Climate Action Conference Recap

Today's 2007 Virginia Climate Action Conference was a big success. I think we had as many as 175 people at the event at some point or another, and all corners of the state were represented. Participants appeared to come away feeling renewed and energized in their desire to take action on the climate change issue, which was precisely our hope; one specific campaign that grabbed a lot of people's attention is the recently-launched effort to block a new 585 megawatt coal-fired power plant in Wise, Virginia. I could give a long litany of reasons why this power plant is a bad, bad idea (for one thing, that one plant alone would far more than negate [from a carbon emissions standpoint] all of the tree-planting, CFL-buying, building-retrofitting, hybrid-vehicle-purchasing, etc., that the City of Charlottesville intends to do in the next decade or two), but I'd just be duplicating what you can already read here.

One of the many cool people I got to meet today is Miles Grant, whose eco-themed blog ("The Green Miles") I've long admired. Miles "live-blogged" the conference at Raising Kaine -- see here.

I was pleased and proud that Charlottesville was able to play host to this first-of-its-kind (in Virginia) gathering. Several speakers noted and commended Charlottesville's own efforts to address climate change locally, which was gratifying to hear, but we clearly all have a long way to go if we're going to make much of an impact on the overall problem of global warming and climate change.

10/28/07 UPDATE: Seth Rosen has a good write-up on the conference in today's Daily Progress.