Yesterday, over 500 students across Virginia pledged to be a Climate Voter before they hit the polls to cast their ballots. Wow! I could feel the electoral energy as I stood outside with Virginia Commonwealth University students eager to get last minute pledges for clean energy.
Election Day’s big success adds to the past two weeks on the ground across VA where students have come together in a push to get over 1,700 students pledging to vote for a clean energy future. 
Maryland was just hit by Hurricane Sandy, the largest storm ever recorded to hit the East Coast, but not as hard as states like New Jersey and New York:
“We all dodged a bullet on this one,” Anne Arundel County Fire Battalion Chief Steve Thompson said Tuesday from the county’s emergency operations center. “If that storm would have wiggled a little bit south, with those winds, it would have been a doozie.”
Yet, 300,000 people from Virginia to Baltimore remained without power Tuesday evening and many areas of the state experienced extensive flooding. The fishing pier on Ocean City’s iconic boardwalk is now half-gone. Sadly there were also a couple storm related deaths in Maryland as well as a number of injuries.
As we begin to rebuild, the first thing we must do is make sure everyone is safe and has what they need to survive in our state and across the country. Please donate if you can to the American Red Cross as they most certainly will need more robust funding in the coming years and decades.
Once we get back on our feet, with the metro running in DC and the subways back on track in New York City, we must immediately focus on what we can do to lessen the wrath of ever-worsening storms like Sandy. Perhaps Stephen Lacey and Joe Romm put it best when describing the link between human-caused climate change and these new super-storms:
After watching three presidential debates in which climate change was mentioned a grand total of zero times, Richmond area CCANers struck with our well-known banner at today’s big swing-state candidate appearance in sunny Byrd Park!
What could have prepared Dominion executives for the tremendous showing of customer outrage and dissatisfaction unleashed the week of October 1st! Without our dedicated climate warriors who participated and supported the Week of Action, Dominion would continue to quietly, and legally, get away with setting up a $76 million bonus for themselves while playing keep-away with Virginia’s clean energy future. Since the Week of Action, the clean air advocates and climate protectors of Virginia got control of the ball, and for a change Dominion representatives have had to respond to some hard questions from reporters.
The Stand Up to Dominion Week of Action was so successful because of the participation of clean energy supporters from all around Virginia, and it was especially uplifting to have everyone sharing their reasons for taking action.
What an excellent fourth day of the Week of Action at Dominion! Several Hampton Roads residents came out today, from as far as Chesapeake and Norfolk, Hampton and Newport News, to help shine a spotlight on Dominion’s $76 Million Rip-Off and all the consequences that the company’s continued dependence on eastern Virginia, including driving climate change and sea level rise. Check out the picture below of our mock-submerged Virginia landmarks, the Tangier Island water tower and the Neptune Statue, among the icons of Virginia at risk due to climate change.
At Hampton Bay Days this past weekend, the high-jumping Dock Dogs weren’t the only ones who made a splash! Thanks to all our local volunteers, CCAN had two great days of outreach promoting clean energy and enlisting the help of festival-goers to bring clean energy to Virginia! As the only organization educating the public on the impacts of climate change to the Chesapeake Bay region, it was a perfect opportunity to talk about how to move clean energy away from fossil fuels and toward renewable solar and wind power for the sake of our waterways and our coast.
Residents of many Tidewater neighborhoods are dealing with higher water than ever before when storms hit and the full moon shines. It’s had recent media attention in the Post and the Pilot. CCAN is actively concentrating on offering these folks on the front lines of climate change some ways to address the rising sea by getting to the root of the problem: greenhouse gas pollution.
When the company that puts out 55% of Virginia’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions tries to leave pollution out of the picture, Wonder Wind and some intrepid CCANers show up on the scene to set the record straight!
This Saturday 5/5/12, people across Maryland and the world will take action to “connect the dots” between climate change, extreme weather and other climate impacts that are already affecting our lives. Organized by 350.org, Climate Impacts Day is shaping up to be another powerful demonstration of the grassroots determination to spur global action on this most urgent of global crises.
Here in Maryland we got off to an early start with our efforts to connect the dots when I traveled to Annapolis this week to chat with hardcore, Annapolis-based sailor Matt Rutherford.
The push for the Keystone XL pipeline puzzles me. Society is foolishly increasing its dependence on oil by investing more and more in this diminishing dirty resource. Meanwhile, many of the clean and renewable alternatives that our future requires already exist and continue to improve in both efficiency and cost.
The fact of the matter is that we must begin to reorient our entire energy system away from fossil fuels. To that end, there is very exciting news about five new advances coming out of MIT that look to utilize solar energy just about everywhere. In other news there was a great breakthrough in transportation; for the first time a German engineered electric vehicle traveled 1000 miles on a single charge!
While there may be some doubt about current energy conversion rates with solar energy, wind is quite the proven technology for replacing fossil fuels in a very big way. For example, Denmark currently gets about 20% of its total electrical need from wind alone, generating jobs and reducing green house gas emissions all along the way. In the bigger picture, Europe is producing 5.5% of its electricity from wind as of 2010, but has plans for massive investment. According to the European Wind Energy Association, strong EU regulatory framework is guiding 194 billion Euros of investment with the goal of tripling wind energy production to over 15% by 2020.
And here we sit investing in expanding an oil pipeline that already exists. To put it in a wider perspective, the general estimate for the Keystone XL pipeline rings in at around 7 billion. Instead, we should invest that money installing clean, renewable sources of power right near major coastal populations where it is needed most. Or, we can continue to delay the inevitable and invest in a dwindling dirty fuel while ignoring its litany of