Kaine: State Needs New Ways To Combat Climate Change

Innovation is needed to combat climate change, according to Democratic U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.

Kaine was one of about two dozen senators who took part in an all-night session Monday into Tuesday to bring attention to issues coming from climate change.

The Environmental Protection Agency says the Earth’s temperature on average has gone up nearly 1.5 degrees in the past 100 years, and in the next century is expected to go up another 2 to 11.5 degrees. Greenhouse gases, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, are partly to blame for the warming, according to the EPA.

Global warming has been accompanied by climate/weather change, including more flooding, more droughts, more intense heat waves and rising sea levels.

“We will solve climate change through American innovation,” Kaine said in a Tuesday afternoon phone interview.

Kaine took to the Senate floor from 10 to 10:30 p.m. Monday. He said he talked about the effects climate change is having on Virginia.

The commonwealth’s dominant industry is agriculture and forestry, Kaine said, and they generate a combined $70 billion in economic activity each year.

“There’s no industry that’s affected more by climate variations than ag and forestry,” he said. “Our second-largest metropolitan area, Virginia Beach/Hampton Roads, is next to New Orleans as the most vulnerable community to sea level rise in the eastern United States. We’re seeing effects in Virginia.

“However, we also have positives in Virginia. We have great research institutions. We have the capacity for offshore wind [energy operations].”

When his wife, Anne Holton, was a child, no one swam in her local waterway, the James River, Kaine said. Now, 35 years later, people swim, kayak and fish in it, due to the Clean Water Act, he said.

“People said it would bankrupt America, it would hurt jobs, it would be a bad thing,” Kaine said. “Smart regulation can encourage American innovation. And, that’s what’s going to solve climate change.”

When he was campaigning for Senate two years ago, Kaine asked people if they thought human activities were having an adverse effect on the global climate.

“Seventy percent of Virginians believed that to be true,” he said. “Only a tiny minority in Virginia argue against the science.”

People are seeing a spike in flood insurance premiums as sea levels rise, putting more homes in the flood plain, Kaine said.

“We’re already debating here and spending money to deal with the consequences of climate [change],” he said. “Why don’t we put some processes in place to prevent more dramatic changes in climate? We have a lot of different opinions about what’s the right thing to do about it.”

Currently, 37 percent of power production in the U.S. comes from coal, Kaine said, and five counties in Virginia mine coal.

While people in the coal industry have said there’s a “regulatory war on coal,” innovation and the natural gas industry are posing major challenges to it, Kaine said. Many utility companies are switching to natural gas from coal.

“What that tells me is the only future for coal is a pro-innovation future,” Kaine said.

While there is nothing to replace the 37 percent share coal has in power production, “we ought to be making coal cleaner,” he said.

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