U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith sent this web site a separate e-letter, in addition to the regular E-Newsletter. I received the e-letter on Friday and pasted it into Blogspot for posting today. Then I blinked out of cyberspace about the time the sun went down on Friday night. I thought the letter needed an editorial comment, and spent an hour or so writing one. Google then chose to break the connection and lose the whole comment. Oh, no worries, I'd copied it to the "clipboard" feature in Windows. Well, Google had managed to lose the "clipboard" too! What fun! Yes, this is a post some corporate types aren't going to like, and one thing the U.S. Congress needs to do is order those corporations to deal with it. Nobody elected any of these corporations to any position in any government. They are private corporations that can only be allowed to exist because, and while, they serve private individuals.
Now, the comment...
What a well written letter that one (below, on this web site) is! You can tell that it was written to reply, with minimal variations, to comments on one of Congressman Griffith's recent E-Newsletters from any and all sides. I like and respect that. If he ever gave up politics Morgan Griffith would probably do very well as a writer. The letter states the Republican Party's general position on energy issues, as it relates to Virginia, very well.
Unfortunately the Republican Party's position doesn't go far enough for Virginia.
What prompted me to e-mail a reply to the E-Newsletter, rather than just posting a comment here as usual, was the offhand, casual, complacent mention of a nuclear reactor back on the schedule for construction here in the Ninth District.
Alarmism is deplorable, but there are things it's proper to sound the alarm about. Nuclear reactors in any part of the Appalachian Mountain region are among those things.
For those who don't know, the Appalachian Mountain region consists mostly of karst land--limestone slowly eroding into underground watercourses, many of which watercourses have, due to long-ago geological events, formed mountain springs, some of which are energetic enough to be what are called artesian wells. Artesian wells are mysterious, magical, even mystical things. Mystical types always feel a "spiritual" awe in places that have artesian wells. Whatever spirits may or may not be involved, there is something mysterious, in the sense of not fully understandable or controllable, about water that has not flowed downhill away from mountains, but continually springs forth near the tops of the mountains. When humans meddle with artesian wells, the consequences are unpredictable and have often involved loss of human lives, not to mention property.
The mountains are somewhat unpredictable and dangerous all by themselves. Though the Appalachian Mountains have been relatively stable compared to some other mountain ranges, they were formed by seismic activity and they have had occasional earthquakes, even in the present century. Places that have had earthquakes do not need nuclear reactors.
The mountains are higher and the mineral resources more tempting in Pennsylvania, so we in Virginia have generally enjoyed the privilege of sitting back and watching how proposed schemes to exploit natural resources work for Pennsylvania before rejecting them for us. Mining, drilling, and hydraulic fracturing have done lots of unpleasant things in Pennsylvania. Among other things they still have an unquenchable underground fire making hundreds of acres of land unusable for any purpose. They've struck poison gas, too, and had mountaintops cave in, houses crumble, people (not only coal miners, either) and animals killed by geological events. Pennsylvania was, of course, the site of the Three Mile Island disaster.
We don't need any of those things in Virginia. However greedily the rest of the world may be reaching toward our resources, they don't need to be allowed to cause any of those effects either. The Ninth District of Virginia is not only pretty, although pretty it certainly is and during the last week Virginia took in a nice cash infusion at the peak of the prettiness. The Ninth District is also mysterious and awesome and not to be meddled with. There must be better ways to meet "energy needs."
Fortunately there are several. Electric power companies tend to think in terms of an outdated centralized model in which they own all the "power plants," often places where fossil fuels were burned and pollution was high, that deliver all the electrical current through a big unsustainable "grid" that frequently breaks down and leaves people without the use of their plug-in devices for weeks. Usually that happens in winter and people lose their electric heat during snowstorms. Sometimes it happens in warm weather and people become ill from eating food that was stored in electric refrigerators or freezers. The grid model is ripe for replacement. People don't like paying monthly bills, especially in months when they didn't get what they're paying for.
