Texas challenges science behind EPA climate finding
By Bill Dawson | February 17, 2010
Gov. Rick Perry (left), Attorney General Greg Abbott and Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples announce Texas' challenge of the EPA's greenhouse-gas finding.
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In a strongly foreshadowed action, Texas officials announced Tuesday that they are formally challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that greenhouse gases are harmful to human health and the environment.
The two Texas petitions – one asking the EPA to reconsider its finding and the other asking a federal appeals court to review it – are aimed at preventing the agency from regulating emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants blamed for global warming.
The EPA’s “endangerment finding” about carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases blamed for global warming – the direct target of the Texas challenge – does not in itself impose mandatory limits on their release, but is a legal prerequisite for such regulation under the Clean Air Act.
The finding was proposed last April, drawing strong criticism from Gov. Rick Perry and other Texas officials, and was adopted and issued by the EPA in December.
The EPA said at that time that the finding was legally necessary before that agency and the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Safety Administration could finalize their jointly proposed emission standards for greenhouse-gas emissions from light-duty vehicles. More►
TCN Interview
James Hansen:
NASA climatologist
December 11, 2009
James Hansen is perhaps the world's best-known climate scientist, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, and the man who dramatically propelled the subject of global warming to public prominence with his congressional testimony in the late 1980s.
He was going to speak to Houston's Progressive Forum on Oct. 29, but had to postpone the engagement until this week because of health matters. As things turned out, Hansen's rescheduled talk could hardly have come at a more appropriate time.
On Monday, the day of his Houston appearance, the 12-day United Nations Conference on Climate Change had just gotten started in Copenhagen. Negotiators there are trying to forge a binding interntional agreement on reducing greenhouse gases to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which was signed in 1997 and expires in 2012.
On the same day, the Environmental Protection Agency announced its formal conclusion that greenhouse pollutants threaten public health and the environment – a necessary step for regulation of those gases under the federal Clean Air Act. Members of Congress, meanwhile, continue to work on a separate law that would address manmade climate change.
The day after Hansen's Houston speech, his first book was published – Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity. The title reflects his growing concern about global warming. More►
CO2 emissions dropped in Texas
before recession, groups report
By Bill Dawson | November 13, 2009
Emissions of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, fell in Texas from 2004 to 2007, even before the recession of 2008-09 suppressed economic activity and CO2 emissions.
That was one of the conclusions in an environmental group's analysis of what it called the latest data from the U.S. Department of Energy.
In terms of volume, Texas had the second-largest CO2 reduction among the states from 2004-07, while New York had the largest, according to the report, released Thursday by Environment America and its state affiliates.
Texas remained the state with the greatest CO2 emissions at the end of the study period, but had recorded a per capita decline in those emissions of 8 percent and an absolute decline of 2 percent since 2004. More►
TCN Interview
Alyssa Burgin:
Director, Texas Drought Project
September 29, 2009
As parts of Texas endured severe drought conditions this summer, the Austin-based Texas Harambe Foundation launched a new venture, the Texas Drought Project. The organization's stated mission includes "recognition of indicators of climate change, recommendations for modifications to policies governing water, methods of conservation, and solutions to the overall problem."
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Alyssa Burgin
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The Texas Drought Project's director is Alyssa Burgin of San Antonio, a media consultant and veteran of various progressive causes and campaigns. Burgin, who has served as outreach and media director of Texans for Peace since 2002, recently worked for congressional action against global warming as a representative of the Harambe-funded Texas Climate Emergency Campaign, a state affiliate of the national 1Sky organization.
Burgin described herself this way in a blog profile: "I grew up in a home where Franklin Delano Roosevelt was revered, women's rights were treasured, and every lecture ended with the same reminder – 'always question authority.' If my Dad could see me now, I believe he'd think I was doing okay in that category."
She recently answered questions posed by Texas Climate News editor Bill Dawson about the Texas Drought Project. More►
Rallying the oil-industry troops
against the House climate bill
By Bill Dawson | August 20, 2009
The nation’s first "Energy Citizens" rally – staged by the American Petroleum Institute (API) and coalition allies in Houston this week to criticize the House-passed climate bill – was, to all appearances and by various accounts, a disciplined exercise in tightly focused strategic messaging.
The essential message had already been conveyed by API in advance statements about the planned series of about 20 rallies across the country – the claim that the cap-and-trade bill, which would limit greenhouse emissions through a system of tradeable permits, would unacceptably cost jobs and raise energy costs.
