The clock is ticking, writes Mike Tidwell with Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN)! "Dominion Power has already begun clearing land for its proposed 585 megawatt coal-fired power plant in Wise County, Virginia. And the company hasn't even received all its air pollution and building permits yet. Talk about corporate disdain for the voters of Virginia!"
Last Chance to Submit Comments Against Wise Co. Plant! The Department of Environmental Quality is now reviewing Dominion's air pollution permit for the proposed Wise County Power Plant. This plant will not be a "clean coal" facility as Dominion claims, but will spew out mercury, sulfur, nitrogen, carbon dioxide - not to mention the extensive environmental impacts from mining the coal. The DEQ needs to hear from you, the comment period ends on March 12! Click here to submit comments.
Tell Kaine to preserve his legacy and stop the Wise Co. power plant. So far Governor Kaine has yet to come out against Dominion's Wise County coal plant. He needs to be made aware of the fact that just this year alone, Washington, Florida, Kansas, and Texas have all canceled plans for new coal-fired power plants. "On the other hand, Virginia is moving backwards, planning to invest $1.6 billion in ratepayers' money in a new coal-fired power plant in Wise County," writes TheGreenMiles. If Kaine wants to be a leader on the issues of national security, the environment, and energy, he needs to shut down these plans and fast! Click here to send a message to Governor Kaine.
It might help if, in addition to calling the Governor, we called our friendly local Supervisor or other local official and urged them to take formal action as well. The change we have been waiting for really does begin with us.
It would be great to figure out some other way to get the power. Instead of hurting the conservation cause by hyperbole.
I know I have argued quite hard against people who were, I felt, too highly critical of the Gov. on this issue. I do want to point out that I don't like the damn thing either. But I do realize that there are a lot of things that could be done to get the power from other places and I just don't see the effort being put into these things and a lot of effort being put into opposing the Wise Co. plant without alternate methods of power supply being suggested or provided.
It is a stupid idea. I don't like the nasty coal powered plants at all. I oppose the plant as well. It is tactics that I am talking about now.
Concerning use of the phrase "tipping point," which caused WillieStark to take umbrage: That one final act insignificant in itself can be the final straw that breaks the camel's back, or in other words, the "tipping point," is an interesting theory, and statistically in making policy or explaining past events in history it can be very useful--- for example, which is the final cigarette which triggers the cancer? (Could be the first or the 10 thousandth, who knows?) Or, when does the adoption of a new gadget by one additional person turn the gadget into an overwhelming must-have fad? Or, when is the turning of the final molecule (and which molecule) that precipitates a cube of water into ice, and so on.
In the book "Collapse" by Diamond one reads about Easter Island, a closed economy with a rigid social system which triggered its own decline and population collapse by persisting in a non-sustainable life style that completely devastated the island's resources, a decline from which it could never recover. It is not hard to see in Easter Island an analogy to planet Earth and our own life style with its ravenous use of non-renewable resources, just on a larger scale.
Who knows when accumulated insults to the Earth's eco-system will finally overwhelm the built-in governors of Mother Nature's flexible world system, and what might be the final straw that break's the camel's back, what one additional thing that begins the unstoppability of a change in climate? I personally do not want to trust our species' future to riskier and riskier destruction of acres of rain forest or the demise of another stock of a food fish, or added pollution from China's coal-fired plants, or whatever. Tipping points are where you find them.