What does global warming have in store for outdoor sports enthusiasts?

WHEEZING RUNNERS (from more intense allergy seasons)

DRIED UP RIVERS (from more intense droughts)

CODE RED AIR QUALITY (from more intense heat waves)

And who’s the top contributor of climate pollution in Virginia? Dominion Power.

Sponsoring events like Dominion Riverrock, Richmond’s annual outdoor sports festival, can’t erase the company’s huge contribution to the global climate crisis. If Dominion wants good PR, the company should not only sponsor community events, like Riverrock, but also make a real commitment to clean energy, like wind and solar power, instead of building more and more massive fossil fuel plants.

That’s the message we're bringing to Dominion Riverrock on this weekend in Richmond. Sports enthusiasts who are also fans of a stable climate are wearing t-shirts bearing the message while participating in events.  

They're even adding to the fun by entering photos with folks who agree with our message into the event's Instagram contest!  How fun is that? Check out the photos:

For an idea of how increased extreme weather, like droughts and floods, are already in the picture from climate change, check out this Huffington Post piece.

Climate studies have warned us to expect more frequent and intense extreme events, such as heavy rain and snow storms, along with heat waves. While weather variability is nothing new, the wild swings in weather — termed "weather whiplash" and that have recently occurred across the Midwest and South Central states during the past few years, from record flood to record drought and back to record flood — may be an example of what’s in store as global warming continues to alter the atmosphere.

To learn more about how climate change affects air quality, check out the recent report on the topic from the Union of Concerned scientists, which projected that Virginia would be one of the top 10 most affected states.

Ground-level ozone, the primary component of smog, is generated by chemical reactions between nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) triggered by heat and sunlight. Warmer average temperatures from a changing climate may elevate ozone concentrations in many parts of the country, especially in and around urban areas.

Warmer temperatures also are associated with stagnant air conditions that can cause ozone pollution to settle over an area and remain for extended periods of time.

The UCS analysis, which used the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Environmental Benefits Mapping model, calculated national impacts and ranked the 10 states most likely to experience the worst health impacts and highest costs in 2020.

In terms of costs, it found that California would be hit hardest, followed by Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, New Jersey and Virginia. These states are most vulnerable because they have a combination of the largest number of residents living in urban areas, large numbers of children and seniors, and high levels of nitrogen oxides and VOC emissions from vehicles and power plants.

And finally, for more information about allergies and climate change, check out this early spring Huffington Post piece.

The planet is getting warmer, and human behavior is responsible. The changing climate has brought early spring, late-ending fall, and large amounts of rain and snow. All of that, combined with historically high levels of carbon dioxide in the air, nourishes the trees and plants that make pollen, and encourages more fungal growth, such as mold, and the release of spores.

We will be paying a wretched price in the coming months for the behavior fueling the explosion of pollen, which are the tiny reproductive cells found in trees, weeds, plants and grasses. By all accounts, there will be more pollen this year than ever before.

Most trees release their pollen in the early spring, while grasses do so in late spring and early summer. Ragweed makes its pollen in the late summer and early fall.

And pollen production is only part of the impact that global warming is going to have on allergies and asthma — and our health overall.

In areas of the country experiencing prolonged heat and drought, dust will worsen air pollution, exacerbating asthma and other respiratory diseases. In other regions, climate change will affect the insect population — their stings and bites can provoke fatal allergic reactions in sensitive individuals — as well as the proliferation of such vines as poison ivy. Poison ivy thrives with increased carbon dioxide, and as a result, now makes a far more potent urushiol — the oil that causes poison-ivy-triggered rashes — than in the past.

Today I attended my third Dominion Resources annual shareholder meeting, the company’s 104th. And woah! What a day! The company, which provides 2/3 of Virginia's electricity, announced the results of voting on a resolution addressing the financial risks of climate change, which I worked with a shareholder to introduce. It received an unprecedented 22% of the shareholder vote! While that may not sound like much, in the shareholder activism world, anything over 10% is extraordinary. Resolutions are typically introduced not with passage as the goal but with the intention to educate board members and shareholders.

Outside of the meeting, which was held at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, about 20 activists volunteering with CCAN, Sierra Club and Appalachian Voices held their own “exhibit” of altered artwork to represent the unrecognizable future of rising seas, extreme weather disasters and destroyed mountains that Dominion is leading Virginia toward. The "masterpieces" included a Starry Night marred by mountaintop removal mining, The Birth of Venus submerged by rising seas -- a reality all too close to home for residents of Hampton Roads -- and Napoleon, with CEO Tom Farrell moonlighting as the emperor of climate pollution.

