July 2025 - Chesapeake Climate Action Network

Standing Strong for Chesapeake: How Community Voices Are Defeating Polluting Projects

A blog by Michelle Ueltschi, CCAN’s Carol Brantley Environmental Justice Fellow

As I approached the Chesapeake City Hall, heart pounding, I had no idea what to expect. The closest I’d ever been to a City Council meeting was watching Leslie Knope on Parks and Recreation! Entering the chamber, I was immediately shocked. A sea of Chesapeake residents, all wearing bright red and proudly sporting “No Data Center” stickers, took me by surprise.

I knew the council was voting on the data center that night, but I had no idea how much the community was strongly united against it. But my real focus was the first agenda item of the night: the proposal for a Chesapeake compressor station that would bring more toxic pollution to our community.

Why the Dangers of This Compressor Station Hit Close to Home

Virginia Natural Gas (VNG) is proposing to build a new compressor station in a residential neighborhood in Chesapeake. Compressor stations are facilities placed along natural gas pipelines to boost pressure and keep gas moving over long distances. These stations release toxic air pollutants and greenhouse gases, including methane and cancer-causing gases like benzene. This compressor station is planned to be located within five miles of a school where my mom works, making it a very personal issue for me.

As I’ve been talking to people about this project while canvassing and at festivals, I’m inspired by the passion and energy Chesapeake residents have shown in fighting to protect our community. I’ve heard stories from longtime residents longing for the preservation of their rural communities.

I’ve listened to grandparents recount stories of their childhoods, sharing how they have seen the city become more polluted, storms getting worse, and that they fear the future for their families. During these conversations, CCAN and other organizations gathered hundreds of signatures from Chesapeake residents telling the city council that they do not want this project built in their community.

A Landmark Victory: Chesapeake City Council Rejects Polluting Projects

That night, after hours of testimony and debate, the Chesapeake City Council made a landmark decision: they voted to deny Virginia Natural Gas’s sweeping rezoning request! This request would have paved the way for the compressor station and the data center. Its rejection was a huge win for residents, civic leagues, and environmental groups that raised environmental justice concerns about pollution, safety, and the disproportionate burden these projects would place on already disadvantaged communities.

I thought we had won that fight. I celebrated, closed my research tabs, and shifted my focus to other priorities. But the next morning, I received an email: Virginia Natural Gas had requested a reconsideration from the City Council. Suddenly, we were back at square one. I was confused and angry; why does one company get endless opportunities, while we have to block every single door just to stay safe?

Nevertheless, we got back to work. With only a month to act, our coalition put together a bold plan to urge the City Council to stand firm and listen to the voices of Chesapeake residents who oppose this project.

Join Us to Protect Chesapeake’s Future

Here’s the bottom line: the only way we can ensure this project does not harm our communities is to pack the city council chamber on July 15th at 6:30 PM. We need to show the city council how many of their constituents are against this project, and remind them we are watching their vote closely.

Before the meeting, at 5:15, CCAN will be holding a mini rally to prepare residents to speak out against the project. We will be providing shirts, coaching residents on how to address their representatives, and we will have free snacks! Can you make it out to the mini rally or the city council meeting on July 15th? Sign up here to let us know you’re coming and bring a friend!

We’ve beat this thing before. Let’s beat it again!

About the Author: Michelle Ueltschi (she/her) has been working in Hampton Roads, Virginia as a Carol Brantley Environmental Justice Fellow for the summer of 2025. She has recently graduated from Columbia University with a degree in sustainable development.

As a Hampton Roads native, Michelle found her passion for the environment at a young age and spent many years in high school advocating for the local environment and working to protect her hometown of Virginia Beach.

Now, after finding her passion for climate justice at Columbia, Michelle is bringing the knowledge and experience she gained in New York City back to the Chesapeake Bay!

Texas’s Deadly Floods: Failure to Warn

A Deadly Storm as a Bellwether for Climate Change

For three days from July 4, a tropical storm brought a deadly deluge to a region of central Texas known as Hill Country, which is considered one of the deadliest places in the US for flash flooding. The worst of it happened in Kerr County, including, tragically, in summer camps with many children.

Fueled by remnants of Tropical Storm Barry, torrential rainfall surged the river by 25 to 30 feet in under an hour. At times, the water rose one inch every 25 seconds. At the time of writing, more than 100 people are dead, including more than 35 children, with 170 people still missing.