Virginia doesn't get as much sunshine as Arizona, where people who've installed solar collectors have been selling electricity to the companies for years...but we get enough sunshine that Virginia home and land owners should be selling electricity to the companies. Eleven years ago the company wanted to build a "new" coal-burning plant. This web site supported that. Delegate Kilgore supported that. The company got that plant, built it, used it, and already they're saying they need to raise rates to invest in building more sources of energy. Very well. Let them invest in the communities they serve. I have several outbuildings on the sunny side of a hill. Let them put solar collectors on the roofs of those buildings. I think that will take care of my electricity requirements and give me a little monthly income from the surplus, and if the solar collectors work on the outbuildings, we can talk about putting more of them on the house.
That's not the only way the company could profitably invest in their own community and be able to sell energy to other places. We have a landfill in my county. It is filling up. We do not really need another landfill. At a well filtered central location, such as that "new" coal-burning plant, the company could be disposing of biomass. Whether it's dead leaves or food scraps or old newspapers or bodywastes, modern toilets quickly convert even the nastiest by-products of life into something the company could be burning for energy. The rest of the Commonwealth, as well as people in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana, want the Ninth District to stop paying sewer bills and start collecting payment for biomass. We get our water from our mountain springs, and the rest of the Southern States drink what runs off our land, and they need us to stop putting our personal "honey" in it.
Then I'd like to see what Elon Musk could do with the concept of pedal-powered generators. How many people in the Ninth District look as if we could use a good gym routine? How many of us either don't go to gyms, or pay for memberships and then don't go, because it's embarrassing to pay money to beat the air uselessly? Walking treadmills and pumping iron could be generating electricity. Going to the gym could become a way to show public spirit. That would do a lot to improve the aesthetics of the Ninth District, too, and the use of drugs that become addictive and harmful (exercise being the best painkiller), and other burdens on the medical care system.
There are three largely untapped energy sources that Virginia needs to be tapping.
Then let's talk about reducing consumption. I live in a house that has twenty-eight electric circuits. Since the 2011 cyclone, three of those circuits have been usable--in the bathroom, in two seldom used bedrooms, and in my office room. At first I missed the electric stove and refrigerator. Now I don't. In fact, I realized, the toilet and water heater get enough heat from being in front of a west-facing window, most of the year, to serve two frugal users well. One circuit is enough to heat and light one room and run an optional plug-in device--computer, small-battery charger, whatever--of the occupant's choice, and that's all a reasonable person really needs.
Republicans are divided on this idea of reducing consumption. The urban type, which are unfortunately the type who run for Congress, have been encouraged to hold stereotypes about the less urban type. The stereotyping and ridicule work both ways, of course. Let's just say that American small farmers, especially the Amish and the Appalachian region's hill farmers, have forgotten more about the True Green way of life than Chuck Schumer or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez ever learned. Unfortunately too many of them have literally forgotten.
There are people who live on the land in a frugal Green way because they hold some sort of, shall we say, unpopular beliefs. Amish, Mennonite, vegan, McCarthy-era bomb-shelterer, would-be rebel against everything who will cave and move back to town the first time head lice move into his dreadlocks, and other people whose beliefs urban Republicans will never understand, do exist. But actually, in Virginia's Ninth District, "back to the land" is a rooted, traditional lifestyle that appeals to people of "conservative" temperament, too. If they have joined the Republican Party, other Republicans who don't know them well probably don't see a difference between them and the urban Republicans.
These are the type of people who appreciate Congressman Griffith most and whom he represents best, these frugal Green people, fiscally conservative because they believe thrift is a virtue, socially moderate, conservative by temperament and upbringing. People of "conservative" temperament choose their universities and/or branches of military service based on what their same-sex parents did, accepted Rick Boucher (D-VA-9) because he was an incumbent, and they may really like Morgan Griffith because of his politics or may think they don't care much about politics and vote for Congressman Griffith because by now he's an incumbent. Some of that type of people inherited urban-conformist-consumer lifestyles but some were blessed with better opportunities in life; therefore they farm, or live on farms, whether or not their small farms make a profit. Many have worked in cities and come back to the Ninth District as retirees, or semi-retirees. They're not fanatics, and many of them are not even poor. They choose a frugal Green lifestyle because it's a good lifestyle; as an old book my parents used to own put it, Life at Its Best.
