We recently spoke with the Sierra Club’s Conservation Director Cyrus Reed, who says the group’s worried about the precedent the ruling could set for other citizens or groups hoping to oppose similar licenses. Continue Reading →
A female Alligator Snapping Turtle at the West Midlands Safari Park in Bewdley, Worcestershire. The Alligator Snapping Turtle is one of the largest freshwater turtles in the world, and was recently found to be not one but three distinct species.
A new study places one of Texas’ strangest—and most imposing—reptiles in a very precarious position.
Published in Zootaxa, the study confirms that the alligator snapping turtle, thought to be just a single species, is actually three genetically distinct species. Alligator snapping turtles, dinosaurian creatures that range throughout river systems in the American Southeast, are the largest freshwater turtles in the world, and the findings put Texas’ already at-risk turtles and their neighboring cousins in further danger.
Though the population split between the three species isn’t equal, simply put, there are now fewer turtles of each species to stand up to pressures from illegal harvesting and habitat loss.
Alaska funds its state government largely by taxing oil production. But last year, faced with dwindling production, the legislature narrowly passed tax cuts to lessen the burden on energy companies in hopes of encouraging more drilling and generating more tax revenue.
One Alaska lawmaker said they looked to the Lower 48 for inspiration.
“Because we kept hearing all the booming oil work that is being done in Texas and North Dakota and people said hey, that just goes to show you, Texas has a lower tax rate. And that just goes to show you how increased taxes are causing less exploration and development here in Alaska,” said Alaska State Sen. Bill Wielechowski, a Democrat from Anchorage.
Texas Tech climatologist Katharine Hayhoe was recently selected as one of Time Magazine's '100 Most Influential People.'
Yes, you can believe in both God and climate change. Just ask Katharine Hayhoe, Director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech, who is well known for her work on the impacts of climate change. She’s also an evangelical Christian, and has become a vocal proponent for doing more to bridge the divide between faith and science.
After receiving the honor, she spoke with KUT’s David Brown, host of the forthcoming daily news show, Texas Standard. Hayhoe learned of her selection via email. “I actually thought the email was spam at first,” Hayhoe tells Brown.
Take a listen to Hayhoe explain how she thinks accepting and acting on the science of climate change is a responsibility for Christians:
Receding waters have ravaged communities in the Highland Lakes.
It’s almost strange to refer to the Highland Lakes of Central Texas as “lakes.” They’re sitting at just over a third full, and Lake Travis looks more like a river with plenty of bare, scraggly shoreline. The lake system is the crucial water supply for the million-plus people in and around Austin, and they could reach their lowest levels ever this summer.
While the drought is one of the reasons the Highland Lakes are in dire straits, they would be about double their size today if massive amounts of water hadn’t been sent downstream to rice farmers in 2011. It was enough water from the lakes to supply the City of Austin’s share for three years. And the decision to release that water – by the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) – is coming under renewed criticism from Republican state Senator Troy Fraser (R-Horsehoe Bay), chairman of the powerful Senate Natural Resources Committee. He’s threatening to try and have the LCRA’s permit revoked.
Fraser says that decision three years ago to release water to rice farmers is just one of several mistakes made by the LCRA during the drought, but it might be the costliest. “Because they mismanaged the lakes, they’ve now caused [for] themselves a financial crisis,” Fraser says. Continue Reading →
“Shade-grown” coffee uses a traditional farming method that uses a natural canopy of forestry. Environmentalists favor this technique because it keeps the landscape relatively intact and supports native species such as migratory birds.
Mike McKim, owner of Cuvee Coffee, a roaster in the Austin area, attributes the quality of his coffee in large part to shade-grown techniques.
“The better [farmers] take care of their land, the better their coffee is, in general,” McKim says.
But beyond the U.S., consumer demand and a drop in global coffee prices is causing a global shift toward growing the cheap stuff, which is used for instant coffee. According to the report, the “proportion of land used to cultivate shade-grown coffee … has fallen by nearly 20 percent globally since 1996.”
While shade-grown coffee production is growing, non-shade-grown coffee is growing at a much faster rate. And in regions such as Africa and Asia, where coffee production on the whole is increasing, farmers are growing a lot of it.
A worker hooks up pipe during drilling in the Barnett Shale near Fort Worth, Texas in 2012.
A Texas family sued a drilling company was awarded close to three million dollars this week by a Dallas County jury. The decision is being called a landmark one by people opposed to hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” and touted as a first by the plaintiffs’ legal team.
“The fracking industry has really just taken off in the last three or four years. So really this is a new problem to the extent that we’re seeing cases now that are getting a verdict,” David Mathews, a lawyer representing the Parr family, tells StateImpact Texas.
Fracking is the drilling technique that pumps water and chemicals into the ground to release oil and gas. In this case the Parrs argued that fracking near their North Texas ranch by Aruba Petroleum hurt their health, reduced their property value, and even forced them to flee their property.
The Parrs had initially filed suit against other companies as well, but those were either dismissed or settled out of court. Companies and plaintiffs often settle, another reason why jury awards are rare.
Mathews is calling the decision “a bit of a wake-up call to industry.”
A chemical trailer sits among the remains of the burning fertilizer plant in April 2013.
Federal Agency Says ‘It Should Never Have Occurred’ Â
A year after a deadly explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas, a federal agency is releasing a report saying the disaster was preventable.
The Chemical Safety Board, which investigates chemical accidents and issues recommendations to ensure public safety, is presenting its preliminary findings tonight in the town of West, Texas, where the fire and subsequent explosion last year took 15 lives, injured hundreds, and destroyed homes and schools.
“It should never have occurred,” Dr. Rafael Moure-Eraso, the head of the agency, says in a statement. “It resulted from the failure of a company to take the necessary steps to avert a preventable fire and explosion and from the inability of federal, state and local regulatory agencies to identify a serious hazard and correct it.” Continue Reading →
If you follow local headlines in Midland-Odessa, it seems like there’s a fatal car crash every couple of days.
According to the Texas Department of Transportation, the oil-booming Permian Basin saw a 13 percent increase in roadside deaths from 2012-2013. Last week, a victims’ rights coalition in Midland held a panel discussion on how to deal with the region’s increasingly dangerous roads.
Organizers of the event say most of those wrecks stem from the “3 D’s” – drugs, drinking and distracted driving. But the oil and gas boom in the Basin is compounding those dangers: simply put, there’s just more traffic and bigger trucks on the road than before.
TxDOT’s been trying to tackle the problem with radio and TV ads like this one, but education only goes so far. Continue Reading →
State regulators blame big spikes in emissions to "upsets" at a few facilities like this one in Houston in 2012
With budgets already reduced and with more cuts on the way, federal environmental regulators are expected to be doing fewer inspections of industries that pollute. And if state environmental regulators were expected to take up the slack, many of them — including those in Texas —- are dealing with budget cuts of their own.
“There have been just dramatically fewer [EPA] inspections,” said Bernadette Rappold, a lawyer who spent years working in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement division. She’s now with the McGuireWoods law firm in Washington.
In the next few years, Rappold said even fewer inspections and enforcement actions are expected if the EPA’s budget-slashing five year plan is adopted.
“It’s not the case that it’s simply the federal EPA that’s been cut and the states can pick up the slack. The states are, in many instances, hurting too.”
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