Audit, newspaper retraction undermine
AG's argument in Texas' EPA petition
Aug. 26, 2010

And a related British newspaper article, which Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott cited as evidence that such regulation is unwarranted, has been retracted by that newspaper with an apology. 

Abbott's petition earlier this year challenged the Environmental Protection Agency's finding that climate-changing greenhouse gases are dangerous, a legal prerequisite for the regulation of industrial emissions that the EPA is now planning to phase in. 

One of the attorney general's arguments was that the EPA's "endangerment finding" was based largely on the conclusions of the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC's chairman, Rajendra K. Pachauri, "has, and certainly appears to have, several conflicts of interest," Abbott asserted. 

Abbott's petition, rejected last month by the EPA, alleged that these conflicts of interest "indicate that the IPCC is being led toward a conclusion that climate change is a dire threat to the planet that must be reversed; a conclusion that would enrich Dr. Pachauri and the entities that employ him." 

One of the Texas petition's footnoted sources for this claim was an article published by Britain's Daily Telegraph last December, which dealt with Pachauri and The Energy and Resources Institute, a non-profit research organization focusing on energy, environment and sustainable development where he is director general. More►

From "green fees" to "Aggie Energy,"
Texas colleges embracing sustainability
Aug. 25, 2010

Texas universities and colleges have been in the news lately because of assorted developments related to cleaner energy, energy conservation and associated subjects.

Taken together, they suggest that interest in sustainability concerns – particularly regarding energy – is becoming a more prominent, more routine part of the higher-education experience in a state where fossil fuels still famously reign.

Here's a sampling.

“Renewable” branding for the fans

Alums and other supporters of both the Longhorns and Aggies now have the opportunity to help programs at the University of Texas and Texas A&M while they simultaneously boost the state's renewable energy industries.

Athletic programs at the two universities both recently entered agreements that will market electricity from renewable sources to residential and business customers in parts of the state with deregulated power markets.

Both programs involve partnerships with the same pair of companies – Dallas-based Branded Retail Energy and Houston-based Champion Energy Services. The plans are being marketed via the Texas Longhorns Energy and Aggie Energy brands. More►

Heat, fires, floods and an ice island:
Signs of manmade climate change?
August 12, 2010

It's hot these days in Texas – Dallas had its thirteenth straight day of triple-digit temperatures today, for instance, and the state's AC-driven electricity demand hit a new record high on Wednesday.

Still, there's nothing unusual about a hot summer in the Lone Star State, and nothing so far suggests the summer of 2010 will be jaw-droppingly memorable here.

Following a June with above-normal temperatures "across the state," July temperatures were "slightly above normal" in the eastern half of the state and "below normal" in the western half, the Office of the Texas State Climatologist at Texas A&M University concluded in the latest monthly reports.

Weather extremes and related events are attracting enough notice in other parts of the U.S. and around the world, however, that an unsurprising question is being asked in some quarters: Could they be evidence of manmade global warming and climate change? More►

What are the Texas implications
if there's no federal climate bill?
July 28, 2010

Majority Leader Harry Reid’s decision last week to delay – at least – Senate action on a comprehensive energy-climate bill carried a variety of implications for Texas.

Those potential impacts extend from Congress and the federal courts to energy companies and the state Legislature.

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama and his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, insisted that despite the setback posed by Reid’s action, such a measure still might win passage later this year. That hope was also expressed last week by Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, a co-author of the bill that Reid said doesn’t have enough votes now to overcome a filibuster.

Many media reports, however, portrayed the chances of a broad energy-climate bill becoming law in this Congress as slim, at best. The Associated Press described “bleak prospects.” Reuters, meanwhile, reported that Reid’s decision to press instead for passage of a much narrower energy bill without climate provisions was a “potentially fatal blow” to a comprehensive bill with a cap on carbon dioxide emissions. More►

Science roundup: Butterflies, BP and more
July 3, 2010

Butterflies. Religion. Undersea methane from the BP spill. Solar technology. Capturing carbon dioxide.

Texas scientists and engineers have been in the news lately because of their work in a variety of areas involving climate change and related energy subjects.

Here’s a roundup of some of that coverage.

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Journalist and author Seth Shulman profiled Camille Parmesan, a biologist and butterfly expert at the University of Texas, in an article in Grist, “Are butterflies the silent harbingers of global warming?”

Her interest in the subject dates to her research on the Edith’s checkerspot butterfly as a graduate student in the early 1990s. She “realized that the butterflies could be sensitive indicators of global warming” and continued to study the checkerspot for another four and a half years:

The work paid off. Parmesan's landmark 1996 paper in the British science journal Nature was one of the first definitive looks at the effects of climate change on a living species. When she started out tracking checkerspots, Parmesan wasn't sure she'd be able to discern any effects of climate change. But even discounting sites where urban sprawl or other human interference might have impinged upon the butterflies' habitat, Parmesan was startled to find that at the southern edge of their range, in Mexico and southern California, populations of Edith's checkerspots had declined by 80 percent. More►

 
Climate change in Texas classrooms:
Curriculum assessment, science-fair hoax
June 18, 2010

Journalists writing for two national-audience Web publications that focus on climate issues recently trained their attention on developments in Texas schools:

• Julia Harte reported for SolveClimate that a 2009 Texas curriculum mandate, spearheaded by climate change skeptics and opposed by scientists and environmentalists, is “being largely ignored by educators across the state.”
• Zeke Hausfather, writing for The Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, detailed how a Beeville newspaper’s report that a 4th grader had won a national award for a project titled “Disproving Global Warming” was widely repeated by climate change skeptics before the prize was exposed as “a cruel hoax.”

