The Virginian-Pilot
By Beth Kemler
I have friends who are survivalists. They have three months’ worth of food, water and ammo stowed in their basements. I used to think they were a little nuts. I joked that they were ready for the zombie apocalypse. After a year of completely unprecedented weather fueled by climate change, I’m starting to think they’re a little smart.
Superstorm Sandy was just the latest disaster that gained ammunition from climate change.

What can we do about it? We could pour our efforts into bracing for future storms, but I think it’s smarter to put more energy into stopping them.
Scientists say we’re close to reaching a climate change tipping point that we can’t return from, but we’re not quite there yet. Once we do, the planet’s climate will enter into a cycle of feedback loops that we have no hope of controlling.
We can still back away from the cliff – if we start a rapid shift away from planet-cooking fossil fuels, like coal and natural gas, and toward clean wind and solar power.
Of course, this switch can’t happen overnight. It’s not as easy as going to your local superstore to stock up on canned goods and toilet paper. But given how quickly we’ve seen our weather get so bizarre, it’s clear the cliff isn’t 50 years away – it’s more like 10 years away – and we have to act now.
The superstorm was a big wakeup call about the big problem of climate change. Some are comparing it to Ohio’s Cuyahoga River catching fire in 1969, an event so shocking that politicians helped create the Clean Water Act and Environmental Protection Agency.
Who should be having an “aha” moment in Virginia and proposing big solutions? Who can move us toward wind and solar power? Dominion Virginia Power CEO Tom Farrell. The utility provides about 70 percent of Virginia’s electricity and is the state’s biggest carbon polluter.
What did Dominion do right after Sandy? It restored power to customers and promptly proposed building a gargantuan new fossil fuel-fired power plant. This is the ultimate in snooze-button behavior.
While folks up and down the East Coast were jolted by the devastation of a storm that gained power from fossil fuel pollution, Dominion announced it wants to pour out more pollution – a lot more. If the proposed natural gas-burning plant in Brunswick County is built, it will likely add as much greenhouse gas pollution as 550,000 cars – about the number in all of Idaho.
Dominion’s the man who, in the prime of his life, has a heart attack, has emergency bypass surgery and then immediately asks for a bacon cheeseburger. Except in this case, Dominion isn’t just hurting itself with its destructive behavior. It’s hurting all of us.
According to Dominion’s 15-year energy plan, the company intends to increase renewable energy’s share of its generation mix from 2.4 percent to 2.8 percent. Basically, the man promises to take the stairs, instead of the elevator, once a month.
This doesn’t come close to matching the scale of the problem. Because of climate change, people are losing their homes. Farmers are losing their crops. Some people have lost their lives. The problem cannot be solved with tiny, token efforts.
One area offers promise for moving Dominion toward wind and solar power – Virginia’s official renewable energy goals. A state law offers utilities millions in bonuses for meeting them. Unfortunately, even here, Dominion has failed us.
The company could get a bonus of $76 million over two years – but not for actually building new renewable energy facilities. Instead, the company played a clean energy shell game and got credit for decades-old facilities, like a hydropower dam that’s been operating since 1930.
In the upcoming legislative session, a reform bill to help fix the state’s renewable energy law will be considered.
Under this bill, utilities won’t get their bonuses unless new pollution-free facilities, like wind farms and solar arrays, are built. Legislators need to hear from their constituents that we want to see real solutions like this to the climate change crisis.
So what are we going to do? Are we going to start stocking our basement with canned goods and bottled water or are we going to push our state legislators for real climate change solutions? I hope Virginians will contact their legislators today.