Dominion is Virginia’s biggest climate polluter and a major purchaser of coal from mountaintop removal mining. On the other hand, the company has yet to bring a single kilowatt of utility-scale wind or solar power online for Virginia customers.

Activists got a pleasant surprise when Delegate Peter Farrell, son of Dominion CEO Tom Farrell, wandered by. The Virginia General Assembly member stopped to check out the action, and listened as one of his constituents explained we were there to call attention to Dominion's climate pollution and the impacts of the company's fossil fuel-fired energy. Then he asked to take a picture of our artwork featuring his CEO father!

Back inside the meeting, I presented the resolution (item 8 on the 2013 proxy) calling on leadership to report on risks posed to shareholders by climate change, especially extreme weather. The proposal noted that the three most costly extreme weather events in Dominion's 104-year history-- Hurricane Isabel, Hurricane Irene, and last year's derecho-- have all come within the last decade.  In presenting the resolution to the shareholders at the meeting, I talked about residents of coastal Norfolk whose houses have flooded repeatedly due to sea-level rise and increasing storm activity.  I pointed out that these folks who live in ground zero of the climate crisis are examining the risks posed by climate change and deciding what to do.  Some are literally raising their houses up on platforms to avoid the water, some are moving inland and some are buying solar panels to lower their contribution to the crisis.  Clearly 22% of Dominion shareholders agree with me that the company needs to take a cue from Norfolk residents and examine what's coming and decide where to go.

Other proposals received solid support. A proposal to link executive compensation to sustainability metrics received 7%, one related to mountaintop removal coal mining received 6% and one related to nuclear power safety received 4%. In recent memory, the highest vote percentage received by a shareholder resolution that the Dominion board urged shareholders to reject -- in other words, all of the environmentally focused resolutions -- was 16%. That was received by a 2011 proposal related to the community impacts of power plant retirements.

Global warming will shift world's wine-growing regions

Have a favorite local vineyard in Virginia or Maryland?  Make sure to get its wine while you can. A study released recently by Conservation International and Environmental Defense Fund found that the world's wine-growing regions will shift as the planet heats up. While other studies have examined the impact of climate change on specific wine-growing regions, like California, this is the first one I've seen that provides global maps. 

Check out the map I pulled from Environmental Defense Fund's Google Earth flyover video:

Why will the warming of the planet by a few degrees have such a dramatic impact? Wine grapes are incredibly delicate crops. Even small changes in temperature can mean the difference between a $100 Cabernet Sauvignon and cooking sherry. With ripening timelines shifting, some vintners in California have been forced to harvest their fruit in the middle of the night to get it when it’s cool. Warming can also bring more risk of bacterial diseases, like Pierce’s disease, to vineyards.

Athena Vineyards in Heathsville, VA participates in Climate Impacts Day in May 2012

Dominion Power made a startling announcement this morning. In honor of Earth Month 2013, the company will plant enough trees to go carbon neutral through its program, "Project Plant It!" This is a major breakthrough for climate action in Virginia. Until today, the utility had no plans to change course. To have the commonwealth's top emitter of climate-disrupting pollution plant 4 billion trees is simply astounding.

Watch the video everybody's talking about:

In Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's first book, released today, he paints a portrait of himself crusading for the freedom of the people of Virginia against federal government overreach.  In "Weird Science," the chapter about his lawsuit challenging the EPA's finding that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health by causing climate change, it's clear he's more of a crusader for the freedom of corporations to pollute.  

SPOILER ALERT: The attorney general states in the book that he intends to spend taxpayer dollars to take his crusade for polluter freedom all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In fact, though "Weird Science" contains quite a bit of ridiculous rhetoric, I think the most preposterous and also the most significant is the way he justifies his plan to return to court- based on huge misreprestenations of quotes from the ruling against his case.  

But before we get to that, let's check out how we got here, starting with some background info from the book:

Just to give you a little history, in the 2007 Supreme Court case Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, twelve states brought suit against the EPA to force the agency to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as pollutants. The court ruled 5–4 in favor of the states, saying that the EPA was obligated under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases if it ultimately determined they were pollutants that endangered public health.

