Archive for April 2012
Britain Sent Foreign Aid to EDF to Fight Texas Climate Deniers
Whew. There’s quite a story from today’s Guardian involving the British Government, the Environmental Defense Fund, and right-wing Texas elected officials. The year was 2009. Her Majesty’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office gave 13,673 Pounds (about $21,000) to Texas EDF to “influence climate security policy and legislation in Texas.” How did EDF use this money to accomplish that goal? By organizing voters in key Texas districts? No. By arranging the elected officials to meet Texas victims of climate change? Nope. “The money was used to fly two Texan state politicians, including the climate sceptic Republican Troy Fraser, to the UK to receive a briefing with climate scientists and government officials. A Conference was also held in Austin in which a video of Prince Charles personally addressing Texan politicians on the subject of climate change was shown.” The article doesn’t say so, but it’s obvious what the strategy at work here was. Unable to persuade Texas lawmakers of the righteousness of their cause with only local speakers of the Queen’s English to do the work, EDF was at a loss. If only we could impress the importance of global warming on Fraiser and Co. by using people with authoritative British accents to explain it to them. Brilliant! And it would have worked too, except no one could understand what the Prince was actually saying on that video. Of course, when Governor Perry found out about all this, he was rightfully indignant, taking the position that the English had no business interfering with his plan to devolve state government into a a giant polluter oligarchy. That’s what the EPA is for. There was some other stuff too about how Texas has a great (cough) record of clean air accomplishments (cough) and how global warming is really just a vast left-wing conspiracy, yada, yada, yada. But you expect that from the Guv. What’s EDF’s excuse? EDF’s Texas Director Jim Marston explained that “There are people in Texas, including Governor Perry, who are uneducated
[on this subject]. This was the period leading up to the Copenhagen climate summit. We wanted to get it away from the theoretical and move it to a country where the Kyoto [protocol]
had already been ratified. We wanted them to hear it from the best
scientists from the UK, a country that Texans tend to respect.” See, British accents make everything infinitely more respectable. And how grateful was Senator Troy Frasier after his London Homesick Blues junket? Marston says “he came back very enthused. Sadly, his enthusiasm has decreased since,
partly because the issue [of climate change] has become so politicized.” That, plus the power of an English accent tends to wane when it’s not constantly reinforced. As Texas grassroots environmental activists, should we be more disappointed in the British for being so condescending about our environmental fights when they’re building breeder reactors and stopping wind turbine farms that ruin Donald Trump’s view of the ocean, or EDF for being so wasteful and naive? We report. You decide.
No More “Republicans for Environmental Protection”
Word comes from Politico that after 17 years of trying, “Republicans for Environmental Protection” is 86’ing the concept and changing its name to some kind of focus-group-tested “ConservAmerica.” It’s not so much that conservatives have abandoned the environment and public health. Poll after poll shows broad support for most of the environmental agenda, and over the last 20 years some of the most successful projects Downwinders has pulled off have been with Republican office-holders as partners. It’s that a controlling faction of the Republican Party is increasing hostile to what has been an historical bi-partisan set of goals for their own sake, differing only in approaches. In 2012, the very value of having clean air is routinely questioned by that faction, as is the science behind any advance in knowledge that contradicts a worldview where corporations make all the decisions about our risks for us. So instead, the former RFEPs are hoping to attract conservatives in general. “We’re seeing more and more independents out there,” said David Jenkins,
the group’s vice president for governmental and political affairs.
“Messaging through a Republican frame doesn’t reach those people as well
as reaching them through a conservative frame.” They may be on to something. The most ardent conservative critics of pollution in North Texas are not state or federal Republican office-holders, but grassroots right-wingers like former DISH Mayor Calvin Tillman, who feels as though the GOP has let him down. It’s one more sign that the modern Republican Party is further isolating itself on an issue that really doesn’t give a flip about the politics of your lungs.
