Bad Time For “Texas” Polluters Fuels Rumors of Takeovers

 

While there may be some signs of life in the national economic picture, it seems to be a terrible time to have the Lone Star State's name attached to your business. As the Thanksgiving holiday began, the stock price of TXI, aka Texas industries, aka the owners of a brand new permit to burn industrial wastes at its Midlothian cement plant, reached a 52-week low of about $22 per share, compared to more than twice that earlier in the year. That decline could have something to do with its "EBITDA to sales ration," basically an earnings to revenue formula that's supposed to tell you how financially healthy a company is supposed to be.  It's estimate of how many years of earnings would be necessary to pay back all the debt a company has. This ratio is considered to be alarming when it is greater than 3.0. TXI's is 146. It's next closest competitor in the construction materials market is Headwaters at 11. It's numbers like these that consistently land TXI on a list of companies ripe for takeover, especially in an industry that's been consolidating at a record pace the last twenty years. It's also what's motivating the company to turn itself back into a waste incinerator. By this time next year, TXI headquarters could be overseas. Meanwhile Energy Future Holdings, aka, the old Texas Utilities, is also swimming in debt thanks to ill-timed gambling on aging coal plants and hitching its fate to natural gas prices."It's kind of like Greece — by any cold, sober analysis, the math doesn't work,' said one power investment banker," according to Reuters lengthy analysis. The once mighty giant could hit a wall as soon as 2014 when it faces a $4 billion loan payment. Markets put the chance of EFH going into default at 91%. Changes in ownership mean changes in operation at the large polluting facilities of these companies. Could be good – jettisoning those old coal plants for example, or bad – cranking up the kiln to burn even more wastes to cut fuel costs. Stay tuned.  

Better late than never: Texas Monthly does the Perry vs EPA story

TM’s Nate Blakeslee gets the assignment to track down how Rick Perry runs against those crazy environmentalists and EPA the way George Wallace ran against those crazy civil rights marchers and the Justice Department. He can’t quite bring himself to mention Downwinders’ name when establishing Region 6 EPA Administrator Al Armendariz’ credentials but we’re represented nonetheless as, “a citizens’ group that won a judgment against one of the many cement manufacturing companies south of Dallas, which have long contributed to the Metroplex’s intractable air pollution problems.” Nothing much new here, especially for those of us living this story, but it’s good to see Perry’s disastrous run for the Presidency have some decent side-effects like coverage of his anti-environmental stances.

UK Report: 200,000 Deaths Every Year from Dirty Air

A new study by members of the British Parliament who are organized into something called the Environmental Audit Committee concludes that 200,000 UK citizens die every year from breathing dirty air, which not only causes illness on its own, but exacerbates existing conditions. “Lewis Merdler, campaign manager at Environmental Protection UK, which leads the national Healthy Air Campaign, says air pollution in the UK has a huge impact on the nation’s respiratory and cardiovascular health, and particularly affects children and the elderly. ‘Air pollution in the UK represents a huge public health crisis, contributing to more premature deaths than obesity and passive smoking combined,’ he says. ‘It’s a scandal the Government isn’t doing more to protect the most vulnerable in our communities from dangerous levels of air pollution.”

Traffic Jams Your Lungs and Brain

Here’a a good summary piece in the Wall Street Journal (sub required, but this link seems to get you past that) about the large number of studies going on attempting to understand how traffic jam pollution affects human health. So far, researchers have shown connections to not only the obvious respiratory illnesses cause by breathing in bad stuff, but also to behavioral development, IQ, autism, and depression. “The evidence is growing that air pollution can affect the brain,” says medical epidemiologist Heather Volk at USC’s Keck School of Medicine.  ‘We may be starting to realize the effects are broader than we realized.” So true for a countless number of pollutants these days. Which is why it’s always better to prevent their creation and release in the first place. 

New TXI Waste-Burning Permit Awarded With No Public Comment

(Dallas)—- Only three years after it finally stopped the controversial practice of burning hazardous waste at its Midlothian cement plant, TXI was awarded a permit in June by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality allowing the company to burn at least 12 new kinds of industrial wastes in its kiln without any public notice, comment, or hearing, and based only on other cement plants’ data. 

Car Dealers Battle Their Own Companies on New Auto Pollution Rules

All the major automobile manufacturing companies signed-on to the Obama Administration’s July proposal to increase fleet efficiency standards to 54 mpg by 2025. That left the usual opponents of these increases in league with the proponents. Everything seemed hunky-dory. But wait. Automobile Dealers are now organizing to stop this move. How? By stripping the EPA and the State of California from being able to set mpg standards. And of course the little matter of state’s rights won’t get in the way of House Republicans carrying water for the Auto Dealers and undermining California’s ability to set its own emission standards. Cash donations trump ideology every time.