Unfortunately, this is not new. Central Texas – especially the Hill Country – is known as “Flash Flood Alley” due to steep terrain, shallow soils and intense rainfall and has flooded nearly once every decade over the past 100 years.

Even so, it’s getting worse with climate change, and events like this will become more common in this region and elsewhere. Humidity and heat are rising in the Gulf, bringing more moisture. Meanwhile, drought dries out soil, making it less absorbent. When rain does fall, it floods faster and more violently. A new UN report calls worsening droughts “a slow-moving global catastrophe.”

The Need to Be Prepared

But it’s not just about climate change. It’s about emergency preparedness. The region has poor cell service, so warnings from the National Weather Center can sometimes not get through. For years, Texas debated a $1-million flood alert system for Hill Country to prevent disasters just like this. But it was never funded, despite the area’s 50,000 residents and thousands of young campers.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration is taking aim at every possible agency involved in emergency preparedness, with mass budget cuts and layoffs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which runs the National Weather Service, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, and more. US National Weather Service budget cuts meant that a veteran warning coordination meteorologist for the region retired early this spring. His role was to work with local communities to help them prepare for events like this, to get the national weather alerts to the community members in need. But he was not replaced, leaving a critical gap just months before the flood.

In times like this, I often turn to books for advice and understanding. Here are a few recommendations for your own reading. And then, once you’re fired up to do something, join CCAN as an Action Member to plug into your local climate movement.

Books to Deepen your Understanding

The Deluge

By: Stephen Markley

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Year: 2023

The Deluge is a climate thriller. And it is a political epic. And it is so much more.

At nearly 900 pages, spanning a range of decades and characters, it showcases a world responding too slowly to environmental breakdown. There are scientists desperately lobbying for reform, activists risking their lives for visibility and ordinary people watching the weather change everything, including a truly terrifying — and too real scene of a wildfire in downtown Los Angeles.

Markley shows how systemic failure creeps forward through inertia, denial and political dysfunction. Stephen King called it this generation’s Grapes of Wrath.

Choice quote:

As bureaucrats have rediscovered again and again from time immemorial, getting people to do what is in their best interest is often more difficult than unleashing their worst natures.

The Ministry for the Future

By: Kim Stanley Robinson
Publisher: Orbit
Year: 2020

Sometimes, though I wish it weren’t the case, a crisis is needed to catalyze action. The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson opens with a harrowing heatwave in India that kills millions yet leads to the formation of an international agency under the UN, nicknamed the “Ministry for the Future.” Its mandate: to advocate for future generations and protect life on Earth.

What follows is a fascinating mix of fiction and speculative policy, as Robinson explores economic restructuring, geoengineering, climate migration, eco-terrorism, and radical diplomacy. The novel follows a mosaic of voices—scientists, refugees, central bankers, insurgents, bureaucrats—as the world shifts from a state of emergency to one of sustainability.

The novel doesn’t shy away from collapse, but insists that coordinated global action is still possible—even if it’s messy, compromised, and contested. The Ministry for the Future reads like a hybrid of climate fiction and future history, and has become a touchstone for policy thinkers and climate advocates alike. It doesn’t just ask what might happen. It asks what we’re willing to do.

Choice quote:

As bureaucrats have rediscovered again and again from time immemorial, getting people to do what is in their best interest is often more difficult than unleashing their worst natures.

Timefulness

By: Marcia Bjornerud

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Year: 2018

How fast are things changing? To get some perspective, it’s worth going back to the beginning of time. Or at least, the beginning of the earth.

In clear yet gorgeous prose, geologist Marcia Bjornerud introduces readers to the idea of “timefulness” — a sense of planetary history that extends far beyond human timescales. She argues that modern society is “chronically short-sighted,” and that our inability to grasp deep time has left us blind to the consequences of our actions, particularly when it comes to environmental stewardship.

The book blends field stories, geological insight and philosophical reflection, making complex concepts easy to understand. She doesn’t offer doom; she offers perspective.

Choice quote:

It is also not the “end of nature” but, instead, the end of the illusion that we are outside nature. Dazzled by our own creations, we have forgotten that we are wholly embedded in a much older, more powerful world whose constancy we take for granted. As a species, we are much less flexible than we would like to believe, vulnerable to economic loss and prone to social unrest when nature—in the guise of Katrina, Sandy, or Harvey, among others — diverges just a little from what we expect.

