VB Dems

Jim Hoeft of the Republican blog Bearing Drift has decided to organize his supporters to join him in participating in the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s “Clean the Bay” Day on Saturday, June 5. This is terrific! The Bay needs all the help it can get.

It’s also very interesting how Jim had to amend the context of his invitation to Republicans to join this event. You see CBF is a 501(c)(3) and is strictly prohibited from engaging in political activities. They are hyper-sensitive to anything that smells like politics anywhere near them.

Last year I was helping Brian Moran in the Democratic primary. He wanted to participate in “Clean the Bay” Day and invite his supporters to join him. He asked me to work on setting it up. The attorney for CBF came down on that idea hard, doing everything he could to stop that from happening with all sorts of restrictions such as no photography, no campaign T-shirts, buttons, stickers, lit, no press release, no reporting, etc., etc. and personally policing our participation that day. We got the picture, respected their position and abandoned the idea.

Jim Hoeft in his blog post announcing Bearing Drift’s participation originally pointed out how June 5 was just a handful of days away from the GOP primary for the 2nd congressional district and how it would be great to see the GOP 2nd candidates join him. One candidate, Jessica Sandlin, responded with “Love it, Jim! I’m in and I’ll bring my kids”. Jim has since struck that language from the blog post. He’ll hopefully also remind the GOP candidates like Jessica of CBF’s restrictions.

I talked to VBDC Chair Susan Mariner about this and she thinks it would be a great activity for Virginia Beach Dems to be involved with too. Look for more details on that coming soon!

Save the Bay and Drill Baby Drill! Right, Jim?

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“The fact is, these things happen”, said Louisiana’s U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu at a hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on November 19, 2009. The flaming oil rig pictured here was responsible for a blowout that took almost three months to bring under control. During that time it dumped over 400 barrels of oil per day into Australian waters, eventually growing to the footprint size of New Jersey.

The Montara was built in 2007 and represents everything the oil industry touts as state-of-the-art advanced technology for “environmentally safe” drilling. BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig responsible for the recent blowout off Louisiana’s coast was built in 2001 and is also touted as safe.

The Minerals Management Service (MMS) said 39 fires or explosions were reported offshore in the Gulf of Mexico in the first five months of 2009, the latest period for which statistics are available. Since 2001, there have been 69 offshore deaths, 1,349 injured and 858 fires and explosions in the Gulf of Mexico according to the federal Minerals Management Service. An MMS review published last year found 41 deaths and 302 injuries out of 1,443 oil-rig accidents from 2001 to 2007.

“The tragedy off the coast of Louisiana shows we need to be asking a lot more tough questions of big oil,” U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said. “I think we need to look back over 10 years or so to see if the record denies the industry’s claims about safety and technology.”

Our Virginia legislators, from Webb to Warner to McDonnell to Nye, have jumped lock, stock and barrel into bed with Big Oil, ignoring #1 that “these things happen” and ignoring #2 that the environmental sensitivity analysis is flawed. So said a DC Court of Appeals last year, and the fact that MMS is proposing seismic exploration of the Atlantic is evidence all the more that for Virginia to proceed in the 2007-2012 program, with as little as we do know about the impacts of drilling, is very suspect and irresponsible.

Speak out against the rush to drill Virginia on Thursday April 29. MMS is holding a public hearing on Atlantic seismic surveying at the Hilton Norfolk Airport at 1pm and again at 7pm. The deadline for public comment is May 17. Email comments to GGEIS@mms.gov.

MMS is also accepting public comment on the 2007-2012 program. That deadline is May 3. Email comments to PRPcomments@mms.gov.

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Considering that KGL (Kerry Graham Lieberman) climate bill, in order to secure the 60 votes it needs to pass, will contain compromises for drilling, it is probably best that the vote not coincide with Earth Day. It was the 1969 Santa Barbara disaster that is most credited with igniting the movement towards national celebrations of Earth Day. Instead the vote is likely to occur the following week.

Earth Day celebrates its 40th anniversary this year and I have such mixed emotions regarding its significance. As with everything, I can’t separate the politics from anything and this causes me to find Earth Day to be somewhat annoying. All the focus falls on recycling, scooping the poop, switching out light bulbs, planting trees – all good and certainly helpful things in building a conscientiousness that collectively makes our planet greener.

Earth Day started off as a political revolution and needs to become on yet again. We need an energy policy that like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act of yesteryear gets quickly to the root of what ails our planet before it’s too late. Energy policy means politics and when you talk politics while tabling at an Earth Day celebration, people recoil.

It’s so frustrating because instead of directly educating folks to the critical need for passing climate legislation, I’m trying to educate people how policy in the first place is integral to environmental protection in general.