The Case For Local Control of GHG Pollution in 3 Easy Articles
It doesn’t often work out this way, but three related stories came over the transom recently that so eloquently spelled out the case for Dallas regulating the Greenhouse gas pollution from the gas industry, that we could have written them ourselves. but we didn’t have to. Downwinders and the Dallas Residents at Risk alliance support the idea of the City of Dallas requiring the “mitigating”, or “off-setting” of new and large air pollution emissions that come with gas drilling. For every ton of Greenhouse Gas emitted by a new well, or compressor, or storage tank, the operators would have to fund a project that would reduce that same amount of pollution in Dallas, so that there would be no net increases in pollution. So why do this? ARTICLE #1: The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review covers a local permit for a gas compressor station that could emit between 20 and 90 tons of smog-forming Nitrogen Oxide, also a Greenhouse Gas. The state already has almost 400 such facilities because of its location in the Marcellus Shale gas play. According to the article, “The stations, which compress gas to get it to move through pipelines, release air pollutants that compound the state’s long-standing ozone problem.” Gas drilling brings large amounts of new air pollution that isn’t covered under current regulations on either the state or federal level. Just one compressor station in Dallas could spew more Greenhouse Gas pollution than all the current industrial sources in the city combined. ARTICLE #2: The New Scientist gives voice to the growing perspective that the fastest way to affect climate change progress is to cut methane and soot emissions, not necessarily CO2. “Methane is a more important control on global temperature than previously realised. The gas’s influence is much greater than its direct effect on the atmosphere,” says Peter Cox, of the University of Exeter. Curbing methane, he adds, may now be the only way to prevent dangerous warming. “Oil and Gas sources in the US make-up 40% of all industrial methane pollution releases. Dallas has signed the US mayors agreement to reduce its Greenhouse Gas emissions. It won’t be ale to keep that commitment if it allows gas drilling without some form of mitigation or off-setting. ARTICLE #3: A piece from the San Luis Obispo Tribune that details how a local county air pollution control board is now regulating greenhouse gases for new housing and commercial developments. What are they doing? Requiring mitigation. “The staff estimates that of 1,142 projects countywide over the next 10 years, 56 would be large enough to require mitigations. Mitigations usually come in the form of sidewalks, bike paths and other amenities that discourage the use of cars.Other developments could be exempted if they are covered by a qualified local emission reduction strategy….” Dallas wouldn’t even be the first to think about GHG emission control on the local level, although it might be the first to apply it to the gas industry. Because that’s what the biggest new threat to air quality in Dallas is.
There’s an App for That: “Fracking 101” PowerPoint Now Ready to Download
2012 to Be Most Awesome Ozone Season Ever
Sunday marked the official start of the 2012 ozone season. Unofficially, it began the week before on March 24th, when both the Frisco and “Dallas North” ozone monitors operated by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality recorded violations of the new federal standard of 75 ppb, and then on March 25th, when the Keller, Grapevine, and Eagle Mountain Lake monitors also all recorded violations of the 75 standard. Frisco came within less than a single ppb of being in violation of the old 85 ppb and set the record for the highest March ozone reading TCEQ’s ever recorded. It’s this old 85 ppb standard that DFW is still trying to meet even as the regulatory goalposts have been moved back to account for new science linking smog to heart attacks and strokes at lower levels of exposure. In submitting its new clean air plan to EPA to finally get below 85 ppb, you might remember that TCEQ predicted that in 2012, DFW would see the lowest ozone averages ever recorded – primarily because so many people are replacing their older more polluting cars with newer, cleaner ones. This prediction even came two months after the end of the 2011 ozone season showed DFW had worse smog than Houston. No, state leaders were not deterred by naysayers in taking a strong, optimistic stand for clean air when it came time to turn-in its compliance plan for EPA. Theirs is a faith-based initiative. According to Austin, all 18 DFW air quality monitors will be registering lower levels of smog in 2012 than any of them have ever recorded in the decade since monitoring began in DFW. At some monitors, TCEQ predicts summer maximums will drop by 40 parts per billion or more, an annual decrease no monitor in DFW has ever registered. Given the high readings from March already, it’s hard to believe that this prediction could possibly come true, but hey, they’re the experts,right? So put away those gas masks and get out and breathe that fresh North Texas air. Haze? No, that’s just steam.
Weekly Tuesday Evening Dallas Drilling Planning Meetings Begin Tomorrow at 7pm
