Column by Erik Curren

“The media backlash is just beginning,” says an editorial in the Ecologist, an edgy environmental magazine out of Britain. “Slowly, almost imperceptibly, global warming is morphing into ‘global boring’.”

It’s not that anyone much outside of talk radio questions the science anymore – led by Newt Gingrich, serious Republican leaders are now saying that climate change is real, it’s caused by humans, it’s dangerous, and the only way to fight it is to cut our fossil fuel pollution. GOP presidential frontrunner Rudy Giuliani says he “definitely” believes in global warming and has praised California for its efforts to cut greenhouse pollution, while second-place contender Mitt Romney has started to waffle on climate change but does support a national policy to encourage energy conservation.

No, the media backlash is that global warming now risks being trivialized into just another fad: “Cutting your carbon footprint is the new black.” The risk is that next month, or next year, once the hype over Al Gore and Leo, polar bears and permafrost, and curlicue light bulbs get old, the media will lead us into the next hot story, maybe, say, something to do with the Olsen twins.

There’s an ironic benefit to being a laggard. At least in Virginia, our risk of climate-change burnout is low compared to places like California, Wisconsin and New Jersey that have passed serious measures on the state level to increase energy efficiency and cut carbon pollution. Since we’ve done comparatively little, we shouldn’t yet be jaded.

At least that’s what the Sierra Club is hoping this fall as they release their Citizens Energy Plan. The rollout began in September with presentations statewide. The club is hoping that the plan’s launch will help build on some initial efforts by Gov. Tim Kaine to push energy conservation in the state administration and by 10 communities from Alexandria to Williamsburg that have declared themselves “Cool Cities,” thereby promising to cut their greenhouse-gas pollution by supporting renewable energy and conservation.

And Virginia should act for two reasons. First, since numerous tidal inlets give us more coastline than California, the Old Dominion is particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels and stronger tropical storms. Second, Virginia is addicted to the worst, most polluting fossil fuel – coal – and plans to use even more coal are currently in the works.

“Sea-level rise will lead to increased wetland loss in the Chesapeake Bay. Up to 21 percent of the remaining wetlands in the Mid-Atlantic region are at risk of inundation

between 2000 and 2100,” says the Citizens Energy Plan report.

Future sea-level rise, continued growth in population and poorly planned suburban development will put Hampton Roads — Chesapeake, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Suffolk, Virginia Beach, Newport News, and Williamsburg — at special risk to flooding, according to a recent study in the journal Natural Hazards.

And computer models indicate significant average temperature increases throughout the state, which could spread disease, hurt asthma sufferers, tax the elderly who are vulnerable to heat stroke and spread agricultural pests, adding additional costs for spraying and threatening crop yields.

“Clearly, Virginia will be impacted by global warming economically and ecologically,” says the authors of the CEP. “We will see a loss of economic opportunity if other areas take the lead developing solutions. These factors provide a basis for action.”

Like the rest of the country, we get about half of our electricity from coal-fired plants, with the remainder coming mostly from nuclear power (36 percent). A small amount of electricity comes from hydroelectric dams, and an even smaller fraction comes from burning natural gas, oil, various kinds of crops and even turkey droppings.

But unlike many states, Virginia is a major producer of coal, one reason why our rates per kilowatt hour are consistently near the lowest in the nation. Not surprisingly, as other sources of power (particularly natural gas, which is depleting rapidly) become more expensive, and as demand for electricity grows, the state’s largest electric utility, Dominion Virginia Power, has plans to burn even more coal in the future, with a new plant to be built in Wise County now on the drawing boards.

While the electric power and coal industries claim that so called “clean coal” and carbon sequestration can allow us to burn coal without adding to global warming, such technologies remain speculative and unproven. It would be a foolish gamble to expand our reliance on coal based on such claims.

Meanwhile, most of our transportation, as elsewhere, is powered by oil, which accounts for 30 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions in the Commonwealth.

If we follow the course we’re on now for energy use, growth and development, Virginia will become an even bigger contributor to global warming.

Under a business-as-usual scenario, according to the CEP, by 2030, Virginia will consume 31 percent more energy than we do today. This increase will be driven mainly by the residential, commercial and transportation sectors, all fueled by a 30 percent increase in the state’s population. Assuming that renewable energy will remain at about current levels, we’ll suck down ever more oil and burn mountains more of coal. Due to construction of new coal power plants in Virginia and elsewhere to meet electricity demand, the Commonwealth will use 68 percent more coal.

Overall, if we don’t change our ways, we’ll be pumping out 32 percent more global-warming pollution in 2030 than we do today. If we want to contribute to a solution that will save our state, this is exactly the wrong direction to go.

Because warming is a problem of the atmosphere worldwide, it is certainly true that if we were to reduce our carbon pollution while other places didn’t or even continued to pump out ever higher levels of greenhouse gases every year – if Virginia became an island of energy saints in a sea of energy sinners – it still would not save Virginia Beach and Norfolk from rising tides and future Katrinas.