That's the kind of frugal Green lifestyle I would like to see Republicans embrace and celebrate. For the first year or so people may sing "It's not easy being Green," but after an adjustment period they sing "I wouldn't have it any other way." (Music link here.) The changes they need to make are modest, and actually save money. Three simple changes--of attitude, not policy--would reduce "energy needs" significantly. Republicans will still be Republicans if they let themselves consider that:
(1) Walking is the way healthy people get around. Wheeled transportation is for long-distance hauls and for people with disabilities. Those who thank people for not smoking should also thank them for not driving.
(2) Getting things done, then refreshing their minds by actually playing a game (not the electronic kind) or singing or reading a good book, are the things healthy people do for fun. Television seems noisy and boring to people who have something going on in their minds, though it's a comfort for very sick patients in hospitals.
(3) Minimizing monthly bills is a sign of intelligence. Making lots of payments is a sign of incompetence. The person with the lowest use of kilowatts in the neighborhood, for any month when the person was living at home the whole time, deserves some sort of award (with a cash payment), because this person has shown not only intelligence but also public spirit.
There are other changes people can make and still be temperamentally conservative Republicans (and White, and American, and Baptist). They can minimize grocery bills, and the energy costs of transporting food to big-chain stores, by eating what grows on their own unpoisoned land, the way their grandparents did, planting those "victory gardens" in suburban yards. They can be as clean as they want to be and still have water bills low enough to make the city water service wonder whether they're still living at home, by being vigilant about leaks and drips. Several things our grandparents did, and urged us to do--little things like turning off the light on leaving a room, hanging tinsel or paper chains instead of lights for holiday decorations, putting plastic over windows in winter if you don't have storm windows to reduce heating cost--don't actually save as much money as our grandparents hoped they would, but every little bit helps.
Then, a third point of concern is raised by Congressman Griffith's letter's nonchalant acceptance of the idea of a growing global population demanding more energy at the expense of places like the Ninth District, which are still relatively sparsely populated and therefore relatively pleasant places to live. We all need to accept that human overpopulation exists, even if we live in places like Sweden or the Dakotas where population is decreasing. The fact that few people want to live in some places does not change the fact that people are badly overcrowded in other places. All places on this unsafe planet are subject to natural disasters; in order to be considered safe places to bring up children, places need to be sparsely populated enough that people can clear out of them in an hour or two, /All buildings are subject to fire; in order to be considered livable, buildings need to be close enough to the ground that people can safely leave by windows. And that's not the way the places where young people look for employment are.
People who resist awareness of overpopulation tend to belong to my generation. They don't like being called the older generation, but let's face it, the generation before ours is almost gone. Baby-boomers don't like being "older" because old age brings an increased risk of long-term or permanent disabilities, which might cause us to have to depend on others for help. Help from tax-funded institution seems less personal and less embarrassing to some people. Baby-boomers grew up hearing that impersonal, professional geriatric care, as well as comfortable retirement, were available to all older people thanks to the Social Security system. Relatively few of us had parents who admitted that the Social Security system was an unsustainable pyramid scheme made possible for a few years by the plagues that had gone before it. In the 1950s very few old people had survived influenza, diphtheria, and tuberculosis, and young people, miraculously free from those diseases, were working to allow those survivors to grow old in comfort. So some of us thought, "We can keep that rolling if we can only keep the population growing," and that took care of our parents. But the population can't keep growing; now we have plenty of young people, but not enough jobs that pay them enough that they can pay into Social Security.
