Good morning, RVA! It's 52 °F and cloudy, and that’s about what you get today. You can expect highs to creep up a bit (into the upper 50s) and maybe a little sunshine this morning, but warmish and cloudyish seems to be the situation for the next few days. With any luck, though, a (fingers crossed) lack of actual rain will still give things a chance to dry out. How do people in the Pacific Northwest live like this?? Are they just covered in mold constantly?
Water cooler
Today the City will host two, fun public meetings. First, the second of three meetings about Those Three Zoning Changes takes place virtually tonight at 6:00 PM. If you want to do some homework before attending, Jonathan Spiers’s reporting in Richmond BizSense from yesterday remains the best I’ve read on the proposed changes. If you feel like you already know enough, you can skip the meeting entirely and give a public comment by filling out this quick, one-minute form. Second, and I really dropped the ball on this one, but Richmond Connects, the process to update the City’s multimodal transportation plan, will host two telephone town halls (the first of which was yesterday, sorry). Worse than that, registration for today’s 12:00 PM event is already closed. But! There is an option to register for “ALL City of Richmond Telephone Town Hall Meetings”? Maybe selecting that option will get you added to today’s meeting, too? Anyway, I mostly mention this to put Richmond Connects back on your radar as we move into 2023 and further into their community engagement process.
Bleh. The Virginia Mercury’s Charlie Paullin reports that the State Air Pollution Control Board “officially began the process of withdrawing Virginia from a regional carbon market.” Questions abound about the legality of Board’s vote, but, regardless of the legal outcomes, we should fully expect the State’s Republican leadership to continue the strategic dismantling of legislation and policies that reduce the impact of climate change on Virginians. It’s going to take a decade to make back the progress lost over the course of this administration—on climate and on everything else.
In this morning’s Axios Richmond email, you can read “Youngkin’s post-midterm vibe check,” which lines up pretty well with my current thinking on our Governor’s presidential potential. I just don’t think there’s any actual space (or voters) for a guy whose policies are deeply Trumpian but doesn’t vomit them out with a rotten, childish attitude. Florida’s DeSantis offers both at the same time, and I think he’d easily crush Virginia’s bevested governor in a primary. I have, of course, been wrong about basically everything since 2016, so take those last few sentences with a grain of salt.
Peggy Singlemann, formerly Maymont’s gardening wizard, has a column in VPM packed full with winter gardening advice. Yes, reader! There are still things to do in your garden in December! Here’s one piece of advice I will definitely follow: “After tending to the tools, I take time to review the garden and landscape photos I have taken over the past few months to assess the past growing season, and mentally establish a starting point for next year.” I’m deeply jealous of Singlemann’s slow and steady year-round pace—which is what appeals to me most about gardening—and look forward to doing some serious plant-planning over holiday break.
This picture via /r/rva has it all: The train bridge, the river, a gentle and cozy mist. We live in a beautiful place.
This morning's longread
‘It was like an apocalyptic movie’: 20 climate photographs that changed the world
You’ll definitely recognize some of these photos—bros golfing in the midst of a wildfire is an image I’ll never forget—and be newly shocked by others. Take a minute and scroll through these images of just some of the impacts of climate change, because staying newly-shocked is important.
This startling image of husky dogs pulling a sledge through melted ice in north-west Greenland was captured by Steffen Olsen, a scientist with the Danish Meteorological Institute. Olsen and a team of local hunters were collaborating on a project to monitor climate change, ocean conditions and the sea ice in the Inglefield ford. He snapped the photo on his phone during an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve the team's scientific instruments before the ice melted. "We had not previously experienced water on the ice this early in the summer," he recalls. "The local team working with me said this was beyond anything they had experienced before.'
If you’d like to suggest a longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
Picture of the Day
I got these really high-quality clothespins for my birthday, and they are my new favorite thing.
