It’s morning in Wise County. Beautiful mountains, a great town, with a UVA presence even. The sun is shining and the sky is clear. The few miners left working are now headed home from the night shift.
Cue the Ride of The Valkyries, just to set the mood. There is a helicopter coming over the rise.
It circles the new Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center a couple of times and is gone.
What you can’t tell from the ground is that former Gov. Tim Kaine is the a passenger. The other is a camera operator. Quite possibly a third is a sound guy.
Yessiree, Ol’ Timmie’s a shooting hisself a campaign ad. And it’s a humdinger.
You’ll notice he never quite comes out and says “I built that.” Even though he strives mightily to imply it. He said on his website,
“As governor, I was proud to be involved in the process that made this state-of-the-art power plant a reality. This plant shows that we can always utilize our coal resources in a cleaner and cleaner way. While some would seek to eliminate coal entirely, and others would seek to weaken emission regulations at the cost of public health and safety, this plant shows that neither of these approaches are appropriate. Instead, we should strive to make everything we build today cleaner than what we built yesterday. In many areas, including water usage, mercury emissions, and the capacity to implement carbon sequestration technology, this facility is showing the way forward. This Virginia City plant is a good news story on the future of energy right here in the Commonwealth.”
Now, what do you think of when you read that quote? He was right there cheering it on, right?
Not quite. Not according to the New York Times, (and their notoriously biased reporting.) No one in Wise County remembers it that way.
In a July 19, 2012 report from St. Paul VA, (St. Paul is just north-east of my mother’s birthplace, Bonnie Blue. Tim says his wife is from there too. That’s just the first lie exaggeration in this short video. She’s from Roanoke. Four hours away. And grew up in the Executive Mansion. Probably never touched a lump of coal. Or even seen one), Jonathan Weisman of the Times reports,
“My advice is, don’t try to weaken regulations,” he [Kaine] told voters in southwestern Virginia last week. “Sell your story. Say we can meet these standards.”
There is not much evidence that such nuance will break through the hostility that regulations under Mr. Obama have engendered here. Talk of an Obama “war on coal” saturates the airwaves, and in an area already down on its luck, such talk breeds fear.
“It’s probably coal that keeps everything going,” said Betty McMillan, 73. “If that goes, it all goes.”
In more than a dozen interviews in St. Paul, no one was familiar with any role that Mr. Kaine had in getting the plant going. As recently as March, the former governor toured the plant in a campaign swing. It did not seem to make an impression.
“I did the permitting, and I don’t remember that,” Jeff Kite, 44, an environmental engineer, said about Mr. Kaine’s role.
Mr. Kite said that regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency had kept him gainfully employed, because businesses hire him to help them comply with federal standards. But, he said, they are “just killing permitting.”
“There’s no coal mining, no new transportation. He’s really hurt the economy,” Mr. Kite said of the president.
Kaine did create a commission to study climate change and its impact on Virginia. One of their recommendations was to allow no more coal-fired energy plants. Unfortunately for them, this one just squeaked in before the new EPA regulations were announced.
Otherwise, Timmie’s new ad would be saturating Richmond and Fairfax cheering that it never opened.
You see, while his climate change commission was working, Gov. Kaine took an unofficial, and unauthorized leave of absence from being Governor, to be the DNC cheerleader for Obama. Where he proudly championed cap and trade, and pixie dust, and unicorn poop. Or other such stuff.
But we’re here in Wise. The real world.
It was back in March of this year, that the EPA rolled out its new regulations.
The Bristol Herald reported on April 5th, “…Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a regulation limiting newly constructed coal-fired plants to 1,000 pounds of carbon emissions per megawatt generated. The average coal plant emits about 1,760 pounds per megawatt…”
Tim Kaine has praised that level. In the Herald article he is quoted, “..Whether you adjust the standard in the reg [ulation] or Congress takes some action on it, all of us want everything new to be built cleaner than what’s in the past,” Kaine said.
This new plant is the cleanest the world has ever known. But it’s still not clean enough for the President’s EPA. According to the plant’s spokesman, Dan Genest. “The Virginia City center is permitted to burn up to 20 percent biomass. But at 10 percent biomass, the plant would produce about 1,740 pounds per megawatt hour.”
That’s almost half a ton too much for President Obama and Chairman Kaine.
So the regulation that Tim Kaine endorsed a few months ago will prevent any real clean coal plants in the future. It would have prevented this one if it had not already been under construction, and thus grandfathered in.
Sorry Governor. You can’t have it both ways. You either “supported” this plant, or you supported the regulations that would have killed it. Killed it and all those jobs you take credit for in your false and misleading ad.
This could be the last coal-fired power plant built anywhere in the U.S. Might as well celebrate it Timmie, there probably won’t be another.
Meanwhile Tom White has this.
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