Good morning, RVA! It's 25 °F, and, highs today will hit the upper 50s. I think that’s a wonderful excuse to get outside and move your body through space in whatever way makes you feel good. You’ve got three more days of warmish weather before cold temperatures return—take advantage of them!
Water cooler
The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Mel Leonor reports that, unless something dramatic happens in the next couple of days, the General Assembly will ban mask mandates in schools. Yesterday, the Democratic-controlled Senate approved legislation that would “prevent local school boards from levying mask mandates and from punishing students whose parents opt to send their child to school without a mask.” Legislation that bans mask mandates is a whole different ball of wax than an overreaching, hastily issued Executive Order, and I don’t know that local school boards—Richmond and Henrico’s included—would have much leeway to do anything about it. Katelyn Jetelina said it early this week: Population-level solutions are so much more effective at keeping people safe and preventing the spread of disease than individual-level ones, and the GA’s Democrats are making an incredibly short-sighted decision to forever strip a useful public-health tool from Virginia’s tool box. This isn’t just about COVID, either! The next time—and there will be a next time—we encounter a dangerous airborne illness we will be without an important population-level mitigation measure unless the General Assembly passes a law. So dumb.
The Mayor delivered his 2022 State of the City Address last night, and I thought it was pretty good! You can read the speech here, or watch it on the City’s Facebook page or YouTube channel. I think we already knew most of the Mayor’s announcements, given that the more exciting ones come from ARPA funding and we’ve already seen a bunch of presentations on how the City plans to allocate that huge bucket of cash. I hadn’t heard about the $500,000 for a gun buyback program which seems pretty cool, though. Chris Suarez at the RTD has a short summary of the speech which includes pictures of the mayor’s podium surrounded by a dozen ferns. If anyone at the City is looking to re-home some of those plants, please let me know, OK?
VPM’s Patrick Larsen reports that the Virginia Senate voted to block Governor Youngkin’s nomination of Andrew Wheeler for the State’s Secretary of Natural and Historic Resources. Larsen helpfully reminds us that, “Before heading up the EPA, Wheeler worked as a coal lobbyist after serving as a staffer to James Inhofe - the Oklahoma Senator who famously threw a snowball on the floor of the U.S. Senate in an effort to prove global warming was a hoax.” The Senate will vote once more today to, fingers crossed, fully and finally block Wheeler’s nomination.
Yesterday, I wondered aloud about the reason for draining the canal (as seen in this picture via /r/rva). The best municipal social media account in the region (maybe the state?), @rvah2o, followed up with me and, super relevant to my interests, the City has “emptied Kanawha Canal so we can survey, assess, Closed-Circuit TV, and clean [Combined Sewer System] outfall #34.” This has been your weekly sewer update. Thank you for tuning in.
The real meat of the City’s redistricting process kicks of tonight at 6:00 PM with a “Public Drawing of Richmond Voter District Map Options” meeting. Maps are thrilling, but redistricting is all about minutia—will this meeting turn out boring or fascinating? Time will tell! It’s my night to cook dinner, so I may just put this on in the background while throwing together this cornbread tamale pie recipe from the New York Times (which, by the way, tastes just as good using Impossible Burger’s beef substitute).
Did you know that any RPS student or staff (and up to three guests) can visit the Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia for free during the month of February? More details in RPS Superintendent Kamras’s email from last night, including a reminder that they have some RPS + Black History Month gear over in the RPS Bonfire store.
My family’s current Shared Show™, the one we watch together after dinner, is Cobra Kai (we’re currently working our way through the fourth season, so no spoilers!). I find it delightfully charming and self-aware, unlike a lot of other shows about teenage karate gangs. So, as you can imagine, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden’s bonsai exhibit, which runs through February 25th, feels pretty timely. Did you know there are different words for trees collected from the wild (yamadori) and trees collected from urban settings (urbandori)? I feel like I could get way into the bonsaiverse give the opportunity!
This morning's longread
What Germany’s Effort to Leave Coal Behind Can Teach the U.S.
Despite the title, I’m not sure what the U.S. can practically implement from Germany’s plan to ditch coal—at least not while King of America Joe Manchin has other plans. Still, though, this is an interesting climate read from the other side of the world.
But there’s one crucial difference between the two places. As part of its Energiewende, or energy pivot, Germany has embarked on a formal effort to exit coal, with a national commission and subsequent legislation setting specific closure deadlines for mines and plants, and distributing billions of euros in compensation to coal companies, workers, and the regions themselves. In the U.S., the coal exit has been haphazard. Federal attempts to move beyond coal went dormant under President Donald Trump, and under President Joe Biden they are now running up against the opposition of Senator Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who holds both the crucial fiftieth vote in the Senate and a stake in a family coal business that earned him nearly five hundred thousand dollars in 2020.
If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
