Environmental Extremists Bummed Their Green Doesn’t Spend So Well

Walking along the Charlottesville Downtown Mall, you see a lot of small signs plastered on the Landmark Hotel (an unfinished concrete monstrosity that looks more East Berlin than 29 North).

Protest!  Saturday!  Richmond!  Buses!  Outrage!

…sounds like a good time, right?  What are we protesting today?

Love and energy justice for all.  Environmental racism and energy racism.  I kid you not — there’s a whole letter with this kind of stuff in it.

The funny part is who they are protesting.  Not the Republican-led General Assembly.  No, their target is the man whom they thought they bought and prefer would stay bought: Governor Terry McAuliffe.

How much, you ask?  Dominon Power — the erstwhile villain in this whole kerfluffle — donated $75,000 to McAuliffe’s campaign in 2013.  The Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial board clears up any misconceptions here as to who is doing the buying and selling:

That’s a pittance compared with the $1.7 million he got from the League of Conservation Voters, the $1.6 million he got from NextGen Climate Action (a group set up by reformed fossil-fuel investor Tom Steyer of New York) and the $468,000 he got from the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club.

For those counting at home?  $3.4 million dollars, folks — a heck of a lot of cheese in comparison to little ol’ Dominion Power.

The editorial gets better:

What would a Virginia powered only by solar and offshore wind actually look like? Might it look, say, like Germany? Three years ago Der Spiegel reported on “Germany’s Energy Povety: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good.” That nation’s “agressive and reckless expansion of wind and solar power,” the magazine said, “has come with a hefty price tag for consumers, and the costs often fall disproportionately on the poor.” If Virginia’s poor one day can’t afford to pay their electric bills because of environmentalists’ pressure, does that represent “justice”?

Alternatives to natural energy are pretty much non-starters on a mass scale.  Solar power?  Expensive and costly, not to mention the tremendous cost to the environment to mine the rare earths needed to make them.  Wind?  Localities are already passing height restriction ordinances to impede their installation.  Nuclear energy?  Not even mentioned… perhaps because of the inherent racism (sic) of the atom?

The target — of course — is the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.  Billed as a clean and affordable energy solution, it will pipe natural gas from Appalachia directly to the Port of Virginia — our economic lifeline and a major source of economic growth.  That’s 5 million homes and anywhere from 70 to 300 times less land area used than the alternatives proposed by the opposition.

Plus, the forecast in Richmond for Saturday?  99 degrees Fahrenheit.

Best to stay inside where there’s air conditioning.  Powered by… you know… electricity.