Dominion Power made a startling announcement this morning. In honor of Earth Month 2013, the company will plant enough trees to go carbon neutral through its program, “Project Plant It!” This is a major breakthrough for climate action in Virginia. Until today, the utility had no plans to change course. To have the commonwealth’s top emitter of climate-disrupting pollution plant 4 billion trees is simply astounding.
Watch the video everybody’s talking about:
APRIL FOOLS! Dominion’s still Virginia’s #1 climate polluter! And their real Earth Day plans are to add another half a million cars’ worth of climate pollution to the atmosphere with a new power plant.
We would love to see Dominion commit to go carbon neutral or come anywhere close to it—which is why today we’re having a little fun to launch a very serious campaign. We’re calling it “Project Planet,” as a counterweight to Dominion’s token PR efforts like “Project Plant It.” Throughout Earth Month 2013, we’ll be joining with parents, grandparents and concerned Virginians across the state to demand a new direction from Dominion—to demand that Dominion make a serious commitment to cutting its carbon footprint. You can sign the petition here.
You can help spread the word by sharing Dominion’s “tree-planting” announcement on Facebook and Twitter before April Fool’s Day ends. Local activists in Richmond already had some fun this morning, loading up newspaper boxes near Dominion’s downtown Richmond offices with a special edition of the “Richmond Fools Dispatch,” both displaying our fake news headline along with the truth about Dominion’s climate pollution.
As it stands now, Dominion’s energy portfolio is overwhelmingly dirty, but big decisions are coming up that could set a new direction, giving us a chance to speak up for the clean-energy path. While Dominion’s most recent long-term energy plan is dominated by new fossil fuel projects—it would increase renewable energy by just four-tenths of one percent over 15 years—a new long-term plan is due to the state government by September 1. State regulators are also currently considering public input Dominion’s application to build a massive new gas-fired power plant in Brunswick County, Virginia. This plant would emit as much climate pollution as 550,000 cars—or roughly all of the cars in the state of Maine—when cheaper investments in energy efficiency technologies could more than offset the power it would supply.
With your help, between now and Earth Day 2013, we’ll deliver thousands of signatures to Dominion and state regulators with two simple demands: 1) Develop — and start implementing right away — a plan to reduce your emissions of the gases causing climate change, and 2) Stop building new fossil fuel-fired plants like the one in Brunswick County — and instead embrace strong energy efficiency programs and wind and solar power.
The first step of solving a problem is to stop making it worse—not covering it up with slick ads and PR stunts, as Dominion does every year around Earth Day. The most recent Project Plant It! ad I ran across a few weeks ago claims that Dominion is helping to make “a greener tomorrow.” The truth is Dominion’s expanding dirty energy supply threatens our tomorrow—it’s taking us toward more costly and devastating flooding in neighborhoods of Norfolk, caused by climate change-induced sea level rise and toward more severe storms like Sandy. If Dominion’s Earth Day ads were sincere, it would make the only responsible choice to protect children now and in the future—to stop building new fossil fuel plants and start cutting its carbon pollution right away.
