In Va. Beach, talk of climate change taboo
Officials work to combat sea rise, but don’t discuss causes
“I can show you the gauge information to show you that, yes, sea level rise is happening. But
I’m not getting into the reasons why it’s occurring.”
VIRGINIA BEACH — In Virginia Beach, sea level rise is a real and existential threat. And city officials aren’t afraid to say so.
For years, they have worked to develop complex — and expensive — initiatives they hope will safeguard the city from some of the most worrying flood projections.
In all of their recent preparations, however, city staff have steered clear of what most experts say is causing the tides to creep higher and higher. By design, they rarely, if ever, utter the words “climate change” — and they specifically avoid attributing any such change directly to humans.
“We don’t want to be stuck in the middle of arguments,” explained C.J. Bodnar, a city engineer who is helping lead Virginia Beach’s outreach efforts. “I can show you the gauge information to show you that, yes, sea level rise is happening. But I’m not getting into the reasons why it’s occurring.”
That’s because the city needs consensus to move forward as it plans for three feet of sea level rise and more intense storms in the coming decades, officials say.
While the words “climate change” are unofficially verboten at meetings, virtually no idea is off the table. From buying out hundreds of at-risk properties to installing high-tech flood gates that would change the face of some of the city’s most iconic locations, city staff are looking at solutions that could cost billions of dollars.
The messaging strategy flows from the city’s priorities. Officials plan to invest considerable money into mitigating the impact of sea level rise and more intense rainfall, but have punted on attempts to curtail the city’s carbon footprint in any meaningful way. It has abandoned some goals that had been adopted in prior plans while making some modest gains in reducing energy consumption.
Virginia Beach Mayor Bobby Dyer said the city is dealing with limited funding and needs to focus on the most urgent issues — like protecting people’s homes and businesses from floodwaters — rather than on problems that aren’t as immediately harmful.
“The operative word is right now,” he said. “We’re dealing with extremely limited resources. We’re not getting a lot of help with the state and the feds.”
The city’s job is to run the government as efficiently and environmentally responsible as possible, said acting City Manager Tom Leahy. Dramatically cutting back on the city’s greenhouse gas emissions would come with a hefty price tag, he said.
“That would have real, serious economic impacts,” he said.
And now the city is reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, which has left officials with even fewer good options ahead. The city’s finances have been hit hard by the closure of hotels, restaurants and retail stores, which means less revenue from taxes on meals and sales amid the shutdown.
On the shelf
In 2013, the city finalized its nearly 200-page sustainability report, a far-reaching document that broached topics like maintaining a low crime rate while also including explicit greenhouse gas emission goals. Some environmentalists saw the report as a watershed moment for Virginia Beach, a sign that the conservative-leaning city was ready to start doing its part to combat climate change.
Around the globe, rapid increases in these gases are driving a warming planet by trapping heat, much of which goes into the ocean, research shows. This temperature increase not only contributes to more severe storms, but also causes seawater to expand, polar ice caps to melt and seas to rise.
Since 1960, Hampton Roads has seen more than a foot of sea level rise, according to tide gauge data from Norfolk’s Sewell’s Point. The rate of rise has been accelerating in recent years and is projected to become even steeper in the coming decades, according to a recent report by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. The city is also seeing significant storms more often.
Though polls show the public is divided on the cause of climate change, there is a consensus among experts: At least 97% of actively publishing climate scientists agree that the rise in global temperatures is due to human activities, according to NASA.
The 2013 sustainability plan set out goals for the city to cut back on its emissions and energy use. They included:
Track greenhouse gas emissions from city government operations and establish goals for the future.
Reduce energy consumption in city government operations and facilities.
Partner with the state and energy providers so the city uses more clean energy
But in the seven years since the city passed its sustainability plan, Virginia Beach has made little or no progress on many of the goals.
For its carbon footprint, officials did not bother to collect data to serve as a baseline to measure future improvements. The city never started tracking greenhouse gas emissions, has no solar panels on city buildings and never made a significant change from gas or diesel vehicles to ones that use electricity or cleaner fuel.
Some members of the steering committee who helped develop the 2013 plan, as well as some local environmentalists, say they are disappointed in the city’s lack of progress — especially since officials have gotten more open about discussing sea level rise.
“I wished they had done it,” said Joe Bouchard, previous commanding officer of Naval Station Norfolk who helped draft the city’s plan.
The retired Navy captain said he saw the city lose its appetite for much of the plan when then-City Manager Jim Spore retired in 2015.
