Kaine's Power Plant Dilemma

For some months, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine has carefully stayed out of the controversy surrounding Dominion Power Co.’s proposed coal-fired plant in Wise County.

No more. The governor is knee-deep in the muck – firing off an opaquely worded letter to the state Air Pollution Control Board that nudges the panel to give the plant its stamp of approval.

Kaine shrewdly avoids issuing a direct executive command, but the implications of his letter are clear. The five-member citizen panel had better not stand in Dominion’s way.

“I am writing you to provide you with clear direction on my expectations for the process to be utilized in issuing permits,” Kaine writes. “My intent (is) ... to assure consistency, certainty and predictability in the process of issuing decisions.”

Predictability and certainty, of course, are of the utmost importance to Dominion, which is itching to start honest-to-God construction on the Wise County site. Until the company has air permits in hand, it is limited to doing site-preparation work. This must be quite frustrating.

With every day’s delay, construction costs are climbing, as is the price of Virginia coal. Meanwhile, the very real risk exists that the next inhabitant of the White House won’t share the present occupant’s open disdain for the environment.

The nation’s appetite for new coal-burning plants employing utterly conventional technology might change come January. In fact, climate change legislation might even make it out of the starting blocks.
On environmental matters, Kaine has attempted to have it both ways. On the one hand, he’s an environmental crusader with an ambitious goal – cutting Virginia’s greenhouse-gas emissions by 30 percent by 2025.

“We can’t wait any longer,” Kaine, a Democrat, told a Virginian-Pilot reporter at the time he announced the plan.

Kaine also embraced the climate change legislation sponsored by Sens. John Warner, R-Va., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. The failed bill would have created a cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide. Coal-burning power plants are one of the largest sources of carbon dioxide, which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled may be regulated as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

Kaine’s enthusiastic embrace of climate change initiatives conflicts with his stance on the Dominion plant. Approving a new source of greenhouse gas emissions seems counterproductive for a state seeking to lower its levels.

In the face of this conflict, the governor has shrugged and passed the buck. It was the legislature that declared a coalfield power plant to be a public good, he told this newspaper’s editorial board in February. And, it is the regulatory bodies – like the Air Pollution Control Board – which will decide the permit matters.

“I’m not the decision maker,” he said at that earlier meeting.

Fast forward four months. Kaine is now attempting, albeit subtly, to pressure the Air Pollution Control Board to get on with the business of issuing the permits. The board meets June 24 and June 25 in Wise.

Kaine drafted the letter to the board June 10. A day later, his communications director, Gordon Hickey, denied that such a letter existed. On Friday, Hickey said he didn’t learn of the letter until after he spoke with this newspaper. We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, but we note that Hickey could have picked up the phone and corrected his misstatement once he learned of the letter’s existence. He took no action and should know better: Hickey just joined Kaine’s staff after serving as political editor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

It seems likely that Kaine wanted to influence the Air Pollution Control Board in private while preserving his public persona as an environmental crusader. He cannot have it both ways without being judged guilty of blatant hypocrisy.