Good morning, RVA! It's 41 °F, and today you can expect bright, crisp weather with highs in the 50s. Do keep an eye out for some gusty wind, though, if you’ve got wind-related activities planned for today—like kite flying or road biking or line-drying laundry. Temperatures will drop below freezing tonight, so say goodbye to a lot of outside plants that have done a good job hanging on through this extended temperate season.
Water cooler
A thousand days ago, right before the Thanksgiving holiday break, I wrote about how the City would soon release a draft of the Richmond Connects Action Plan. Richmond Connects is the first attempt in a long while to update the City’s strategic transportation plan. This Action Plan is a part of that larger effort and consists of a long, well-defined list of projects that will equitably move our City’s transportation infrastructure forward. I’m pretty excited about it! You can flip through all 121 pages of the plan here and leave smart and insightful comments as you go. The list of high priority projects (“the projects most critical to improving transportation equity in Richmond”) begins on page 14. Make sure you also look through the “shorter-term projects” listed in green to see what quick-and-easy projects the City’s could implement—things like, gasp, a car-free Carytown. You have until next Tuesday, December 5th, to leave any and all comments, so get to reading!
In his column this week, Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams writes about Hanover County Public Schools’ recent banning of 75 books. I loved this bit: “[Students] may be quietly terrified about the condition of the world they are about to inherit and rightly indignant about the toxic greed that jeopardizes their birthright of a sustainable planet. A book may inspire them to confront the existential threat of environmental degradation. Or to break the cycles of racism, sexism and militarism. Perhaps this is what some politicians fear most of all.”
Richmond BizSense’s Mike Platania reports that Dominion has taken its Downtown properties off the market as part of an “ongoing strategic review.” You may remember the bulk of these properties as the former office building that got blown up years ago and the recently-canned fancy parking lot for electric cars. I hope this doesn’t mean we have to live through a bunch more years with an entire city block fenced off and vacant.
The Richmond Police Department announced that they will give local retail shops a grace period to implement the new regulations banning “skill games”—you know, the ones that function a whole lot like slot machines that you sometimes see in convenience stores. I’m sure everyone has some good, hot takes on why we’re banning this kind of gambling but not the Casino 2.0 kind of gambling, but I mostly wanted to point out the penalties for not complying with the new laws: “Merely playing a skill game could result in a fine up to $500 (Class 3 Misdemeanor). Employees aiding in the operation of skill games could result in jail time for up to 12 months (Class 1 Misdemeanor). Managers or owners who conduct illegal gambling operations can face up to 5 years in jail (Class 6 Felony).” Not worth messing around with! The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Samuel B. Parker has more details.
The National Climate Assessment is a congressionally-mandated climate report that comes out every five years and, based on new science and data collected in the intervening years, updates us on how climate change impacts—and will impact—our communities. The report, now on its fifth iteration, is surprisingly readable and conveniently broken up into chapters focused on sectors like agriculture and built environment as well as regions like the Northeast or the Southwest. Specifically, readers of this email should check out the Transportation chapter and the Southeast chapter. The latter, which includes the Richmond region and beyond, has a local tie, too: The lead author is Dr. Climate Scientist Jeremy Hoffman, who you definitely know through his important work on redlining and the urban heat island effect. This may not be the most positive reading you tackle this week, and you should definitely prepare yourself to encounter a bunch of depressing sentences like this one: “Unconstrained exurban and suburban sprawl will further expose human development to weather- and climate-related risks such as wildfire, hurricanes, floods, intensifying thunderstorms, and tornadoes.” However! It’s important reading and well worth your time. P.S. Make sure you pair this with today’s longread to balance out your feelings of hopeless despair.
This morning's longread
I’m a Climate Scientist. I’m Not Screaming Into the Void Anymore.
One of the lead authors for the above mentioned National Climate Assessment is, turns out, not entirely pessimistic about the survival of the human race! I mean, I wouldn’t say she’s optimistic, but she definitely sees a path forward for humanity that does not include charring our planet down to an uninhabitable, smoking hunk of rock.
And not everyone is on board yet. In particular, the fossil fuel industry is still ignoring the science. Oil, gas and coal companies have already made plans for infrastructure that, if used as intended, would cause the world to blow past the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees Celsius in the next few decades. To prevent this, we need to reach those who haven’t yet been moved by our warnings. I’m not talking about the fossil fuel industry here; nor do I particularly care about winning over the small but noisy group of committed climate deniers. But I believe we can reach the many people whose eyes glaze over when they hear yet another dire warning or see another report like the one we just published. The reason is that now, we have a better story to tell. The evidence is clear: Responding to climate change will not only create a better world for our children and grandchildren, but it will also make the world better for us right now.
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Picture of the Day
A delicious crime scene.