We may want to believe that that's because our own younger generation are unfit or unwilling to work, and the problem can be solved by allowing young hardworking people from poorer countries to immigrate. This is unfortunately not true. We've technologically advanced ourselves and our children out of jobs. The factories went overseas in the 1980s, the clerical jobs were computerized in the 1990s, the push to replace cashiers and waiters with robots started early in this century, and now efforts are being made to replace schoolteachers with computers too. Entry-level jobs are increasingly limited to those in which a select few young people are being trained for promotions--not that most of them will get those promotions. Corporate careers with retirement pensions are not available to those of us who've not already been pensioned off. Nor will they be available to our children or grandchildren. There are very few full-time jobs available for anyone without special training, and the competition for those specialized jobs is vicious.
We need to accept that we've reached a dead end--we baby-boomers. Social Security is not going to fund our retirement. If you thought it was, too bad for you; I always knew we were paying to support our parents and would not be able to collect the money for ourselves. We need to commend ourselves for having supported our parents, the first mature decision we made as a generation and probably the best thing history will say we ever did, and focus on trying to save at least the small part of Social Security that pays for disability pensions. We need to accept that most of us are not going to be able to retire, but at least, if we keep working as much as we can and accepting regular daily activity as part of our personal health care plans, we may be able to salvage disability pensions and medical care plans for those whose survival really depends on such.
We need to reverse population growth. Nature has ways of doing that, when overpopulated animals lack the ability to make reasoned decisions about it. By far the most comfortable way is to think rationally about the matter, then lose our aversion to any non-reproductive lifestyle choices the young feel able to make, and make sterilization a condition for immigration, work permits, or even student visas. But of course we as a species can choose plagues, wars, and individual violent insanity, instead. We just need to be realistic about the fact that those are our options.
Some parts of the Ninth District have in fact lost population, largely because of economic pressure on people who would prefer to move back here and live frugal Green lives. We need to welcome those people back and encourage them to live frugal Green lives, as distinct from "Green New Deal" lives.
All Americans, especially all Republicans, have heard some form of the idea that everything needs to start out big and keep growing bigger. When you live in an orchard you see that this is not the case. A plant, bush, or tree grows to a certain point, produces its fruit or seeds, and dies. Some plants live for one year and have to be re-planted from new seed every year. When the same plant, usually a tree, keeps on living and producing fruit for several years, you don't want it just to keep growing and growing. If you do that, it will stop producing fruit and die. The old growth on that tree is dead wood that breeds parasites and diseases. You want to keep pruning away the dead wood so that new growth keeps the tree alive and keeps producing fruit. There are different rhythms for different trees, some apple trees can stand years of neglect if conditions are right, but there's always a balance between growing and pruning.
Republicans should win big in this election, because we have too many Democrats in office and they are making a horrible mess. In Gate City I had to go online to look up who was running against Congressman Griffith; people here aren't taking that person seriously. This being the case, it does behoove Republicans to start thinking seriously about both the realities and the perceptions of climate change and global "energy needs." The realities and the perceptions are two different things, but the party that wins this election needs to address these concerns. We can begin with the indisputable fact that reducing consumption of electricity, gasoline, and natural gas is a way to address both climate change and "energy needs." Where climates are verifiably changing is in the localities where people are consuming most energy, so there we are.
The unsound, in fact insane, idea of putting a nuclear reactor in any part of the Ninth District could only have come from people Back East who regard the Point of Virginia as a wilderness full of welfare cheats. We produce food, and have some small artisanal industry, but we sell most of those products among ourselves or to our visitors; people in the rest of the state do not see trucks hauling in Scott County tomatoes or Russell County blueberries. What do we export back to the rest of Virginia? Coal, but there's not much of that left. Tobacco, but there's not much demand for that left. So they sneer, and I've spent enough time in the Hump to hear plenty of it, that all we produce is welfare-cheating, drug-addicted kids, probably all the illegitimate offspring of unacknowledged unnatural acts among cousins if the truth were known, and so on and so forth. We could indeed turn this around. We have more open space for more sunshine, and less pollution so that we actually get more sunshine when it's not raining, than the eastern part of Virginia does. We could be selling them electricity, and still say no to the stupid, unsustainable proposals for fracking, or strip mining, or nuclear reactors.
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