The city has made some improvements in its energy consumption. Officials decreased the city’s gross consumption of electric, natural gas and propane energy by 4% from 2015 to 2019, despite adding additional office space in that time. That’s a bit under the city’s goal to cut its gross consumption by 5% in five years.
Some of the adjustments included swapping out conventional lighting with LED technology, which uses about half as much energy and lasts substantially longer. And the city has continuously retrofitted aging facilities.
“We continue to improve energy efficiencies where practical,” Leahy wrote in a Nov. 8 note to City Council. “Energy conservation continues to have the focus of our leadership.”
The council has also thrown its weight behind some renewable energy projects, such as a wind farm off the coast, and recently reversed its position on offshore drilling.
The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy ranked Virginia Beach 63 out of 75 of the country’s largest cities for its energy efficiency policy and program efforts.
Bouchard, the former Navy captain, said the city should be doing more to cut back on its emissions, not only for the environment but also because it could save taxpayers money. Virginia Beach has 1,541 vehicles using unleaded gas, 599 vehicles using diesel, 80 hybrid vehicles and no electric vehicles, Hill said.
Bouchard argued that because the city has to regularly replace vehicles in its fleet, it should opt for electric or hybrid cars on this cycle to reduce the city’s energy bill. And, it’s good for the environment and for the climate, he said.
“There were a lot of very sound arguments for doing those things. But the City Council was not in any kind of a mood for doing those things,” he said.
Laura Habr, who co-owns Croc’s 19th Street Bistro near the Oceanfront and has pushed the city to adopt green practices over the years, argued that the city needs to do its part on carbon emissions and climate change now.
She has urged Dyer to join the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, a formal coalition of city leaders who have pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions, though he has not yet done so.
Habr said it is time for Virginia’s largest city to help lead the way on the issue.
“How are these cities doing it and we’re not?” she said. “Why aren’t we doing more?”
In sharp contrast, Virginia Beach schools have had success in curbing their carbon footprint and have been explicit in their goals. The school division became one of the first in the country to inventory its carbon footprint — back in 2011 — and finished an emissions reduction plan soon after. Over the next eight years, it reduced energy use by 27% while building space grew by 9%. Recently, it joined a pilot program to replace six diesel buses with electric ones.
Competing priorities
The issue comes down to priorities. Dyer and Leahy said the city can’t afford to both safeguard against sea level rise and address the underlying causes of that rise.
“I think both are important, but right now we have a responsibility to address the problems we can confront,” Dyer said. “Certainly climate change is an important consideration on a national level — and that is definitely part of the problem — but what we have to do is focus on what we can fix in the very near future.”
In an interview before the coronavirus pandemic, Leahy said the city was trying to hold the line on tax and fee increases and it already had to account for building renovations, expenses tied to water quality mandates and increased compensation for employees to help fill vacant jobs. He said it’s a difficult choice to spend money on projects that would end up having a net cost to taxpayers.
“It’s our job to pick costeffective projects,” he said.
Financial impacts from the pandemic and shutdown have made those decisions even tougher.
So rather than worrying about why the seas are rising, city leadership has, at times, just adopted the mentality it’s simply a problem that needs to be addressed.
“Nobody is to blame for the polar ice caps in Greenland melting,” then-City Manager Dave Hansen said during a May 2019 City Council meeting. “We’ve just got to deal with it.”
The city’s current messaging regarding sea level rise was planned in late 2017, before a series of listening sessions with locals was set to start, when the city’s public works department started avoiding the words climate change while speaking with residents.
“That’s when we decided we’re going to deal with the problem that we’re trying to tackle, we’re not getting into the reasons behind it because we don’t control those,” said Bodnar.
The focus for the city is, instead, on the practical and immediate plans the city has to safeguard the city. Many residents support accelerating those plans. Bodnar said he believes that messaging has been a success, going as far as to say in public meetings that the city purposefully doesn’t discuss climate change because it is a hot topic.
City staff takes the same tact in its formal documents too, simply avoiding the subject in its planning efforts.
For example, the words “climate change” pop up once in the city’s 159-page sea level rise plan, which the council plans to vote on Tuesday. It makes its first appearance in the end notes, in reference to a Hawaiian study. The city’s main landing page for sea level rise information took a similar approach.
“Regardless of opinions about climate change, the reality is that flooding is increasing and the City must prepare for the future,” the webpage read.
In mid-May, that reference was removed.
Peter Coutu, 757-222-5124, peter.coutu@pilotonline.com