Good morning, RVA! It's 36 °F, and today looks beautiful. Expect highs near 60 and sunshine and people outside doing their thing. This great, unseasonable weather continue through Saturday, after which NBC12's Andrew Freiden says we could see some snow on Sunday.
Water cooler
Graham Moomaw at the Virginia Mercury has some more reporting on the demise of any and all future mask requirements in our public schools. There are some absolutely wild quotes from legislators in this piece, like:
- "We are telling parents what to do...and as a legislator, I just don't believe that I have the audacity to tell them what they can do and they cannot do." — Sen. Joe Morrissey, Democrat
- "The truth here is that the only mitigation that actually works is the vaccine." — Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant, Republican (not at all true, by the way)
- I don't have a doctorate in medicine...but I do have a doctorate in common sense." — Sen. Chap Petersen, Democrat (sponsor of this bill)
I have two, semi-related thoughts swimming around in my head. First, banning mask mandates in schools forever is so incredibly shortsighted. Democrats in the Senate who supported this should feel bad, not only because COVID-19 may mutate and change in a way that requires masking in schools to keep children safe, but also because none of them are magical futuretellers that can predict what diseases will spread across Virginia in the next five, 10, or 100 years. A more appropriate path, would have been to allow local school boards to follow public-health guidance and best practices. That's no longer an option, and it's shocking to see some Democrats end up on the anti-science side of the room.
Second, somehow this became yet another binary decision: All masks, all the time, forever until the heat death of the universe OR no masks, never, even if we should encounter a 100% fatal, 100% airborne supervirus. I've been thinking a lot lately about how some liberals need to stop making permanent adherence to COVID-19 mitigation measures a statement of identity—it only encourages these unproductive binary arguments. No one should want to wear masks forever, never eat in a restaurant again, or ban the NBA. We need science-based frameworks to know when to add mitigation layers to our lives, and when to get rid of them. When the spread of disease is low, live your life! When the spread of disease is high, wear a mask on the bus! The current level of discourse doesn't allow for this type of (incredibly simple) flexibility, even for those with a supposed doctorate in common sense.
I ended up attending the City's live map-drawing redistricting meeting last night while making dinner, and it was a pleasant mix of thrilling and boring. The man explaining the process was wonderfully charming—clearly an educator—and did a good job at working through why we redistrict, how we "heal" split precincts, and the goals of the map-drawing process. I had to dip out just as the map drawing started to heat up, with Councilmembers Lambert and Robinson suggesting tweaks to properly balance the population across their two districts. This, as you can imagine, is an inherently political (and emotional) process! Elected officials with strong ties to certain neighborhoods (aka potential voters) don't necessarily want to see those folks (aka potential votes) shifted outside of their districts. It's fun, or at least interesting, to hear elected officials try publicly to compromise with each other on small changes that could totally have big impacts on their next election. The City will host two more of these meetings—tonight and tomorrow afternoon—and I really do recommend popping in to at least get the flavor. The upfront, educational content will be the same across each meeting but they'll continue the map work from where they left off in the previous meetings.
As foretold, Chris Saurez at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that three Councilmembers have signed on to Councilmember Trammell's ordinance to allow a bunch of City employees (including cops) to unionize (ORD. 2021-345). That brings the vote tally officially to four. Seems like a mostly done deal, and Council could vote on this paper as soon as Monday, although the Organizational Development committee did recommend it for continuance until March, so, we'll see.
A while back I linked to this survey for folks to comment on the proposed redesign of the complex intersection at Semmes, Forest Hill, Dundee, and 34th. I'm rarely over that way and don't know the problem spots, but, luckily, it's Brantley Tyndall's job to know these sorts of things since he's the Director of Outreach at Bike Walk RVA. Here's how he sums things up: "However, the design has some problems: it doesn't continue the bike lane on eastbound Semmes Ave. between 34th St. and the intersection, and it does not remove a travel lane there. If eastbound traffic from Forest Hill Ave. stayed one lane through the intersection and opened back up to two lanes east of 34th St., the sprawling intersection at Dundee Ave. could be streamlined more safely, perhaps with the addition of a right-turn lane for drivers heading towards Dundee Ave. or continuing to Forest Hill Ave." If, like me, you're looking to make that intersection safer but don't have the right words, submit a commenting cribbing from the above quote! You've got until February 18th to do so.
City Council's Education and Human Services committee meets today at 2:00 PM and, theoretically, will consider the ordinance to give Richmond Public Schools the money they need to continue working on a replacement for George Wythe High School (ORD. 2021-308). Given this paper's history and lack of announcement from anyone in any direction, I don't have a lot of hope for anything other than a "recommendation to continue." It's been 94 days since this the mayor introduced this paper!
This morning's longread
So you want to use less concrete
I'm not sure this longread ever really gets around to addressing the titular question, but, dang, did I learn a ton of interesting stuff about concrete. Specifically, I think I can now remember that cement—where a majority of the green house gas emissions associated with concrete comes from— is an ingredient of concrete, something I screw up continually.
Another way of looking at it is to consider the total amount mass that gets input to civilization each year. Estimates here vary quite a bit, but it seems to be in the neighborhood of 100 billion tons [5]. So of the total volume of material that gets extracted and used each year (including all oil, all agriculture and tree harvesting, and all mining), around 30% of it by mass goes toward making concrete. The amount of concrete produced each year exceeds the weight of all the biomass we use annually, and all the fossil fuels we use annually.
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