Houston oil and gas attorney Roland Sledge (R) is running for an open seat on the Railroad Commission of Texas. (Which, despite its name, has nothing to do with railroads. It’s the state regulator of the oil and gas industry.)
Roland Sledge also doesn’t believe in peeing on an electric fence.
It’s true. Sledge has even put together a campaign video about it. (It’s a reference to a saying attributed to Will Rogers.) In the video, Sledge says that he agrees with Rogers when he said: “There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. And the rest have to pee on the electric fence.” (Can you guess which kind of candidate Sledge says he isn’t?)
What, ultimately, urinating on such a fence has to do with the Railroad Commission isn’t explicitly clear. Nor is the connection obvious between the commission and disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, or trillions of dollars in bank bailout money, for that matter. But it all makes for entertaining viewing, which you can do above.
Now there’s an update to the page, so you can see the latest illustration of how the drought progressed, and how conditions are slowly improving across much of the state. What was once a sea of red (indicating the worst stage of drought) is now mostly a mix of white, yellow and orange, all indicating lighter levels or no drought at all.
The page also looks into the hard choices the state has to make about water, drought or not; the pros and cons of the policy decisions that need to be made, and also allows you to share your stories.
Two fires in West Texas this week have burned over 24,000 acres.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has approved funds to help battle two large wildfires in West Texas that have been burning for more than a week. The request for the funds came from the state. The approval means FEMA funds can pay 75 percent of eligible state and local costs for fighting the wildfires.
The Texas Forest Service says two fires at the Livermore Ranch Complex have burned over 24,000 acres. The complex is nearly two hundred miles southeast of El Paso.
The bigger of the two fires is near the Davis Mountain Resort, where about 150 residents live. That fire was said to be about 30 percent contained as of this morning.
Last week the Forest Service unveiled a new online tool that allows users to find the wildfire risk in their area. You can view it here.Â
KUT’s Laura Rice contributed reporting to this post.
This summer may not be nearly as hot as last year, but blackouts aren't completely off the table.
Today the group that monitors the Texas Electric Grid came out with a new assessment of the state’s power reserves heading into the summer. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) says Texas is still at risk of rolling blackouts. But the likelihood has diminished as conservation has ramped up and more energy companies have brought “mothballed” power plants back online.
Those plants are operating thanks in part to the low cost of natural gas, which makes it economically attractive to run less efficient natural gas power plants. All but one of the state’s mothballed plants that are being brought back online are natural gas-fired plants.
The Rock House fire of 2011 started at this site outside of Valentine, Texas in April of last year. Much of the same area that burned in that fire is burning again today.
Evening Update: In a late afternoon interview the Texas Forest Service put the amount of land burned by both fires in the Livermore Ranch Complex Fire at over 23,000 acres. Reinforcements have arrived and the smaller of the two fires is now 60 percent contained. The larger fire, which continues to threaten the Davis Mountains Resort, is said to be 25 percent contained.
Two massive wildfires scorched over 19,000 acres of land and continue to burn uncontained in far West Texas as of Tuesday morning, said the Texas Forest Service. The fires are burning in roughly the same parts of Jeff Davis County that were scorched close to a year ago by the “Rock House Fire,” a massive blaze that ushered in a year of devastating wildfires throughout the state.
The fires, now jointly called the Livermore Ranch Complex Fire, were sparked by lightning on April 24. They threaten about 150 permanent residents as well as empty vacation structures in the Davis Mountain Resorts. Continue Reading →
In a program called the “Founder Well Participation Program,” Aubrey McClendon was allowed to purchase an interest in each well the company owned, up to 2.5 percent. McClendon then went and borrowed against those future potential profits, which totaled more than a billion dollars of loans.
In a statement, Chesapeake says that McClendon and the company have agreed on a date for early termination of the investment program. That will happen “on June 30, 2014, 18 months before the end of its current term on December 31, 2015. Mr. McClendon will receive no compensation of any kind in connection with the early termination of the FWPP,” according to the company.
Bloomberg says that according to an emailed statement from Chesapeake, “McClendon will not be relinquishing any of the well stakes he already holds.” The company says that in McClendon’s place they’ll look for “an independent, Non-Executive Chairman in the near future.”