But this unlikely scenario aside (after all, though we were first at Jamestown, today the Old Dominion is hardly an eco-leader), for the sake of our economy alone, Virginia should plan to at least join the middle-of-the-pack players fighting climate change. Within the next decade, federal legislation (including possible carbon taxes) and an explosion of tobacco-style litigation directed against polluters who continue to develop fossil fuels in order to profit at the expense of the public good are likely to make burning coal and oil as unprofitable in the U.S. as pushing cigarettes to kids.

The Sierra Club Citizens Energy Plan urges Virginia to follow a different path, one where the state’s economy can thrive by using energy more intelligently and at the same time developing renewables to replace fossil fuels. The report’s tone is optimistic yet realistic.

“Our vision for a new energy future integrates energy conservation, more efficient energy use and significant substitution of renewable energy sources for fossil fuel based energy. Conservation and energy efficiency are crucial. During the period of this projection, it is not plausible to develop or acquire enough renewable energy in Virginia to replace the fossil and nuclear sources currently in use. Efficiency and conservation offer immediate opportunities. Little has been done in the past to reduce consumption, in part because Virginia has had low-cost electricity.”

The plan starts with conservation. This is what all of us individuals can do. We can start by switching out incandescent light bulbs for compact fluorescents which use a quarter of the energy to provide the same light and last up to seven years. Then we can replace old power-guzzling appliances like refrigerators and water heaters with newer energy-sipping models certified under the federal Energy Star program.

Then, the CEP makes detailed recommendations on energy efficiency:

1. Green Building. New construction can be built according to accepted standards to maximize use of recycled materials in construction and to save power on heating and cooling once built. Green buildings can use up to 30 percent less energy than conventional structures. Existing houses and commercial buildings can be retrofitted to save energy in a way that will pay back any investment in a reasonable period – as little as three to five years using cost-effective measures such as ceiling fans, ground-source (geothermal) heat pumps or solar hot water heaters.

2. Smart Growth. The CEP recognizes that Virginia’s population will continue to grow as our economy expands, and the Sierra Club is not opposed to growth per se. But to cut our greenhouse-gas emissions while still adding more people who will use more stuff and do more business, development will have to move away from car-dependent suburbs and towards walkable, bike-able, town-style design. Smart communities will mix residential and commercial development so that people can shop and work near where they live. For those who must commute, regional transit hubs will not be far away.

3. Transportation. Even if we can make our communities less dependent on cars, many Virginians will still rack up thousands of miles a year. To cut our carbon pollution, we will have to reduce those miles and then make our driving less polluting. The CEP echoes widespread calls today for automakers to produce higher-mileage cars, assuming a bump from an average of about 20 miles a gallon today to 42.5 MPG by 2030. At the same time, the plan calls for us to substitute ethanol and other biofuels for petroleum as well as a partial shift to rail carriage for freight, starting with the I-81 corridor in the western part of the state.

4. Public Sector. Programs such as Cool Communities, as advocated by Sierra Club Groups throughout Virginia, focus on measures in the public sector, where governments can borrow at lower interest rates for longer periods of time, and can thus justify more costly up-front measures to save energy than families or businesses can. Such measures can include vehicle fleets, buildings, and renewable energy purchases.

Once we’ve saved energy, the next job is to produce the energy we will still need for our growing economy from cleaner sources. The CEP focuses only on technologies which are viable today, including wind and solar power, and omits future sources such as hydrogen fuel cells. Just to take wind power as an example, the report urges continued development of on-shore projects, with appropriate siting standards to minimize damage to vulnerable lands and animals. Yet, the CEP envisions that off-shore wind installations could provide up to 10 times more power.

Then, this cleaner energy can be produced and distributed more effectively closer to home, rather than sent out through the big national electrical grid as it is today.

The results? The plan’s goal is to reduce Virginia’s energy use on a per capita basis by 56 percent by 2030. However, if we factor in 30 percent projected population growth, we would only reduce our energy use 11 percent statewide over 2005 levels. Yet, this decline still beats the 31 percent growth projected under the business-as-usual scenario.

If we follow the plan Virginia can reduce its global warming emissions 80 percent by mid-century. And if the U.S. as a whole and the other industrialized nations achieve the same reductions, global temperature rise will below 2.4 degrees, forestalling the worst effects of climate change such as destruction of our coastal communities.

But it won’t be easy. State and local government, businesses and families will all have to pitch in to use less energy, help make cleaner energy more cost-effective and reduce our consumption of material goods overall while still growing our economy to ensure continued prosperity for future generations of Virginians.

The full text of the Virginia Citizens Energy Plan is available at www.virginia.sierraclub.org.

For further reading

Sierra Club of Virginia - http://virginia.sierraclub.org

Filed under: 5-October 2007 Issue