Today, Virginia students and parents sent an Earth Day message to Dominion Power: It’s time to move beyond token green efforts and start taking meaningful climate action for the sake of our future. They delivered nearly a thousand petition signatures collected this month, photos and artwork created by children to Dominion’s Richmond office and called on the company to invest in energy efficiency, wind and solar power instead of a huge new natural gas-fired power plant.
Students from VCU spoke at the delivery, highlighting the threat youth and future generations face from climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. Unless Dominion and other utilities begin a rapid shift to clean energy sources, today’s kids face a future in a different world marked by increasingly severe storms, rising seas, and other climate consequences.
While Dominion engages in its usual Earth Day efforts, like distributing tree seedlings and sponsoring Earth Day festivals, the company remains the top climate polluter in the commonwealth. Its future plans include more of the same dirty fossil fuels, like the Brunswick County natural gas plant.
Today’s delivery is the continuation of a month-long intiative called Project Planet, in which Virginia youth, parents and grandparents are calling on Dominion to go beyond these token “green” efforts and make a serious commitment to reducing its planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions. Launched with an April Fool’s announcement that Dominion had committed to going carbon-neutral (video here), supporters collected petition signatures and worked with kids throughout the month to highlight the risk Dominion’s carbon pollution poses to a livable future.
This Wednesday the State Corporation Commission will hold a hearing on Dominion’s next big greenhouse gas polluter – the Brunswick natural gas plant. Sign up to join us at the hearing to keep up the momentum for climate solutions, not new fossil fuels.