The Wall Street Journal’s energy reporter Russell Gold tweeted a reaction that is likely felt by many: “Feels like an era is ending.” The company’s stocks are up nearly ten percent on the news, however.
Houston Lawyer Anthony Buzbee: "The new way of going about it is massive, massively large cases like the one in Texas City "
The Houston law office of Anthony Buzbee is on the 73rd floor of the tallest building in Texas. There are only two more floors to the top. The furniture is modern, so is the artwork on the walls. It all reflects the success Buzbee has had suing some of the nation’s biggest companies. And now he says he has a new approach to make companies compensate people who’ve lived near chemical plants that have had pollution problems.
“It’s saying a lot that these people who’ve put up with so much have finally decided the state is failing us, the EPA is failing us, we’re going to try to do it ourselves through the court system,” Buzbee said in an interview with StateImpact Texas.
Andrew Zimmern thinks you should stop eating state fair food and start eating donkeys.
Andrew Zimmern is best known for eating things like bats, spiders and even rotten fish. He’s the host of Bizarre Foods on the Travel Channel, where he travels the world to eat exotic dishes. But Zimmern is also a thinker and something of a food activist. I sat down with him at the Austin Food and Wine Festival this past weekend to discuss his ideas about some of the food sustainability and environmental issues facing the world – and Texas.
Q: We’ve seen you eat everything on television from larvae to spiders.
A: Fermented beetle anus. I bet that’s probably the first time someone has mentioned that little piece of deliciousness in an interview.
Q: I was gonna save it for the end. How does one prepare that anyways?
A: Very, very carefully.
Q: Having eaten all of these exotic things, is there anything in the U.S. that we should open our minds to? Things we don’t normally eat?
A: Tons. We could start with my favorite food that isn’t eaten here, which is donkey. This is an animal that grows to maturity quickly, is a very forgiving eater, easy to raise, a disease-resistant species, and it’s delicious. Continue Reading →
Al Armendariz is the regional administrator for the EPA.
Days after a video surfaced of him making controversial remarks about enforcement, the regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Al Armendariz, has resigned.
In a letter to the head administrator of the agency, Lisa Jackson, Armendariz says that he has “come to the conclusion that my continued service will distract you and the agency from its important work.” He also said that the “comments… made several years ago… do not in any way reflect my work as regional administrator.” Armendariz said his resignation is effective today.
Jackson issed a statement saying that she accepted the resignation. “I respect the difficult decision he made and his wish to avoid distracting from the important work of the Agency. We are all grateful for Dr. Armendariz’s service to EPA and to our nation,” Jackson said.
The remarks that got him in hot water surfaced after Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe talked about them in a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday morning, and called for an investigation.
In the video, Armendariz, an El Paso native and former professor at Southern Methodist University, says that his philosophy of enforcement is to make a big example of lawbreakers. “It was kinda like how the Romans used to conquer those villages in the Mediterranean,” he says in the video. “They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they’d crucify them. And you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”
Other factors, however, make the transition a bit more difficult. Record heat waves, limited bike lanes, and a hilly topography go a long way to deter Austinites from fully embracing cycloculture. Fitness and cost-saving factors are certainly persuasive, but are they really worth arriving to work drenched in sweat in the middle of July?
Rocket Electric, a new bike shop in East Austin, has a solution: electric bikes. The shop’s inventory consists entirely of battery-powered two-wheelers that come in a variety of models, ranging from $1,100 to $2,500 in price. They allow customers to conquer Austin’s hilly streets with just the flick of the “throttle” switch. A fully-charged electric bike can travel fifteen to twenty miles at a speed of about twenty miles per hour without a single bead of sweat.
But in Austin, some transportation interest group representatives have lent only tepid support for e-bikes. Dominic Chavez, the former treasurer for Sensible Transportation Solutions for Austin who’s currently running for a seat on Austin City Council, believes that more work should be done to improve biker safety, especially in neighborhoods with a high concentration of children riders, rather than diversify bicycle technology. Continue Reading →
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