At the same time that this local advocacy was heating up, environmental justice and the environment in general were getting a boost from state lawmakers hard at work in Richmond.
This past spring, they passed legislation that commits Virginia to joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and which puts Virginia’s energy generating plants on a steady carbon emission reduction diet.
In addition, the Virginia Council on Environmental Justice was codified into law. A governor-created Council already existed, but this new law will protect the Council from being vulnerable to the whims of whoever holds the state’s highest office in the future.
Also, lawmakers passed the Virginia Environmental Justice Act. As mentioned earlier, other states had passed EJ legislation previously, but sometimes saw little effect. Virginia’s new law laid out targeted details: it established an Interagency Working Group on EJ and a Commonwealth policy with regards to EJ. It also provided EJ definitions.
And these were put to the test just a couple of months later in the cases involving Charles City County.
Taylor Lilley is an environmental justice attorney with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, which provided support to C5 in this case.
With Virginia’s new Environmental Justice Act, she explained, “We had a definition for EJ, we had an idea of what the Commonwealth wanted when it came to EJ, and we had an opportunity to make it an integral part of the way the State Corporation Commission considered that pipeline.”
With that in mind, C5 and other opponents of the pipeline went before the State Corporation Commission, a permitting body, in May, and demonstrated all of the opportunities that the applicants had missed in soliciting EJ input.
That, along with the public’s growing inclination to shift away from fossil fuels, caused the first domino to fall early this summer. After investing heavily in the pipeline proposal, Dominion Energy and Duke Energy Corporation announced that they were canceling the project.
Since then, the State Corporation Commission has put a hold on additional aspects of the infrastructure project that would support the two gas-fired plants, citing concerns about financing and – here it is again – the failure of plant backers to consider EJ factors.
Following these hopeful developments, Lilley underscored the importance of the efforts of C5 folks and other grassroots volunteers, over months of hearings against powerful and moneyed interests, to tell their stories and have their voices heard.
“They’ve got endless juice and so much passion for their home and the place,” she said.
As a young attorney in the field of environmental law, Lilley was inspired by these local residents who refused to have their neighborhoods fouled and turned into sacrifice zones.
But it is precisely this growing activism on the front lines, by people who are refusing to be victimized any longer (the link to Black Lives Matter seems clear) that may be the key to the profound and necessary shift in America’s mindset concerning our responsibility for environmental health.
Taylor Lilley Environmental Attorney with
the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.