I don’t know exactly why I dabble as fervently as I do into something as ugly as politics. But I suspect it has to do with the pictures in my head of the delicate beauty that our natural world still holds. How can politicians like Mayor Will Sessoms ignore what are similar pictures in his head and still want drilling to occur off Virginia Beach’s coast? Sure, we can talk jobs, money, tourism, technology anytime. The anti-drilling argument wins on those issues every time. It’s almost as if we have to take him by the back of the head and force his nose into seeing, smelling, tasting and hearing exactly what makes our coastal environment one that needs to be treasured and guarded within an inch of our lives. Compromise it and that foundation on which politicians like Sessoms have built their mighty castles crumbles away.

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I can’t tell you how comforting it is knowing that the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Secretary of Natural Resources is a member of the Flat Earth Society and is actually swallowing the shit that our esteemed Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is dishing out. (Source for Domenech quote).

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Writes RTD: “Gov. Bob McDonnell and U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar discussed the next steps for Virginia offshore exploration and drilling yesterday during a private lunchtime tête-à-tête at the Executive Mansion.

McDonnell, an enthusiastic supporter of offshore oil drilling, asked Salazar to help keep the momentum going now that Virginia has been cleared as the first state on the Atlantic Coast to explore and, depending on what’s found, drill.

“I urged him to do everything possible, since he was managing the process, to keep this on track for late 2011 or sometime in 2012, and he assured me that he would do that,” McDonnell said shortly after the meeting.

Ha! McDonnell now relinquishes to 2012: “2011… or 2012″. How about 2013, 2017, 2024, never…

The more we get to know about Virginia’s coastal environment the less and less likely we are to see any drills. That study will take time and it looks like more and more time will be awarded to the process.

Sorry, Bob. No wonder you look so glum in this RTD photo. (Photo credit: BOB BROWN/TIMES-DISPATCH)

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President Obama will be announcing plans today to open up new areas to offshore drilling to include the Atlantic Coast from Delaware south.

My tremendous disappointment with this announcement doesn’t come from the fact that Virginia still stands in line for potential lease sale as early as next year. That’s never going to happen for two reasons: 1) Virginia wants to keep a hold of Oceana’s jets and not kiss off the 11,000 jobs, $773 million in annual payroll, and $452 million in annual local contracting it brings in; and 2) because the 6.5 days worth of oil off Virginia’s coast isn’t worth the lawsuits impending as a result of the Federal government continued slipshod environmental sensitivity analysis nor has it or will it garner any interest from Big Oil especially now as much greener pastures have been opened up.

No, my disappointment comes from how allowances for offshore drilling are been used as a political football to jockey support for the climate bill from especially U.S. Senators in southern Atlantic coast states. Sen. Jim Webb is too in bed with Big Coal to ever support it. Sen. Mark Warner who placates all too often to Chambers of Commerce interests is not very likely to support it either. Meanwhile insertion of more drilling in this supposed “clean energy” climate bill will cost Obama in his quest to garner 60 votes as Senators from northern Atlantic coast states, who strongly stand in opposition to offshore drilling, bail.

So now for this game of political football to work out successfully, that climate bill must stay clean without insertions of drilling, “clean coal”, nuclear and other dirty energy sources. Will it be worth having to suffer through the short-lived “Drill, baby, drill” celebrations in Virginia today? I think so, because like I said… drilling ain’t never going to happen off Virginia’s coast.

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“If there’s going to be money made from drilling for gas, I want the city of Virginia Beach to benefit, period,” said Mayor Will Sessoms.

How exactly is Virginia Beach making money from drilling?

The Feds don’t allow for revenue sharing with coastal states, and if they did, Virginia wouldn’t spend it on roads in Virginia Beach. The limited number of jobs on rigs would be filled by workers from all over the U.S. Most offshore oil rig jobs call for a 14/21 day rotation, meaning working for 14 days and having 21 days off. This equates to having approximately 3/5 of the year off. For this reason, workers would not have to relocate their families and otherwise disrupt their lives to work on Virginia’s offshore rigs, opting to simply fly in from the Gulf Coast for the handful of times they are needed to work off Virginia’s shores.

Yet the visions of “jobs, jobs, jobs” dancing around Sessoms’ head remains as put there by Gov. Bob McDonnell. “This is the City Council showing support for the governor”, said Sessoms like any good lap dog.

