The West Virginia Legislature ended its 2022 regular session at midnight March 12, 2022. Altogether, the Legislature passed 293 bills. Sixty-two bills introduced were energy or environment related. Only 8 of them passed. Some of the unsuccessful bills we opposed. Many more we supported. Energy Policy There was a lot of long-range thinking about the […]
Think of the period between January 12 and March 12 as hunting season. The prey? West Virginia’s precious environment. The hunters? All those willing to undervalue and sacrifice the environment for a few extra dollars here or there. There are a lot of hunters in West Virginia, folks, and they were out in Charleston during […]
Immediately upon assuming office, President Biden issued an executive order addressing his climate objectives. Prominent among these was the creation of a Civilian Climate Corps to tackle climate change resiliency and provide job training to underemployed youth. The new CCC would be modeled on a popular New Deal program that put thousands to work on […]
Carbon capture is a term used to describe a group of technologies that either remove carbon directly from the air or scrub it from waste gas as fossil fuels are burned. In either case, the carbon “captured” is buried or used in the manufacture of other products. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change includes carbon […]
When I was a first-year student at the University of Virginia I was required to take a science course. The choices were physics, chemistry, biology or geology. “Rocks” is what the students called geology and it was reputed to be the least rigorous, so that’s what I took. It was a good choice. We learned […]
Every year at this time, those of us interested in environmental preservation and conservation take stock of what the West Virginia Legislature has done for, or to, the environment. Sadly this process usually results in the same conclusion. We made very little progress. During the 2021 regular session just ended, the most notable environmental victory […]
In 2019 a fisherman noticed black seepage from Verso’s paper mill at Luke Maryland into the North Branch of the Potomac River. The seepage turned out to be “black liquor” from the papermaking process coming from several sources along the river bank, including an old storage tank and a coal ash lagoon. A lawsuit was […]
The House Health and Human Services Committee on Friday, March 4 sent a bill exempting above-ground storage tanks from regulation even though located on the banks of rivers and streams close to public water intakes. The vote by 13 Republicans on the Committee overruled the vote of 6 Democrats and the objections of the Department […]
Awhile back, a good friend of mine spent half an hour complaining to me about having to pay an additional $100 when he registered his Prius hybrid vehicle. That caused me to wonder why West Virginia would want to discourage the ownership of these vehicles with a whopping big tax. Hybrids consume lots less gasoline […]
They’re at it again. Under the cover of the Covid pandemic, when citizens can’t rally in numbers, the West Virginia legislature is poised to gut one of the key protections of the Aboveground Storage Tank Act enacted after the 2014 water crisis. Remember the crisis? When 300,000 Mountain Staters had no access to safe water? […]
