By Peter Galuszka
Pulling the state’s head out of the sand, Gov. Terry McAuliffe has reversed his predecessor’s policy on addressing climate change.
He has reestablished a 35-member panel to see what the state can do to deal with what many scientists believe is an impending crisis. McAuliffe revived the panel first created by Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine and then left to wither away by former Republican Gov. Robert McDonnell.
Ironically, the new panel includes Michael Mann, a former University of Virginia climatologist who was the target of bitter and petty attacks by former arch-conservative Atty. Gen. Kenneth Cuccinelli over his view that mankind was responsible for carbon dioxide-driven greenhouse gases that are helping warm up the earth, melt polar ice caps and potentially flood huge sections of coastal cities such as Norfolk.
It’s about time that Virginia rejoined the 21st Century. McDonnell took the state backwards on environmental issues by gutting commissions such as this one and creating others that were devoid of ecological viewpoints and stacked with members of the fossil fuel industry and utility executives.
McAuliffe’s new commission has utility people like Dominion Virginia Power President Robert M. Blue and Bernice McIntyre of Washington Gas Light Company. But it is also well stocked with green types such as the Sierra Club, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Southern Environmental Law Center whose views were pretty much in the wilderness during the McDonnell term.
It is finally time for the state to realize that climate change is real. Study after study shows that the state is vulnerable – from agricultural impacts brought on by different weather patterns to rising water in coastal areas. One area worth study is doing more to speed the switch to renewable energy sources like solar and wind.
McDonnell had pushed a policy that would make Virginia “the Energy Capital of the East Coast,” but the effort excluded renewables in favor of offshore oil and gas companies, nuclear power and coal.
Curiously, McAuliffe also favors such endeavors as offshore petroleum development. That raises questions in the face of massive fracking onshore for natural gas and the revolution it has sparked. Perhaps the new commission can provide some guidance.
It is refreshing that Virginia is finally emerging from the intellectual horse blinders that kept the debate stuck in Benghazi-style debates over emails at a British university or trying, unsuccessfully, as Cuccinelli did, to harass scientists globally over a ridiculous claim that Michael Mann had defrauded Virginia taxpayers by asserting what most climatologists do – that climate change is real and mankind is a reason for it.
Finally. . .
