Addressing an environmental summit in Washington, D.C., yesterday, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine called for Virginia to take the lead in conserving electricity and promoting renewable fuels. “We don’t want to have to wait until the prices rise dramatically to conserve (energy),” he said. “That’s a significant challenge.”
The governor called for more research on environmentally friendly building construction and safe nuclear technologies as well as a regional climate change initiative to reduce greenhouse gases, reports the Associated Press.
Kaine is saying all the right things, but he hasn’t offered anything specific. Here’s the question. Now that he’s completed the state’s long-term energy plan, an impressive document outlining a broad spectrum of strategies, what will he actually do? Which of the plan’s many proposals will he try to implement? What legislation will the governor propose for the upcoming session of the General Assembly, now only two months away?
Kaine has made big promises to the conservation/environmental lobby before. During his gubernatorial campaign, he proposed giving municipal governments more power to block re-zoning requests if the transportation system didn’t exist to handle the traffic. Many credited that proposal with pushing him over the top among growth-weary voters in Northern Virginia. But Kaine abandoned that controversial idea in the face of aggressive lobbying by the home builders.
Many conservationists felt betrayed, but they didn’t immediately abandon hope: Kaine had appointed Scott Kasprowicz, who is closely aligned with the Piedmont Environmental Council, as deputy secretary of transportation. But Kasprowicz has quietly left the administration in frustration. Further, while the governor talks about Global Warming, we don’t hear any talk about linking rezoning and transportation adequacy in order to curb “suburban sprawl.” To the contrary, what I’m hearing now is that the home builders, emboldened, will push to roll back proffers, a mechanism by which developers help offset municipal costs related to growth.
Here’s my hypothesis regarding the governor and the environment: Kaine will dish out lots of feel-good rhetoric and support lots of green policies — such as a cap-and-trade program for carbon-dioxide at the federal level — in areas where he won’t get any push-back from developers, home builders and other industry lobbies that bankroll Virginia political campaigns. In other words, we’ll see “green building” programs, support for Chesapeake Bay clean-up (paid for by the general taxpayer, of course), and other initiatives that threaten no vested interests.
Perhaps my interpretation is unfair and off base. I hope so. Here are the key issues by which we can gauge the sincerity of Kaine’s green rhetoric:
- Growth management. If the home builders push for a rollback of proffers, where will Kaine stand? Will he resurrect his idea to link rezonings with adequate transportation capacity?
- Electric re-regulation. Kaine signed re-regulation legislation that is highly favorable to Dominion Virginia Power. Will he accede to a Big Grid electric power infrastructure, or will he back meaningful efforts to evolve Virginia’s power grid into a more decentralized system with small-scale and renewable power producers? (Addendum: In fairness to Gov. Kaine, the conservation and renewable-energy measures included in the 2007 electricity re-regulation bill, modest though they were, were inserted at Kaine’s insistence.)
- Global warming. If, in the estimation of the Kaine administration, sea levels are rising, what measures will he propose to protect Virginia’s low-lying coastlands? Will he act to curtail development in low-lying areas? Will he re-evaluate expensive road-building projects like the Southeast Expressway that would skirt the low-lying wetlands of Chesapeake and Virginia Beach?
Needless to say, Virginia’s newspapers aren’t paying attention to any of these issues. But you can count on Bacon’s Rebellion: We will.