Virginia Environmental News
At the Democratic Party Labor Day banquet in Harrisonburg, none of the featured candidates or politicians even mentioned our climate crisis. This follows the script of “climate hushing,” which perceives that mentioning climate turns voters off. A recent national survey conducted by UC Santa Barbara shows that this is dead wrong.
Virginia became the first state in the country to launch a statewide bulk-purchasing campaign for rooftop solar to bring down the cost for households.
Roanoke City Public Schools have been installing solar panels to lower electricity bills, minimize their carbon footprint, and teach students about clean tech. Now, the district is set to invest in storage, with a solar-and-battery-powered microgrid at each of its two high schools.
Our Climate Crisis
Climate scientist Michael Mann says that the glacial collapse and deluge in Nepal and Tibet was “not a freak weather event”, but “the structural failure of a mountain itself” and “nature’s latest commentary on the deadly consequences of human-caused planetary warming.”
In addition to global warming, dirty ice, darkened by soot from vehicles, coal plants, and factories, is causing the Himalayas to absorb more heat, melting its snow, permafrost, and glaciers at dangerous rates.
“The summer we love is slipping away.” Over the past half-century, annual summer temperatures in parts of the United States have warmed by as much as 4 or 5 degrees Fahrenheit, driving heat waves, droughts, and downpours.
As super-El Niño weather conditions drive up temperatures and cause punishing droughts, Indonesian wildfire emissions have surged to the world’s highest in September.
Politics and Policy
In an AI gold rush, Google, Amazon and Anthropic have pledged to invest more than $90 billion in data centers around Pittsburgh. At first, Gov. Josh Shapiro was all-in by fast-tracking approvals. Now, he has hit the brakes amidst a national backlash against data centers.
Trump’s $4B in offshore wind buyouts has spurred a legal blowback from eight states.
In his lost re-election bid, Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee (Democrat) faced the opposition of the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition, a super PAC determined to take down foes of clean energy. McKee has repeatedly blamed clean energy for rising utility bills in the state.
The U.S. Energy Department is lending NextEra Energy $1.9 billion to restart a shuttered nuclear plant in Iowa.
A federal judge blocked Trump’s ‘emergency order’ to keep a defunct Michigan coal plant open. The judge said there was no emergency to justify Trump’s action.
Energy and Technology
The new space race has a huge environmental problem. Tech moguls like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos claim they want to make life better on Earth, but they’re not talking about the enormous energy consumption, air pollution, climate effects, and the growing amount of “space junk” it entails.
Trump is calling his deal giving U.S. access to vast oil reserves in Venezuela “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY.” There’s much we don’t know, including how soon the reserves could be drilled (most likely decades) who will pay to make it happen, who will benefit, and possible local political blowback.
In response to the U.S. government push for international companies to invest in Venezuela, Chevron has committed to more than double its oil production there over the next five years in a $7 billion plan.
The U.S. Army will award up to $2.2 billion to build nuclear micro-reactors at five military bases as a reliable source of energy independent from the commercial electric grid.
Solar electric plus battery storage is having a global growth spurt. Such co-located renewable energy projects attracted a record $25 billion of investment in the first half of this year.
Hyundai is building a nearly $6 billion steel mill in Louisiana, which may become the lowest-carbon facility of its kind in the country. Even so, its gas furnaces will be a major source of just about every type of pollution.
Solar energy and grid batteries are changing California’s electricity mix more quickly than seemed possible just a few years ago. Renewable sources now generate more of the state’s electricity than gas.
Batteries to power vehicles or boost the electrical grid are taking the energy sector by storm. Those placed into service around the world last year were about 10 times more than the total in 2020. Most of them are made and deployed in China.
Global coal demand is forecast to rise by 1.2% in 2026 due to disruptions to oil and liquefied natural gas shipments caused by the US war with Iran.
Land, Food, Agriculture
Stressed by drought and heat, some farmers are turning to perennial grains as one solution to extreme weather. While they don’t yield as much, perennials grow deeper roots, are more hardy, and save lots of cost and labor because they don’t need to be planted each year.
French winemakers are forecasting a 30-year low harvest after severe drought and heat. They’re also concerned that “smoke taint” will affect the quality of the wine.
Climate change, wars, and trade tensions are putting enormous pressure on the global food system. This could fuel social instability and armed conflict. When people can no longer feed their families, they argue over land, water, and other resources — or they move.
Ecojustice
Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer, writer and environmentalist, died at 92. He passionately believed that our relationship with the natural world begins with how we live, work, and care for the land around us. Read this short essay about his life.
As governments are pushing oil and mining expansion, thousands of Indigenous leaders and activists gathered in Ecuador to defend the Amazon and to chart another path.
Communities across the political spectrum are fighting furiously against data centers. Trump weighed in on Truth Social, “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor.”
Ecological and Climate Action
A study by scientists in the UK indicates that the global shift towards clean electricity could trigger a ‘cascade’ of progress, helping reduce air pollution, cut waste, and revive oceans.
Electric vehicles wear out tires faster than traditional vehicles because of their weight and high torque. Technology company ENSO seeks to change that by developing a tire with advanced polymer compounds and tread chemistry. They also increase driving range by up to 10%.
Reducing the emissions of methane — a gas primarily produced by agriculture, natural gas and waste management — is crucial for limiting global warming in the near-term.
The simple fix of switching to LED lightbulbs helped to check U.S. electricity-demand growth and avoided the release of many hundreds of millions, if not billions, of tons of heat-trapping carbon pollution.
Focusing on our personal carbon footprint actually feeds into the fossil fuel industry narrative that this is basically about personal lifestyles. A carbon wave, instead, focuses on what we can do together. Sure it begins at home but it then scales up to our community, our city, our state, our national government, and even global efforts.
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