A farm in Amelia County. (Sarah Vogelsong / Virginia Mercury)
More than $125 million. That’s the preliminary estimate of damage to farmers in Southwest Virginia after Hurricane Helene brought damaging winds, heavy rain and flooding to the region. We were lucky the storm didn’t impact more of our state, but for those farmers who are today facing crop losses, property and equipment damage, and other recovery expenses as a result of Helene’s wrath, the impacts are significant and will have lasting implications — for their farms, their families’ livelihoods, and the region’s economy.
Federal government sends Virginia $10 million for Route 58 repair after Hurricane Helene washout
And it’s not just this year. Weather records show that since 1980, Virginia has been hit with more than 100 extreme weather events that cost our state over $1 billion. In that time period, the records show that the annual average of billion-dollar weather events in Virginia has tripled just in the last five years. Floods, freezes, and — for the last two years, in particular — extreme drought have all wreaked havoc on our agriculture industry.
This trend is no surprise to Virginia’s farmers. We live by the weather, and science doesn’t care what you believe. Our weather is, in fact, getting warmer and weirder every year. While we’ve always understood that our success at making a living by farming is dependent on favorable weather, we didn’t start out farming knowing how rapidly the climate would change and how devastating those impacts would be.
We’ve already seen how increases in average annual temperatures are impacting planting and growing seasons. Research shows that corn silks and pollen die when temperatures exceed the mid 90’s. Our farm in the Shenandoah Valley is now in USDA plant zone 7; in 1990 we were in zone 6. Our Southwest Virginia farmers suffered catastrophic flooding while farmers in the Shenandoah Valley experienced extreme drought – for two years in a row.
While the extreme weather trends have intensified at alarming rates in recent years, we have long known the identity of the primary culprit that is accelerating the pace of climate change: greenhouse gas emissions from our electricity and transportation sectors.
We had a sound tool in place to more intentionally and meaningfully address power plant emissions, as designated by law. That tool was the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), which the administration of Gov. Glenn Youngkin single-handedly did away with earlier this year. Before he ended it, it was working. In the first two years of being in RGGI, Virginia’s power plant emissions fell 16.8% statewide. Today, less than a year after Youngkin removed us from RGGI, EPA data from Virginia’s electricity providers shows that emissions are up significantly.
Virginia benefitted from RGGI to the tune of more than $827.7 million during the years we participated, between 2021 and 2023. The proceeds from RGGI were divided between two statewide programs: a low-income energy efficiency program run by the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development and a flood resilience capacity building and project implementation program run by the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation. The emissions reductions from RGGI’s energy efficiency component were consistently progressing. And the flood mitigation measures implemented by the flood preparedness component were making headway at helping protect Virginia’s communities vulnerable to flooding. A total of 98 RGGI-funded resiliency projects had already been approved, but the status of many of those projects is now at risk because of the funding Youngkin pulled out from under Virginians when he pulled out of RGGI.
If you talk to a dozen farmers, you’ll probably get a dozen different perspectives on the topic of climate change. But like I stated earlier, science doesn’t care what you believe; the weather is getting warmer and weirder. Taking Virginia out of RGGI is taking Virginia backwards in our fight against climate change — a fight that needs to be accelerated, not hindered or delayed.
The effects of greenhouse gas emissions on our climate are cumulative. The longer we wait, the worse it gets. The harder it gets. The more expensive it gets. Virginia’s farming families cannot afford the cost of inaction. When we get Virginia back in RGGI, we’ll get Virginia moving in the right direction again.
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