So in December 2009, shortly after Cuccinelli won the office of attorney general, EPA issued its finding that greenhouse gases do endanger public health by causing climate change, based on the consensus of 97% of climate scientists across the globe. But Cuccinelli, who points out that he has "a great respect for science" as a former engineer, disagreed with the consensus.  The only direct argument he offers in the book against the science of climate change is...well...just read it for yourself:

The EPA was attempting to transform the entire American economy and our standard of living because it said carbon dioxide was a pollutant dangerous to public health. Let’s not confuse carbon dioxide with carbon monoxide, the odorless, poisonous gas that’s also emitted during the combustion of some materials. No, carbon dioxide, or CO2—this “dangerous” threat to America and to the world—is the gas we all exhale from our bodies every second of every day. It’s also the gas that we readily and willingly consume when we have carbonated drinks. It’s also what the trees and plants feed on so they can live and produce the oxygen we need to breathe. Yes, this important part of the “circle of life” is now suddenly a dangerous pollutant. Maybe it’s worth keeping all of this in mind when we’re trying to analyze problems carbon dioxide can cause.

Yeah...so on behalf of the people of Virginia, he teamed up with attorneys general from a number of other states as well as fossil fuel industry plaintiffs like the American Petroleum Institute and Peabody Energy to sue the EPA. While labeling those who advocate against climate change as "alarmists," he offered his own alarming prediction of the consequences, should greenhouse gas regulations move forward:

We relied on that fossil fuel-based electricity daily to power our computers, our refrigerators, our lights, our televisions, all of our electronics, and even our electric cars! We relied on oil to heat our homes; power our cars; and power the transport trucks that brought the food to our grocery stores, the clothes to our department stores, and the packages we ordered off Amazon.com to our doors. Using greenhouse gas regulations to force Americans to replace these critical energy sources with more costly, less abundant, and technologically unproven and unreliable alternatives would undoubtedly slow the U.S. economy and potentially lead to energy shortages—with lines stretched around the block at gas stations, brownouts, and air-conditioning that wouldn’t work on the hottest days of the year because of blackouts.

While the attorney general's argument that soda contains carbon dioxide is clearly an intentional oversimplification, I think he really may be so in the dark about clean energy that he truly thinks renewable energy sources are "more costly and less abundant" than fossil fuels and that wind and solar power are "technologically unproven and unreliable."  For the record, he's got it backwards.  While coal, natural gas and oil are finite resources, there's enough free sunlight and wind on the earth to power all of our needs.  And there's nothing unproven about technologies that have been providing power for decades.  Solar panels were providing power to Jimmy Carter's White House more than 30 years ago, for goodness' sake.

In the end, the court ruled against Cuccinelli and the polluters, saying "This is how science works. EPA is not required to re-prove the existence of the atom every time it approaches a scientific question."

In building the case for his intention to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, Cuccinelli completely misrepresents quotes from the unaminous ruling against him as casting doubt on its strength. I have to assume that he's willfully bending the truth—assuming that the typical reader won't look at the ruling for his or herself.  The alternative—that he has actually misunderstood the ruling—seems unrealistic and would be worse in many ways. 

Here's the first quote he uses in its full context:

State and Industry Petitioners [including Cuccinelli] insist that because statutes [like the Clean Air Act] should be interpreted to avoid absurd results, EPA should have considered at least the “absurd” consequences that would follow from an endangerment finding for greenhouse gases.

[Having found that greenhouse gases do ultimately endanger health, EPA is creating regulations for stationery sources of these emissions. However, EPA proposed exempting sources of small amounts of greenhouse gases, like bakeries and farms. Those bringing the lawsuit said this was an admission of a potential absurd result by EPA.]

However “absurd” Petitioners consider this consequence, though, it is still irrelevant to the endangerment inquiry...The plain language of... [the Clean Air]... Act does not leave room for EPA to consider as part of the endangerment inquiry the stationary-source regulation triggered by an endangerment finding, even if the degree of regulation triggered might at a later stage be characterized as “absurd.”

Here's how Cuccinelli quoted it:

The court said it would allow the EPA to move forward with regulations “even if the degree of regulation triggered might at a later stage be characterized as ‘absurd.’”

Very obviously written with a different meaning than it was given in the court's ruling.

