Climate progress off to a bad start under the Youngkin administration
On the campaign trail, Glenn Youngkin’s only on-the-record comments regarding climate change foreshadowed the extreme attacks on the environment that we’ve seen in just the first few days of his administration.
In a live interview with WAVY-TV, he was asked if he believes human activity is responsible for climate change. He responded, “I don’t know what’s responsible for climate change in all candor. I’m a pretty smart guy, but I’m not that smart.”
Personally, I thought he was smart enough to know that the policies Virginia has adopted the last couple of years to address climate change are designed specifically to help out sinking Hampton Roads, which is experiencing the fastest rate of sea level rise on the East Coast. His actions in his early days show that maybe that’s not the case.
One of Youngkin’s first moves, which, oddly enough, he also announced in Hampton Roads, was to eliminate a steady source of funding to help communities address these impacts.
He moved to single-handedly pull Virginia out of the multi-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a multi-state agreement to reduce climate change causing pollution and that has generated nearly $230 million of state revenue in its first year to help protect flood-prone communities and cut energy usage and monthly energy bills for Virginia’s low-income households. Running into a constitutional brick wall there, he’s now trying to hold the state budget hostage in an attempt to roll back climate action.
For a business guy, these moves are puzzling. Because of the commonwealth’s leadership on climate action, we are one of the fastest growing markets for clean energy jobs in the nation. Hampton Roads is seeing tens of millions of dollars of these investments and is becoming an east coast hub for offshore wind — bringing even more dollars and jobs to the region.
Youngkin’s extreme pick to lead Virginia’s environmental agencies is equally puzzling.
This past week, Youngkin’s nominee for Natural Resources Secretary, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist and head of Environmental Protection Agency in the post-truth Trump administration, came equipped with several of his own “alternative facts” as he pitched himself to lawmakers.
Listening to his testimony, it was difficult to place the Eagle Scout before the committee with the EPA administrator responsible for eliminating rule after rule to hold polluters accountable while decimating his own agency from the inside, replacing life-saving safeguards with threadbare regulations that benefited many of his former lobbying clients while endangering clean air and water.
Wheeler was such an egregious selection for Natural Resources Secretary that more than 150 former EPA employees have come out opposing his nomination, pointing out Wheeler’s track record of sidelining and ignoring scientists at the behest of industry.
The Virginia State Conference of the NAACP has communicated its opposition to lawmakers as well for his track record leading “many efforts to weaken environmental protections, lower emission standards, and allow pollutants to contaminate resources unchecked and unmitigated” — pollution that we know disproportionately impacts already marginalized communities.
Wheeler’s response to this massive opposition? Fake news.
On Jan. 20, Attorney General Jason Miyares announced that “Virginia was no longer anticoal” in pulling Virginia out of West Virginia v. EPA, alleging that should EPA win, it could “devastate the coal industry and the thousands of jobs it supports in Southwest Virginia.”
The lawsuit before the Supreme Court, a challenge to a regulation that no longer even exists, will more or less determine whether EPA has broad authority to regulate power plant pollution or not; arguments for this case are scheduled for late February.
Miyrares, who hails from Virginia Beach, a good sevenhour
drive away from coal country, might not know this, but the bulk of the coal that’s still being pulled out of Virginia mines is of a higher quality and used in steel fabrication, not electricity generation, meaning those 2,000 jobs aren’t really in harm’s way here.
But, thanks to the regressive, extreme policies of the Youngkin administration, the nearly 98,000 and growing clean energy jobs in Virginia — many based in Hampton Roads — are in jeopardy if they continue on their current collision course with reality.