(Commentary by Nicholas Sargen, lecturer at the Darden School) After the past two presidential elections, as well as the recent Virginia gubernatorial contest, there has been a growing narrative about “two Americas.” One consists of thriving urban areas that voted overwhelming for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and the other of “hurting” rural communities that went heavily for Trump.
(Video) The latest wave of COVID-19 infections is leading to more hospitalizations and deaths in the U.S., and there are rising concerns about the emerging omicron variant. University of Virginia critical care and infectious disease physician and medical ICU director Dr. Taison Bell discusses the latest coronavirus news.
Two members of the University of Virginia men’s basketball team are partnering with the Blue Ridge Bank through a name, image, and likeness deal. Kadin Shedrick and Reece Beekman will be working with the central Virginia bank with the focus on giving back to the community.
Virginia Attorney Gen.-elect Jason Miyares has named the former top counsel to U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., as Virginia’s next solicitor general. In the position, Andrew Ferguson – who holds undergraduate and law degrees from UVA – will represent the state in matters before the U.S. Supreme Court, Supreme Court of Virginia and other situations.
The quest for approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline has proved to be so herky-jerky over the past seven years that even diligent watchdogs need a spreadsheet to stay on top of each layered zig and zag. One such dogged individual is David Sligh, conservation director for the nonprofit Wild Virginia. The Charlottesville-based attorney and University of Virginia graduate describes himself as a policy nerd who has worked for 35 years to make the promises of the country’s environmental laws real.
Greenbar, a healthy fast casual concept committed to serving communities within healthy food deserts, debuted this month in Ft. Washington, Maryland, 35 miles south of Baltimore. The area in Prince George’s County is one of the highest-income, African-American-majority counties in the country but remains a food swamp and a healthy food desert with an abundance of fast food outlets and convenience stores, according to Sharisse Barksdale-Lane, co-founder of Greenbar, along with her brother, Brandon. [The Barksdale-Lanes are UVA alumni.]
The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to pass bipartisan legislation to support health care professionals’ mental and behavioral health. The Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act would authorize grants to train healthcare professionals in evidence-informed strategies to reduce and prevent suicide, burnout, mental health conditions, and substance use disorders, as well as fund mental and behavioral health treatment and peer-support programming. This legislation is named after Dr. Lorna M. Breen, an emergency medicine attending physician from Charlottesville and graduate of the ...
(Press release) The Champlain College Board of Trustees announced today that Alejandro (“Alex”) Hernandez will become the tenth President of Champlain College. Hernandez currently serves as the Dean of the School of Continuing and Professional Studies and Vice Provost of Online Learning at the University of Virginia. He will begin his new role on June 6, 2022 and relocate to Burlington this summer.
Karen Van Lengen, architect and professor of architecture at the University of Virginia, developed Soundscape Architecture in collaboration with artist James Welty and musician Troy Rogers. According to her, “We don’t study how to listen in architecture, which has been promoted as a visual field since the Renaissance. Soundscape Architecture is a resistance to this purely visual approach. It asks designers to think about the sounds of spaces, how they could be more vibrant, and how they can reinforce the visual aspects of architecture.”
(Commentary) All of which has some people wondering what the committee will be able to conclude if the key witnesses never testify—and if enough voters will care by the time the conclusive report is published. “I don’t think we can say what the impact will be until they finish. But most committees/commissions have little impact. Maybe this will prove to be the exception,” University of Virginia School of Law professor Saikrishna Prakash, who specializes in constitutional law and executive powers, said in an email.
Regardless of Youngkin’s action on RGGI, the carbon targets will remain in state code — something that cannot be changed without new legislation from the General Assembly, said Cale Jaffe, an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and director of the school’s Environmental Law and Community Engagement Clinic. The Senate remains under narrow Democratic control. “You might leave this multistate trading program but still have to meet the zero-carbon mandate in the code,” Jaffe said. “Leaving the trading program just seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face. ......
Cale Jaffe, director of the University of Virginia School of Law’s Environmental Law and Community Engagement Clinic, said Youngkin can’t do that by executive order because of the way state laws authorizing participation are written. “The (State Air Pollution Control) Board has promulgated regulation to join RGGI,” said Jaffe. “No governor can issue an executive order to just undo a duly promulgated regulation.”
Youngkin’s exact strategy or timeline for exiting RGGI was not immediately clear. But Cale Jaffe, an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, said removing the state from the program will require a specific process under Virginia law that cannot be accomplished instantly through an executive order. “Respectfully, governors do not have the authority to undo regulations via executive order, and the Virginia Air Pollution Control Board has finalized the regulations that guide Virginia’s participation in RGGI and Virginia’s transition to a zero-carbon electricity grid,” Jaf...
“It appears omicron may be less deadly, so that could be actually a blessing in disguise,” said Dr. Bill Petri, an infectious disease specialist at UVA Health. “It clearly is more infectious. It replaced delta in South Africa, presumably, it’s going to replace Delta in North America as well, but that actually may be a good thing if it’s less deadly than is delta.”
(Video) Thousands attended an anime convention in New York resulting in many contracting COVID-19. MSNBC’s Craig Melvin is joined by one of the convention attendees who contracted the omicron variant, Peter McGinn, and University of Virginia professor Dr. Ebony Hilton to discuss the cause of the spread and how to prevent it in mass gatherings.
“We learn some about how hard it is to change habits, but the real contribution of the study is demonstrating how social scientists can benefit from working collaboratively in large teams,” said Brian Nosek, cofounder of the Center for Open Science and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Nosek reviewed the study but was not part of conducting it. “Many of the questions we study are very complex, and the standard methods using small samples and simple experimental designs are not up to the task of providing good insight.”
Some environmental laws at the national and international level cover geoengineering the seas. The report notes the Paris Agreement gives implicit support to carbon dioxide removal with several mentions of carbon sinks. But other treaties, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, have put a “de facto moratorium” on geoengineering the seas. “None of these regulations, treaties, or laws were written with CDR in mind,” Scott Doney, an ocean researcher at the University of Virginia who led the report, said at a launch event for the report. “Moving forward, we’ll need to do a deeper dive” on...
The report outlines known risks and benefits, as well as costs and scalability, in order to provide policymakers with a framework for deciding next steps. It does not advocate for any individual tool or technology. “All of these approaches have some combination of tradeoffs and there are substantial knowledge gaps,” Scott Doney, an oceanographer at the University of Virginia and chair of the NAS committee that authored the report, told HuffPost. “It’s really trying to find investments on the research side that could fill those gaps in a way that would better prepare us to make those decisions....
To better understand how such strategies might change the ocean—or whether they would even work—funders will need to pour as much as $2.5 billion into research over the next decade, a U.S. panel of leading ocean scientists recommended today. The funding would dwarf current spending in a field where interest is high but key questions remain unanswered, says Scott Doney, a University of Virginia oceanographer who chaired the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee.
“If society wants to be well-informed, if these decisions need to be made at some point, we need to improve an unbiased knowledge base,” said Scott Doney, a scientist at the University of Virginia who helped lead the report. The report recommended an initial $125 million U.S. research program to “complete some very critical research in the next decade” on the subject, Doney said.