Good effort

When it rains, it pours. We wish it was just a saying here in Hampton Roads. But we all know it’s a fact felt too often in our community.

Take Llewellyn Avenue in Norfolk, where drivers attempted to navigate water overflowing into the street on a recent rainy day. It’s not an unusual sight — the low-lying avenue floods so often that wetland plants from the tidal creek to the left of the road now grow on the right side of the road.

Or take our kids getting pulled out of class multiple times this past school year because an impending storm would prevent school bus travel. Or the for-sale signs we see in long-standing neighborhoods now threatened by sea level rise. And that’s for residents privileged enough to be able to move.

Water doesn’t recognize borders. Climate change threatens us all — from damaged homes and businesses, school closures, delayed emergency services and more.

But there’s another, more uplifting fact: Virginia’s participation in the multistate, market-based carbon emissions reduction program known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative reduces air pollution and protects communities against flooding. Since 2021, nearly $373 million in RGGI proceeds funded flood protection and climate resiliency projects in Hampton Roads, the Eastern Shore and across the state.

State lawmakers deserve praise for mandating Virginia’s return to RGGI in the budget. They recognized that keeping the commonwealth in RGGI is about more than environmental protection — it’s about safeguarding our local economies, communities and our families.

— Christy Everett, Hampton Roads director for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Norfolk