Here's the original context for another quote where much of what Cuccinelli pulls out is actually the court quoting a ruling in a precedential case from 1976:

Industry Petitioners do not find fault with much of the substantial record EPA amassed in support of the Endangerment Finding. Rather, they contend that the record evidences too much uncertainty to support that judgment. But the existence of some uncertainty does not, without more, warrant invalidation of an endangerment finding. If a statute is “precautionary in nature” and “designed to protect the public health,” and the relevant evidence is “difficult to come by, uncertain, or conflicting because it is on the frontiers of scientific knowledge,” EPA need not provide “rigorous step-by-step proof of cause and effect” to support an endangerment finding. Ethyl Corp. v. EPA, 541 F.2d 1, 28 (D.C. Cir. 1976). As we have stated before, “Awaiting certainty will often allow for only reactive, not preventive, regulation.” Id. at 25.

Here's Cuccinelli's version:

The court also upheld the EPA’s use of United Nations-generated climate data because it interpreted the Clean Air Act as permitting regulation even where “the relevant evidence is ‘difficult to come by, uncertain, or conflicting because it is on the frontiers of scientific knowledge.’ ”

Here's Cuccinelli's justification for pushing his crusade to the Supreme Court, in full:  

The court said it would allow the EPA to move forward with regulations “even if the degree of regulation triggered might at a later stage be characterized as ‘absurd.’”

The court also upheld the EPA’s use of United Nations-generated climate data because it interpreted the Clean Air Act as permitting regulation even where “the relevant evidence is ‘difficult to come by, uncertain, or conflicting because it is on the frontiers of scientific knowledge.’ ”

Wow, those last several parts didn’t sound like a ringing endorsement of the EPA’s work. The court seemed to have a split personality in its decision, sometimes chastising us for even bringing the suit, and at other times, pointing out how absurd and ineffective the EPA regulations might be.

Ultimately, we feel that the U.S. Supreme Court needs to clarify how far it will let the EPA take its 2007 decision, so Virginia and several of the plaintiffs will ultimately be taking the appeal to the Supreme Court.

I can only hope the Supreme Court will agree with the states and will conclude the EPA doesn’t have the authority to make “absurd” economy- and lifestyle-altering regulations using “uncertain” or “conflicting” evidence without regard for their effects on the American people, their liberty, and their economic security. While the big-government statists declared the court’s decision in this round a victory, handing over that kind of immense power to an unelected federal bureaucracy willing to shortcut its own rules and work under a veil of secrecy was a defeat for all Americans, regardless of their political persuasion.

So there you have it. Cuccinelli wants to take his crusade for corporate freedom to pollute to the Supreme Court. And the best logic he can give for this appeal is misreprestations of the court's decision. Sounds like a solid use of taxpayer dollars!

Thanks to hundreds of calls and emails from CCAN supporters to lawmakers and a hybrid car parade at the capitol, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell's proposal for a $100 annual tax on hybrid and electric cars appears to be dead! Though we won't be able to say definitively that it's been defeated until the General Assembly session is over, it's looking very good.

Every minute of every day, as Virginians turn on lights and computers and air conditioners, the new power plant in Wise County will send on average 10 tons of greenhouse gases into the already overheated atmosphere. That’s 605 tons an hour, a fearsome 5.3 million tons a year. That’s because last month, Dominion Virginia Power turned on its massive new facility that burns coal but includes zero technology for controlling the carbon-dioxide emissions that contribute to heating the planet.

Estimates are that this 585-megawatt facility will increase Virginia's output of carbon dioxide to more than that of New Jersey, which has 1 million more people than Virginia. The commonwealth will also have the odious distinction of having one of the last coal plants to come online in this country — odious because its emissions far exceed inevitable federal regulations designed to capture power plant pollutants that are baking the planet and wrecking the climate.

Dominion’s timing in firing up this plant couldn’t be more poignant or distressing for Virginians. Less than two weeks before the plant went online, more than a million homes and businesses in the commonwealth lost power for days after a sudden and deadly “derecho” that was fueled along its 600-mile course by energy from an intense heat wave that stretched from Illinois to Washington. No one storm or heat wave can be directly linked to climate change, but scientists say that burning coal and other fossil fuels traps heat in the atmosphere, which in turn can trigger record-breaking temperatures, droughts, forest fires and extreme storms like this summer’s deadly onslaught. In May, for example, the contiguous United States experienced the “warmest spring, warmest year-to-date, and warmest 12-month period the nation has experienced since recordkeeping began in 1895,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported.

So, Dominion better hire more linemen and a bigger PR team, because more extreme weather and resulting outages are forecast in the years ahead.