The
Kaine Mutiny
Is
Dominion’s coal-fired plant destroying the
Governor’s political future?
For
months, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine enjoyed political
popularity replicating that of his Democratic
predecessor, Mark R. Warner. It seemed that he had
fixed a budget crisis and launched the most
far-reaching omnibus land-use and transportation
plan in decades. As the 2008 presidential election
approached, he was even being mentioned as a
possible vice presidential candidate, just as
Warner had once been put on the list of
presidential possibilities.
But
since the first of this year, Kaine has been
getting slapped around. Ironically, the beatings
are taking place in the largely Democratic
blogosphere, which has questioned his support for
a controversial energy project and the substantial
political campaign donations from Dominion
Virginia Power, the state’s largest and
highly-influential utility.
Then,
on April 14, the Wall Street Journal cut to
the chase regarding the contradictions confronting
Kaine – that he seems to be having it both ways
by positioning himself as an enlightened
environmentalist aiming for minimizing the state's
carbon footprint while heartily backing the most
polluting coal-fired plant in years.
The
issue is the $1.8 billion Virginia City Hybrid
Energy Center that Dominion Virginia Power wants
to build in Wise County. Despite its supposedly
modern pollution control equipment, the plant
would still place between No. 8 and 9 on the list
of top state air polluters when built. The plant
has won approval from the State Corporation
Commission (SCC) and now needs state air pollution
permits.
The
contradictions are obvious but highly curious.
Last year, Kaine came out with a comprehensive
plan to cut pollution, enhance transportation and
secure energy supplies in the state. One goal is
to cut the state’s greenhouse gas emissions 30
percent by 2025. Incongruously, the plan also
backs “prudent investments in projects such as
the Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center’s
fluidized bed coal power plant,” along with
another in West Virginia proposed by Appalachian
Power that appears to have been shot down by the
SCC.
The
increasingly powerful green element of the
Democratic Party has been kicking up the fuss. “Raising
Kaine,” a website started, ironically, to
promote Kaine and the Democrats, has been bashing
Kaine for at least three months on the Wise County
Plant.
The
Kaine controversy got national legs when The
Huffington Post blog ran a piece titled, “Va.
Governor Burns National Ambitions in Coal
Proposal.” Author Glenn Hurwitz wrote that
“Kaine is increasingly looking like some kind of
retro, dinosaur pol – practicing a kind of
politics eerily similar to the Republican culture
of corruption.” Once thought to have vice
presidential timber, Kaine “seems to be flushing
his ambitions for national office down the toilet
by actively working to build yet another
coal-fired power plant for one of his biggest
campaign donors.”
The
Huffington Post reported that Kaine has
received $135,000 from Dominion; the Journal
reported $230,000. In response,
Delacey Skinner, Kaine’s director of
communications, told me, “We can’t stop
producing energy.” She adds, “We need to
reduce the carbon footprint of state
government,” but she adds that there’s nothing
wrong with encouraging a cleaner burning coal
plant.”
Skinner
does not see a contradiction in the big sums that
Kaine has accepted from Dominion. “The Governor
takes campaign contributions from Altria (Philip
Morris), but he has pushed to ban smoking in
restaurants.”
To
be sure, the green element of the Democratic
Party, buoyed by former Vice President Al Gore’s
remarkable success with his film “An
Inconvenient Truth,” has embraced global warming
with a vengeance – maybe too much so. Their
national campaign has specifically targeted
coal-fired plants as being especially dirty and
undesirable. In my reporting, I have found that
some of the facts they tout, especially about the
horrible practice of mountaintop removal to get at
coal, are often exaggerated, at least in Virginia.
It’s
also true that more energy sources do need to be
found as the the population and economy of
Virginia and the U.S. grows, and as older power
plants wear out. Non-polluting technologies such
as wind and solar sound great but can’t match
the output of the old-fashioned base-loaded power
plants. Sure, some may argue that such monstrously
capital-intensive plants should be replaced by a
series of smaller ones, but that’s a topic for
another blog posting.
The
greens’ point that does make sense to me is that
the politics behind the Wise County plant seem
especially fishy. The idea seems to have been
hatched in the offices of local delegates and
senators with lots of help from Dominion. The
General Assembly “backed” the plant, but then
the legislature is chock full of bought-and-paid
for Dominion cronies such as Tommy Norment. The
Governor’s ecology/energy blueprint strangely repeats
the need for the Wise County plant again and
again.
When
the SCC approved the Wise facility, it stated that
the General Assembly had declared in legislation
that the plant was in the public interest,
throttling the outpouring of public outcry at its
own hearings. I had always thought that public
hearings were a way to judge public concern, not
just rubber stamping diktat from the state
Politburo, err, General Assembly.
This
isn’t the only bad news for Kaine. The omnibus
land-use and transportation bill he supported last
year has been ripped apart. The State Supreme
Court has found that regional taxing authorities
for transportation projects in Hampton Roads and
Northern Virginia are unconstitutional. That
destroys what Kaine had thought to be solutions
for pressing problems.
Also
bizarre: The Kaine-trashing seems to be an
internal Democratic affair without too many
Republicans piling on. It’s also something you
read in the blogosphere. I haven’t seen much
about it in the state’s newspapers, such as the
hapless Richmond Times-Dispatch. Back in
the old days, the controversy would have been
splashed all over the place.
Ironically,
the very fact that the Kaine Mutiny has been left
mostly to Democratic blogs and not the larger
media shows that the Web tends to compartmentalize
information, rather than spread it.
--
April 21, 2008
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