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Above Photo: Deborah Ferruccio asks zoning consultant Jake Petrosky if he’s ever seen outright regulatory exemptions (a green light) for high impact polluters. Ken Ferruccio watches on as Petrosky admits he has not.

Articles refer to Scott Murray, Roanoke River Basin Association Program Director whose leadership has been invaluable in educating the people and public officials on actual negative impacts of industrial-scale solar. _________________________________________________________________________________________________

In this episode, Deborah and Ken explain why they haven't podcasted for over seven months as they pivoted from their work as podcast historians back once again to researchers, educators and community activists.

The issues they and other Warren County citizens have been facing are age-old ones over land use, the rights of landowners, and in this case, the power of mega corporations to try to position themselves to profit from what industries call “solar electric gold.”

Through coverage in the Warren Record, this episode follows the citizens’ “Close the Door to Horizon and Industrial-Scale Solar” campaign.

As the county government moves to consolidate all its land use ordinances into one Unified Ordinance, intensive lobbying efforts to lift solar regulations are unloosed by Horizon Solar, a subsidiary of a $15 trillion international conglomerate.

The plan is to convince commissioners to lift current size and spacing solar restrictions so that Horizon can build two 450-acre mega solar facilities that will be equivalent to 1,080 football fields!

The prospect that commissioners might open the regulatory door to utility-scale power so that tens of thousands of football-field-sized solar installations could be built, end-to-end along the electric grid, does not sit well with the majority of Warren County citizens who favor protecting and furthering the county’s agricultural, timber, recreational, housing and tourism economies, as well as supporting community-scale solar.

Citizens also know the mega-scale solar land grab is possibly positioning the county for solar-powered hyper-scale polluting AI data centers.

The public’s sentiment is informed and fierce, and Warren Record coverage shows the people are relentless.

The way Ken puts it to zoning officials, “Here in a birthplace of environmental justice, the people lead.”

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Photo: A stack of Deborah’s journals spanning from 1977 — 1982 taken from the Ferruccio’s Warren County PCB Dead Sea Scrolls.

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In this Our Road to Walk: Then and Now podcast series, Deborah and Ken continue to examine the past in the context of the present. In their last episode, they focused on the current climate crisis and the petrochemical take-over.

In this episode, they go back in their PCB Dead Sea Scrolls archives to a collection of 1982 documents that Deborah has found stuck in the last of a stack of seven of her journals spanning from 1977 to 1982. The dates on the documents coincide with her journal entries, and it’s clear from the journals that Deborah and Ken’s personal lives are inextricably woven into the documented PCB history.

They share several 1982 journal entries when the euphoria they have been feeling with new teaching jobs is shattered with news that county commissioners have just dropped the county’s PCB lawsuit against the state.

To give context to the commissioners’ decision, Deborah and Ken analyze letters to the editor and news coverage leading up to it.

The county is on a collision course with the state. It has been three-and-a-half years since Ken warned the Hunt Administration there would be “due process first; then civil disobedience.

But Ken and Deborah and Warren County Concerned Citizens are not done with due process, not yet, anyway.

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Screenshot photo: Vice-President Al Gore speaking at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, Opening Reception of Climate Week, April 21, 2025 (ABC7 News Bay Area).

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In this episode, Ken and Deborah explain why this podcast has been such a long time coming. As with many Americans, they've been busy keeping up with the current administration’s daily assault on democracy, with more than one-hundred-fifty executive orders so far, including day one’s declaration of a “state of energy emergency,” with plans to lift the “burden” of regulations on the fossil fuels and to open up all aspects of the oil and gas industry.

The real emergency, according to Deborah and Ken, is that in effect, President Trump is facilitating a petrochemical takeover of the country and reversing decades of efforts to reduce deadly greenhouse emissions that are responsible for global warming and climate disaster.

They read former Vice-President Gore’s sobering climate change speech delivered just before Earth Day and decide to share much of the speech with their listeners as Gore tells his audience that with this presidency we are in an existential, “all hands on deck” moment as never before, and that we have “to solve the democracy crisis in order to solve the climate crisis.”

Adding to Gore’s sentiments, Ken and Deborah share excerpts from a recently published May 14, 2025 Union of Concerned Scientists damning report titled: “Decades of Deceit: The Case Against Major Fossil Fuel Companies for Climate Fraud and Damages.”

They share Yale Climate Connection findings, namely, “The 2024 presidential election saw over $4 billion in various fossil fuel contributions to the candidates’ campaign committees and to outside groups supporting them.”

Still, Ken and Deborah agree with former Executive Secretary of the UN Climate Change Convention, Christina Figueres, “The task of a mindset of stubborn optimism about the climate crisis is needed more than ever,” because, she said, “As Henry Ford phrased it, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re usually right.”