Virginia Withdrawing From The Northeast's Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative

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Here in the mostly-deep-blue Northeast of the U.S., our genius politicians of the Democratic persuasion have determined to save the world — no, make that the “planet” — by greatly increasing the local voters’ cost of energy. This is the punishment you must bear to atone for your horrible sin of living a comfortable modern lifestyle. If you live in the Northeast, the mechanism of making you suffer goes under the name of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI. The members of RGGI are all six New England states, plus New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. Pennsylvania may be in the process of joining (the Democratic Governor is trying to accomplish that over the opposition of the Republican-controlled legislature); but Virginia, with a new Republican Governor, is in the process of trying to exit.

The fight currently going on in Virginia gives insight into the newly competitive political battlefield on the subject of restructuring our energy economy in a supposed effort to stop “climate change.”

Here is an overview of RGGI from something called the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. The basic idea of RGGI is that every power plant that burns fossil fuels needs to buy an allowance from the authorities for every ton of CO2 that it emits annually. The price of those allowances gets buried in everyone’s electric bill. Over time, the amount of the allowances is set to go down, and the price therefore is expected to go up, dramatically. The consumer will only see rapidly rising electricity bills, which politicians will conveniently blame on the evil utilities or oil and gas companies, with their own direct involvement carefully hidden to avoid accountability.

New Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin has wasted no time in doing everything he can to extricate his state from this madness. On his first day in office, January 15, as part of a package of first-day Executive Orders, Youngkin issued Executive Order Number 9, with the title “PROTECTING RATEPAYERS FROM THE RISING COST OF LIVING DUE TO THE REGIONAL GREENHOUSE GAS INITIATIVE.” Excerpt:

In a filling before the State Corporation Commission, Dominion Energy stated that RGGI will cost ratepayers between $1 billion and $1.2 billion over the next four years. Simply stated, the benefits of RGGI have not materialized, while the costs have skyrocketed.

Believe me, the $1.2 billion would be only the beginning of the beginning if Virginia actually were to proceed down the road to 100% intermittent wind and solar power backed up with batteries. The EO then orders the Director of the Department of Environmental Quality to take all necessary steps to notify RGGI of Virginia’s intent to withdraw and then to take all regulatory steps appropriate to accomplish that.

The Democrats, despite their election losses, equally have wasted no time in trying to block the exit from RGGI. On January 11, just before leaving office, outgoing Democratic AG Mark Herring, at the request of Democratic leaders in the legislature, issued an opinion that the Governor could not eliminate the cap-and-trade aspects of RGGI on his own authority or by regulation. That may or may not be correct; but Republicans, taking no chances, have introduced a bill going by the number HB 118, to repeal the statutory basis for cap-and-trade requirements. Today that bill cleared the Energy Committee of the House of Delegates by a 10-9 vote.

The CO2 Coalition, of which I am a member, entered the fray by producing a Report on February 7 titled Virginia and Climate Change. They also have a helpful summary of the Report here. Coalition Executive Director Gregory Wrightstone says that he and his wife spent the day yesterday in Richmond passing out copies of the Report to legislators in advance of the Energy Committee vote.

The Report was put together by a collection of the marquee names of the CO2 Coalition — including, in addition to Wrightstone, Will Happer (Chair of the Coalition and Professor Emeritus of Physics at Princeton), John Christy (of the UAH satellite temperature series) and Pat Michaels (of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and former Virginia State Climatologist). The Report is mostly a compilation of data that is well known to anyone who follows the climate controversy, and that should not be controversial in any way, but that, in the aggregate, demonstrate how completely ridiculous it is for a State like Virginia to attempt to affect world climate by restricting use of fossil fuels by its citizens.

Excerpt from the Summary of the Report:

This detailed analysis of climate change and its alleged impact on Virginia finds the following to be true and supported by voluminous governmental and peer-reviewed studies concerning the Commonwealth:

  • There is no unusual or unprecedented warming

  • Heat waves have been declining

  • Severe weather is not increasing

  • Crop and forest growth are increasing

  • Droughts are in decline

  • There is no increase in hurricanes

But most importantly, the Report shows the complete futility of a jurisdiction like Virginia, with a small fraction of 1% of world CO2 emissions, attempting to have a material effect on world climate by depriving its citizens of reliable and affordable energy. From the Summary:

Complete elimination of carbon dioxide emissions within Virginia will have an impact that is so close to zero that it is meaningless.

The more-detailed full Report states that the authors applied EPA’s own “MAGICC” model (Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change) to assess the temperature impacts by 2050 and 2100 of Virginia’s prospective elimination of use of fossil fuels. I would comment that the MAGICC model is complete hogwash, cooked up by the government with zero scientific basis to scare the bejeezus out of the people. On the other hand, MAGICC is the government’s own model, and it is entirely appropriate for those questioning government policy to use the model to challenge that policy. Here is the chart from the CO2 Coalition Report showing the results of application of the MAGICC model to Virginia’s complete elimination of emissions from fossil fuels:

Complete elimination of CO2 emissions by Virginia by 2100 yields a diminution of world climate warming by a small fraction of one-one hundredth of one degree Fahrenheit — if you believe the wildly overstated and unproven climate sensitivity to CO2 embedded in the MAGICC model. Go ahead and fight to the death for this, Democrats. I don’t know when the voters will figure this out, but at some point, inevitably, they will.

The CO2 Coalition Report is also chock full of great charts of climate data. Here’s one of my favorites showing decline in heatwaves in the full U.S., the Southeast, and Virginia specifically:

Recent decades, supposedly the “hottest ever” according to bureaucrats at NOAA and NASA, somehow have come nowhere near the heatwave records of the 1930s, let alone the levels of the 1910s, 20s, 40s or 50s.

Whether or not Republicans in Virginia score full success in rolling back the RGGI in the next few months, or whether the fight continues for a longer period, it is clear that the days of no political pushback against the energy transition madness are over.