That critique was echoed repeatedly in different ways at the lunchtime Houston rally, which got under way at 12:30 Tuesday at the downtown Verizon Wireless Theater. More►
Texans' views on climate
aren't so different, polls show
By Bill Dawson | August 6, 2009
Texas has not kept pace with many other states in adopting policies that address global warming – a distinction that the Legislature left unchanged in its 2009 session.
Some Texas government and business leaders, meanwhile, have been outspoken in opposing federal regulations to combat climate change, particularly the American Clean Energy and Security (or ACES) Act, which barely won House approval in June.
Still, the recently conducted 2009 editions of a pair of annual polls – the Texas Lyceum Poll and the Houston Area Survey – suggest that Texans’ opinions on various aspects of the climate issue are not very different from those of Americans in general, including support for stepped-up regulatory action. More►
Updated look at regional impacts
By Bill Dawson | June 17, 2009
With much of Texas enduring a late-spring spell of high temperatures, the last thing many Texans probably want to hear right now is that their hot state could very well get a lot hotter.
That scenario, however, is one of the key projections in a new federal report, “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States,” issued Monday in Washington.
With higher emissions of greenhouse gases, a large part of Texas could see more than 100 days a year with highs above 100 degrees by 2100, it said. More►
Legislative hopes largely unfulfilled
By Bill Dawson | June 7, 2009
Proponents of forceful Texas action to reduce heat-trapping greenhouse emissions had high hopes at the start of the 81st Legislature in January, but they were dashed as various bills on the brink of passage died when the session ended last week.
The blog of Alliance for a Clean Texas, a coalition of more than 20 environmental, public interest, consumer rights and religious groups, summed up the stunned reaction this way: “As we get off the ride, it’s fair to say that ‘whiplashed’ is the only word for what we’re feeling.”
While major bills on renewable energy and energy efficiency failed, the Legislature did pass some less-sweeping bills in those areas along with several measures that directly address emissions of greenhouse gases through mandates related to planning, incentives for “clean coal” facilities and record-keeping. If Gov. Rick Perry signs these latter bills, Texas will have its first body of statute-based policy initiatives dealing explicitly with manmade global warming, a phenomenon that has drawn skeptical comments from some high-ranking officials including Perry himself. More►
Engaging with climate change
By Bill Dawson | May 15, 2009
With the 81st Texas Legislature n
ow in the home stretch, a number of bills relating to climate change and cleaner energy have advanced far enough to give proponents hope that some, at least, may become law.
The biennial session began on Jan. 13 and is scheduled to end on June 1. Around its midway point in March, veteran environmental reporter Randy Lee Loftis of the Dallas Morning News took note of lawmakers’ uncharacteristically strong interest in climate change this time around:
“Global warming has been a nearly forbidden phrase in the Texas Capitol,” he wrote. “But that might be changing.” More►
Solar's time to shine in Texas?
By Bill Dawson | March 23, 2009
When the Austin City Council decided earlier this month to approve building the nation’s biggest solar power array, it was a significant action in itself. More importantly, perhaps, the council’s unanimous vote on the $250 million facility also joined a growing list of recent developments that add up to what pro-solar advocates are now calling “momentum.”
Momentum is a word that anyone at all familiar with the vagaries of sports or electoral politics knows may not precede the desired outcome. Still, it’s
hard not to think that sunny Texas may, at last, be headed toward realizing its long-touted potential for harnessing the sun’s energy to produce electricity. More►
Will Ike, other storms spur new thinking?
By Bill Dawson | Nov. 17, 2008
Besides their dramatic, immediate impacts – the harm to people and property and nature – environmental disasters can exert a profound influence on attitudes and actions, including the policies that governments and businesses adopt.
Think of the toxic waste at Love Canal in New York State. The nuclear plant accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. The runaway chemical reaction that killed thousands at Bhopal, India. The mammoth oil spill from the Exxon Valdez in Alaska. Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans and coastal Mississippi. All prompted far-reaching study, debate and policy changes.
With that history of catastrophe-catalyzed response, it’s reasonable to wonder whether Hurricane Ike, which roared across the upper Texas coast in September and ranks unofficially as one of the costliest hurricanes in U.S. history, will combine with the memory of other recent storms in Texas and Louisiana to help propel Texans toward new ways of thinking and behaving with regard to climate change and sustainability. More►