Tag: Climate change
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George Mason Profs: Prosecute Climate Deniers
by James A. Bacon Jagadish Shukla, a George Mason University climate scientist, thinks corporate climate deniers should be criminally prosecuted under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law. Corporations and other organizations have “knowingly deceived” the American people about the risks of climate change, wrote Shukla and nineteen other scientists (five of whom…
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Heh, Heh. Virginia Electricity Less Carbon-Intensive than Its Neighbors' — without RPS
by James A. Bacon The Gooze, known in more polite company as Peter G. , is a big fan of solar power and wind power and thinks we ought to have more of both in Virginia. In his most recent post, he seems particularly impressed by the activities of Amazon Web Services, which has announced plans…
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Heh, Heh. Virginia Electricity Less Carbon-Intensive than Its Neighbors’ — without RPS
by James A. Bacon The Gooze, known in more polite company as Peter G. , is a big fan of solar power and wind power and thinks we ought to have more of both in Virginia. In his most recent post, he seems particularly impressed by the activities of Amazon Web Services, which has announced plans…
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Grid Pro Quo
The EPA wants to restructure Virginia’s electric grid. Skeptics argue that slashing CO2 emissions will drive electric bills higher. Environmentalists disagree. Who’s right?
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Adapting to Climate Change: 11 Proposals
Working under the direction of University of Richmond professors Peter D. Smallwood and Stephen P. Nash, eleven UR environmental studies majors wrote papers on topics relating to the environment and climate change in Virginia. Each paper defines a problem and lays out a practical solution. All eleven papers are compiled in a document entitled, “Nature…
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How to Reform Virginia’s Conservation Tax Credit
by James A. Bacon The state of Virginia spends $100 million a year in the form of tax expenditures to place conservation easements on land parcels around the state. Could the state get more for its investment? Amy Murphy, an environmental studies major at the University of Richmond, thinks so. In a paper presented to the Climate Change…
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The Tangible Economic Value of Biodiversity
by James A. Bacon From the oceans to the rain forests, from the wetlands to the Virginia Piedmont, wildlife habitats around the world are under tremendous pressure from human activity. One reason that environmentalists get alarmed about global warming is that a rapidly changing environment adds one more source of stress to many species. In a…
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McAuliffe Climate Change Commission Playing for Small Stakes
by James A. Bacon In December 2008, Governor Tim Kaine’s climate change commission issued a detailed action plan. In 2009, Bob McDonnell was elected governor, and work on anything remotely connected to climate change promptly ended. In January 2014 Governor Terry McAuliffe took office, and he set up a new commission to review and update the…
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Sediment, Wetlands and Climate Change
Karen McGlathery, an environmental sciences professor at the University of Virginia who runs the Virginia Coastal Reserve Long Term Ecological Research program, is particularly taken with the study of marshes and wetlands. Over the past century, worldwide sea levels have risen seven inches over the past century, and even faster in the Virginia Tidewater where subsidence…
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Renewables, Extreme Weather and System Reliability
by James A. Bacon At 8 a.m. on Jan. 8, 2015, Dominion Virginia Power (DPV) supplied a record 19,870 megawatts of electric power to its 2.5 million customers — beating the previous record, set the year before, by 85 megawatts. That news bit comes from a DPV e-newsletter with no particular ax to grind. Temperatures in…
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The Silent Sun and Climate Change
by James A. Bacon One of the reasons I call myself a climate change agnostic — I’m not yet persuaded that man-made influences on the climate are pushing temperatures calamitously higher — is that there are alternative explanations for what has been driving long-term temperature fluctuations on the planet. One serious body of thought, largely overlooked by…
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Silting, Resilience and Climate Change
by James A. Bacon Louisiana’s coastline is shrinking. Humanity’s impact on the state’s massive but fragile wetlands — levees accelerating Mississippi River water flows, the criss-crossing of marshes with canals — has aggravated the natural phenomena of subsidence and sea-level rise to inundate some 1,900 square miles of coast land over eight decades. It’s an object lesson for Virginia,…
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What Climate Change Could Mean to Virginia
by James A. Bacon The political debate over catastrophic global warming won’t end until the climate either fulfills the dire forecasts of mainstream climate scientists or refuses to cooperate, thus disproving them. Stephen Paul Nash’s book, “Virginia Climate Fever,” is not likely to change many minds on that score. But if you’re wondering how global warming — if…
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Diet Denier
Perhaps you could call Nina Teicholz a “diet denier.” The journalist and author of “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Health Diet,” is part of the growing backlash against a half century-long orthodoxy that aimed to limit fat and cholesterol in the American diet. That orthodoxy, which ruled the medical establishment and the…
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A Timely Reminder of the Anti-Agenda 21 Distraction
by James A. Bacon Here in Virginia, the anti-Agenda 21 zealots have managed to stay out of the headlines for quite a while. I don’t know if that’s because they are quietly re-energizing themselves or if the movement is falling apart. But it never hurts to be reminded of the bizarre nature of this populist splinter group, which has done…