Related - Teaching about climate change: A scientist's national perspective

Harte’s article for SolveClimate concerned science curriculum standards adopted last year by the State Board of Education, which required that public school students be directed to “analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming.”

The Austin American-Statesman reported at the time that Board Chairman Don McLeroy, explaining the action, said, "Conservatives like me think the evidence (for human contributions to global warming) is a bunch of hooey."

(McLeroy also has claimed that “evolution is hooey.” He was part of a bloc on the board who secured curriculum changes on evolution, too. The Texas Freedom Network, which promotes “a mainstream agenda of religious freedom and individual liberties to counter the religious right,” said they contained “plenty of potential footholds for creationist attacks on evolution to make their way into Texas classrooms.”) More►

Texas Comment
Climate science, climate action, energy choices
May 26, 2010

It’s time for another of TCN Journal’s occasional roundups of Texas commentary on climate change, energy policy and related matters. Editorial writers and columnists have had a lot to say on those topics in recent months.

The state’s two largest newspapers, for instance, resoundingly proclaimed the need to deal with manmade climate change.

"Despite all the spinning and hot air," the Houston Chronicle editorialized in reference to stepped-up attacks on scientists’ findings by climate-change skeptics, "the science is solid and global warming is a real, deadly serious concern. It’s time to deal with it."

The Dallas Morning News declared that the state’s legal petitions challenging possible federal regulation of greenhouse emissions were “"roublingly shortsighted," adding that Gov. Rick Perry and other state officials behind the move “would be wise to focus instead on how best [Texas can] be a leader in a less carbon-dependent world."

Arguing for congressional action to stem climate change in another editorial, the Morning News asserted that “the nation can't afford inertia or inaction, as the environmental and economic challenges posed by greenhouse gases only grow worse with each year of inattention.”

Newspapers provided a platform in op-ed columns for Texas academics to argue that the state should take climate change seriously. More►

AG "overreached" in anti-EPA rhetoric,
newspaper's PolitiFact Texas concludes
May 12, 2010

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott was "highly misleading" and "overreach(ing)" in his claim that federal officials "outsourced" their finding that greenhouse gases are dangerous "to a scandal-plagued international organization that cannot be considered objective or trustworthy," the Austin American-Statesman's new fact-checking initiative concluded this week.

Abbott made that declaration on Feb. 16 when he, Gov. Rick Perry and other Texas officials announced the state's formal challenge of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's conclusion that heat-trapping gases including carbon dioxide warrant regulation.

The "outsourced" charge was scrutinized by the American-Statesman's W. Gardner Selby for PolitiFact Texas, a truth-verification partnership that was launched in January by the Austin newspaper and PolitiFact.com, a website run by Florida's St. Petersburg Times, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

On Monday, PolitiFact Texas published Selby's findings, which included these key points:

• It was "highly misleading" for Abbott to assert that the EPA had "outsourced" its finding to others, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), because that wrongly suggested the federal agency was "shirking its duties."
• Abbott "also overreache(d)” in alleging the IPCC was "scandal plagued" and was not "objective or trustworthy," because recent disclosures about the organization have not undermined its main conclusions, including the finding that humans' greenhouse emissions are changing the climate.

In scoffing at the IPCC's credibility, the attorney general cited stolen and publicized e-mails by some IPCC scientists, which gave rise to much news coverage and blog commentary when they came to light last November. Some critics alleged that certain e-mails showed efforts to manipulate scientific findings. More►

Different paths to reducing CO2
in the production of electricity
April 21, 2010

Texas environmentalists can be more influential and less united than some might suppose, as a climate-related agreement involving one key advocacy group illustrated this week.

A Nebraska-based company agreed on Monday to capture at least 85 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted by a new coal-fired power plant near Abilene in return for a pledge by the Environmental Defense Fund to drop its formal opposition to a state air permit for the facility. 

Jim Marston, EDF’s Austin-based national energy program director, said the agreement is legally binding and signifies “the end of an era in Texas” when coal plants can be built without capturing and storing carbon. 

The Abilene Reporter-News reported that Tenaska, the company that plans to build the plant between Abilene and Stillwater, would pay financial penalties under the non-public agreement with EDF if it does not meet the 85-percent target. 

EDF provided Texas Climate News this explanatory passage from the agreement: 

In the event of non-compliance with the sequestration requirements, Tenaska has agreed to pay EDF liquidated damages on a per ton basis. EDF would use that money to pay for CO2 emission reduction or sequestration [storage] projects elsewhere. 

Both parties, the Abilene newspaper reported, can seek enforcement in court. More►

Moving ahead on building efficiency
April 8, 2010

As TCN Journal reported recently, three Texas cities were lower in the federal government's 2009 ranking of cities with the most energy-efficient commercial buildings than they were on the 2008 list.

And all three – Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin – had smaller numbers of commercial buildings holding the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star rating than they did in 2008. The EPA ranking lists the 25 cities with the most Energy Star buildings.

On Tuesday, an energy efficiency specialist in the Environmental Defense Fund's Texas office in Austin declared on the group's Texas Energy Exchange blog that there's more to the picture than the EPA ranking may suggest.

Energy Star "is a good program with tangible results, but it doesn’t tell the whole story about energy efficiency in buildings,” Kate Robertson wrote. She added:

One reason Texas cities don’t rank higher on the Energy Star list lies in the metric the EPA has chosen. The agency simply lists the number of Energy Star-labeled commercial buildings that a city has. While this is great marketing for the Energy Star brand, there are a lot of important things happening in Texas that this list overlooks. More►