Meanwhile, McDonnell has based his “jobs, jobs, jobs” song-and-dance entirely on a 2005 “report” by Dr. James V. Koch, local celebrity economist and former ODU president. Writes Dr. Koch in an email to me: “First, this really doesn’t qualify as a report. Indeed, I don’t even have a copy. I was given about 48 hours to produce a very quick estimate of the economic benefits (jobs, income, taxes) that might be generated by drilling off shore. Since I had no Virginia data, and no time to produce any, I looked at what had happened previously in Louisiana and a Canadian province as a guide. I did not have time to take environmental costs, etc., into account. I do not list this work on my C.V. because I did not invest the considerable time and attention that I give to the many economic impact studies that I do”.

To the right is a zoning map of Virginia Beach. The Louisiana that Dr. Koch looked to for modeling his economic projections is the one pictured above and below as riddled with green boxes, red circles and a myriad of grey lines. (The grey lines are pipelines; the red lines are pipelines damaged by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.) With visions of those thousands of jobs and millions in revenue, Virginia Beach would have to be similarly riddled.

This is what Mayor Sessoms’ envisions off Virginia Beach?!? What a pawn!

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As reported in WaPo, “Virginia’s Air Pollution Control Board voted today to direct its chairman to tell the Environmental Protection Agency that Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli did not act in their behalf when he filed a lawsuit challenging the EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gases last month”. As a friend writes, “An excellent statement from the Air Board that not only does Cuccinelli not represent Virginians – he doesn’t even represent Virginia’s environmental authorities in state government!”

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Raise your glass (or your oil soaked bird)! The Exxon Valdez oil spill turned 21 years old yesterday! Whoo hoo! Let’s party like Joseph Hazelwood!

Oil is such lovely stuff. We definitely want it washing up on our beaches too. Drill, baby, drill.

Or not…

It’s not too late to email Secretary Salazar. He is expected to make a decision on Virginia drilling soon. Tell him to stop the rush to drill Virginia!!!

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10 Ways Mother Earth Will Strike Back If We Don’t Stop Our Wanton Destruction of the Environment

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I like this new Virginia Beach Democratic Committee!

At its monthly business meeting tomorrow evening (Bayside Library, 7-9pm), the VBDC will be considering a resolution similar to that passed by the Arlington County Dems which condemns AG Ken Cuccinelli for suing the EPA over its climate change endangerment finding. The Arlington Resolution is below the fold.

I know that the Hampton Dems are also considering such a Resolution. This is terrific!

(more…)

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Area bloggers were invited to a private meeting with new HRT director Phil Shucet. I found myself quickly bored with the discussion that got almost exclusively mired in the ugly details (cost over-runs, who was going to pay for Virginia Beach’s study, embezzlement, “culture of fear”).

When new leadership steps on board, folks typically take a step back and again review the bigger picture of their work. From attending this so-called “discussion” on Monday, I sense none of that happening with HRT. My question that turned into a whiny speech attempted to take a stab at exactly what the end goal was with HRT.

With everything in life, don’t we always put big decisions or actions on a scale to weigh both the pros and cons? In business, isn’t that called a “cost-benefit analysis”? Why isn’t HRT doing that analysis now especially in light of the additional costs?

I wanted to both ask that question and at the same time point out that many of the benefits in that analysis could be overlooked. HRT has so far failed to recognized them and in turn failed to promote them to the public. Too many folks only weigh the costs of light rail to only the potential income from fares and the lessened traffic from fewer cars on the road. And for folks to continue to be so limited in their thinking about mass transit is surely the death of any chance for any light rail expansion to Virginia Beach.

A lot of the benefits are neither so obvious nor correlate to money in the bank. I mentioned this as one example. Hampton Roads has been designated as non-attainment for ozone by the EPA. We have to develop a plan to mitigate this pollutant or we risk losing Federal highway dollars. Expanding mass transit needs to be part of that plan. Why isn’t this potential benefit highlighted at all to the public?

Believe it or not, there are a lot of people in Hampton Roads that care about climate change. Why can’t HRT spell out to the public how many tons of carbon emissions are removed with folks opting to leave their cars in the driveway and taking mass transit to work?

While Virginia Beach has its own issues with outreach and education, mass transit plays an integral role in smart growth development. So few people have an understanding of compact urban development. They have no clue as to why we can’t continue the status quo of sprawl and car-centric patterns of living.

Always lost in the cost benefit analysis is our moral obligation to do the right thing for folks who can’t drive. There is, for example, the societal obligation to provide transportation to the disable who can’t drive. And with the economy the way it is, a lot of folks can’t afford to own and maintain a car. Public transportation is increasingly a must for getting to work.

I hope with HRT paying Phil Shucet $40,000 per month that we eventually do indeed get the “big picture.” Without it, HRT is doomed to failure.

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Click here to send an email to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar urging him to stop the rush to drill Virginia.

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