Offshore drilling, green transportation, campaign 2016 and more were on our minds as the year turned. This week in CIB.

Coast Watch: Sea Change on Offshore Drilling

A sea change has taken place on offshore drilling views along the Mid-Atlantic. Five years ago, before the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, it was easier to find supporters along parts of that coast. Today, broad-based local opposition has hardened and is rising.

Take Virginia Beach as an example. The Virginia Beach City Council voted 8-3 in 2010 to support development of offshore drilling. Last month, it reversed course, rescinding that support at the urging of its own local business community.

The local governments along the South Carolina coast, including its cities of Charleston and Myrtle Beach, have joined in opposition to offshore drilling. Dozens of North Carolina coastal communities are defying our pro-drilling governor to oppose drilling. This rising tidal wave of opposition stretches from the Delmarva Peninsula to Savannah, GA.

Citizen conservation groups have been steadily vocal in organizing opposition. NCLCV has been among them, with a petition drive to remind the Obama Administration of the need to protect our coastal environment, resources, and economy by preventing offshore oil and gas drilling here.

The U.S. Bureau of Offshore Energy Management (BOEM) is expected to announce a decision on its draft five-year plan for the Mid-Atlantic by this spring. North Carolina conservationists will be watching for this key decision, and preparing to make coastal protection an election issue here during 2016.

Administrative Watch: DOT’s Proposed Biking Rules Missing a Gear

The NC Department of Transportation (DOT) is drawing mixed reviews from cycling advocates on its proposed new rules of the road for cycling and bike-auto interactions.

There’s applause for encouraging drivers to swing wide left to avoid passing cyclists too closely. On the other hand, there’s opposition to other proposals, including requiring cyclists to get local permits for group rides, ride no more than two abreast, and always stay in the right half of the travel lane.

The cycling advocacy group BikeWalkNC provides an analysis of the proposals, as well as links to the draft report and related documents here.

The report was prepared in response to legislative mandate and will be conveyed to the General Assembly for consideration of possible implementing legislation this year. An informal study group spent about five months reviewing the relevant issues for DOT. Cycling safety advocates criticized the formal DOT draft report for going against the study group’s recommendations on several key items.

DOT released the draft report for public comment in late December but only on an extremely abbreviated basis. Its ‘public comment period’ closed December 29.

Clearly, safety is critical to the viability of cycling as a green transportation alternative. North Carolina has long been behind the blind curve on this front. As interest in cycling as transportation has gone on the rise in our state, public pressure for improving safety is building. This will be a topic to watch in 2016.

Environomics: Issues to Watch in 2016

You know how it always seems that there are some important things you never find time to get around to? It happens to us here at CIB too. Stories come across our desk that we know are important ongoing environmental issues relevant to our state, but there’s no immediate “hook” (e.g., a clear agency decision date or opportunity for citizen action) on which to hang a story in our update that week.

With that in mind, here are a few of the important “environomic” (CIB Dictionary: pertaining to the overlap between the economy and the environment) issues we noted last year and will be watching:

• Wood pellets as an energy source: There’s been a growing demand in Europe for imported wood pellets as a “renewable” energy source. Guess where a lot of the export is coming from? Forest conservation advocates are worried about the potential for feeding our southern forests into the chipper.
• The demise of the “clean coal” concept and the future of coal: Most conservationists recognized this idea as a chimera from the start, but for years the idea was propounded of so-called “clean coal” plants, which burned coal but captured the resulting carbon dioxide in a sink of some kind. Technologically possible in concept, in reality they’re so expensive the economics just don’t work. A supposedly model plant in Mississippi has seen its construction costs balloon to $6.5 billion, at least three times the original estimate. This may be another nail in the coffin of the coal economy, in addition to the rise of more cost-effective alternatives, enduring air pollution issues, and climate concerns. Will its collapse accelerate?
• Hogging the water: We’ve dealt for years with the water and air pollution problems produced by factory-style hog farms, and those remain issues of environmental concern for many rural areas in our state. Now, in some parts of the country these CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) are competing even with row-crop agriculture for limited supplies of clean water (especially groundwater). North Carolina’s having a wet year now, but longer-term climate projections suggest that we may end up dealing with cycles of severe drought as well. Will these issues intersect?

CIB will be keeping an eye out for these—or other “environomic” topics we haven’t anticipated—in 2016.

That’s our report for this week.