The Unmapping

By: Denise S. Robbins

Publisher: Mareas

Year: 2025

Yes, I’m including my own book in this list. But writing it really did help me work through my personal experience of what climate change feels like, and I hope it can do the same for others. My debut novel explores life in a state of emergency through a surreal phenomenon known as “the unmapping”. At 4 am in New York City, all the city’s buildings mysteriously swap places. The Empire State Building ends up on Coney Island and K-town bars are in Queens. The next night, it happens again. It’s a disaster that breaks down the utility grid and leads to thousands of people becoming lost.

The story follows two workers at the city’s Emergency Management Department, tasked with holding the city together as the crisis escalates. As attention slowly turns to stopping the unmapping, the book’s characters navigate a restructured landscape in search of loved ones, safety and meaning.

Many believe it’s a bizarre side effect of global warming, an era when the highly improbable becomes disturbingly routine. I wrote this surreal story with the hope that it would allow the reader to experience how climate change feels. With Texas waters rising at 25 inches per minute, nothing feels stable and everything familiar has become strange — it seems quite possible that the laws of physics will change beneath our feet.

As climate emergencies grow more frequent, the role of emergency workers becomes more vital. In the book, the workers confront the limitations of the systems in place and work to improve them. Ultimately, their job is about saving lives. The real-life decision by Texas officials to forgo a flood warning system that could have saved lives only reinforces the story’s relevance.

Choice quote:

It is hard to say when things started turning around for the better. Is it possible to pinpoint a particular moment when everyone stopped running around trying to live in a broken world and started instead trying to fix it?

What’s Next

YOU can get involved to stop climate change where you live. Join CCAN as an Action Member today.

Photo at top from Flickr user Richard Masoner with a Creative Commons license

A version of this post was initially published on “This Week, Those Books,” which links the big international story to the world of books. Their aim is to provide crucial context — from fiction and non-fiction — to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle. Read it here.

As RGGI States Forge Ahead on Climate, Will Virginia Get Left Behind?

Climate group praises stronger rules while criticizing Governor Youngkin’s unlawful move to remove Virginia

RICHMOND, VA – Ten Northeast states have agreed to triple the rate of power sector emissions cuts under the Regional Gas Initiative (RGGI), committing to reduce carbon emissions by as much as 10 percent annually from 2027 to 2033. The updated RGGI targets, finalized last week, will require participating states to slash carbon emissions by at least 60% by 2037 compared to 2025 levels, a move widely praised as a demonstration of strong state leadership in the face of federal backsliding on pollution.

Maryland is among the ten states bound by these new rules, which mark the third major upgrade to RGGI. The program has already helped participating states cut power sector emissions 50 percent since 2005, almost twice as fast as the national average, while raising billions for local investments, including clean energy programs and energy bill assistance.

Maryland’s Southern neighbor, Virginia, stopped participating in RGGI in 2023, following a directive from Governor Glenn Youngkin, a move that a Floyd County court deemed unlawful and is currently subject to appeal. While Virginia was in RGGI, power plant emissions dropped by more than 22%. In addition, RGGI generated over $800 million in the Commonwealth, supporting flood resilience and energy efficiency programs that directly benefited low-income families and communities vulnerable to flooding. Since withdrawing from RGGI, Virginia is leaving hundreds of millions of dollars on the table each year and has seen emissions rise, while critical funding for these programs dries up.

Virginia’s Democratic candidate for Governor, Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, has already stated an intention to rejoin RGGI.

In response to the new rules, Chesapeake Climate Action Network’s Executive Director, Mike Tidwell, released the following statement:

“For decades, RGGI has delivered results. We are thrilled to see our strong regional partnership take the next step to meet this urgent moment on climate, particularly in the face of catastrophic backsliding in Washington – backsliding that will make energy more expensive for everyday families and saddle communities nationwide with dirtier air and worse health outcomes. And while Marylanders will benefit from the new rules through cleaner air and critical electricity cost-saving programs, Virginians will continue to fall behind as floods worsen and extreme heat sends electricity bills soaring. Leaving RGGI was an illegal, costly mistake.”

# # #

Chesapeake Climate Action Network is the first grassroots organization dedicated exclusively to raising awareness about the impacts and solutions associated with global warming in the Chesapeake Bay region. Founded in 2002, CCAN has been at the center of the fight for clean energy and wise climate policy in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC.

Month: July 2025