Defense official Sharon Burke says the military needs to change how it supplies its energy.
How’s this for a mouthful: Assistant Secretary of Defense for Operational Energy Plans and Programs. It’s basically a complicated way of saying the Defense Department official in charge of figuring out how the military uses and deploys energy in the field. That is Sharon Burke’s position, and in a recent speech at the University of Texas at Austin, she talked about the military’s new mission to reexamine their sources of energy.
Why? For reasons both economic and strategic. By virtue of its mission, the military is a prodigious consumer of energy, Burke says. “Implicit in the kind of military force we need to have moving forward” is the need for an immense capacity to use energy, she said. For instance, Burke noted that the military uses 1.7 million gallons of fuel per day in Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, where the terrain and climate can be quite inhospitable, it’s tough to transport fuel to where it’s needed. She showed one photo displaying an adaptation the military has come up with: a mule with generators strapped to each side. (Soldiers aren’t strangers to being beasts of burden themselves; Burke says they carry an average of sixteen pounds in batteries alone.)
In order to overcome these energy challenges, the Department of Defense is looking at solutions both big and small. Continue Reading →
Water conservation was the foundation for the city’s efforts, Puente says. The San Antonio Water System (SAWS) now serves over 1.6 million people, but despite a sixty-seven percent increase in population, the city has witnessed little to no increase in water use. How? Puente largely credits this feat to an arsenal of conservation programs. San Antonio has relied on what Puente calls “the three-legged stool”: education and outreach, reasonable regulation through effective city ordinances, and healthy financial investment towards conservation efforts.
“Our business model is to convince our customers to buy less of our product,” says Puente. Like the Plumbers to People program, an initiative to retrofit toilets. The cumulative effect of these conservation efforts was the conservation of more than 120,000 acre-feet of water – an $84 million savings over the course of last summer.
The efforts of the San Antonio Water System, however, haven’t stopped at improving the efficiency of bathrooms. Continue Reading →
While some Texas towns ran dry during the drought, or came close to doing so, one community has been living without water regardless of how much rain falls in the state. In a rural subdivision less than ten miles outside of Austin, some thirty families live without running water. Most of them are low-income and don’t speak English. Andy Uhler of KUT reports the first of three stories in a series on the community of Las Lomitas. (You can also watch a video story above by KUT’s Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon.)
“Driving up the dirt road to Norma Escalante’s trailer home, you pass a string of double-wides in varying states of disrepair. Her yard is dotted with odds and ends: an old tube TV, a rusted-over kitchen range perched beside the front door, and the skeleton of a burned-down trailer that’s been converted into a chicken coop.
Inside the home, a couple of sofas with red slipcovers flank a big-screen TV. The ceiling is cracked and stained from water leaks. Norma, her husband and their 9-year old son have lived here for five years.
“I like living out here, I do,” Norma said. “But not having water here, in the United States, in the city — it’s like ridiculous.””
Photo courtesy of the University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Danny Reible will chair the 2012 Texas Water Summit.
Water, water everywhere. Let’s keep some drops to drink. But how? That’s why scientists, politicians, and water utility leaders are meeting up today for the 2012 Texas Water Summit from the University of Texas at Austin’s Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science. It will feature prominent statewide leaders on water issues like state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, San Antonio Water System’s CEO Robert Puente and Robert Mace of the Texas Water Development Board.
To get a preview of the summit, StateImpact Texas’ Terrence Henry talked to its director, Danny Reible. He works at the University of Texas’s Center for Research in Water Resources. He is also the program chair for the summit. The interview was edited for clarity and content.
Q: Tell us about what people can expect from this conference.
A: The Texas Water Summit is an effort to explore the consequence of our drought. What is our availability of water? What are our needs for water? And ultimately how can we match the gap between the two now and in the future?
Q: What are some of the issues you’ll be looking at? Continue Reading →
Keeping the lights on at home in Houston as state regulators debate letting power companies make bigger profits
The three members of the Texas Public Utility Commission (PUC) seem in agreement that the cap on the peak price for wholesale power should be raised. They’ll likely finalize a massive increase this summer.
Then, the big question: will it encourage power generating companies to build more plants in Texas as intended? Or will it only encourage profit-taking and possibly even market manipulation?
At a meeting of the PUC April 12, there was disagreement over how to implement a higher cap on the price allowed on the spot market, typically a factor in extreme weather when power use surges. The current cap has been tripled in recent years and is now the highest in the nation at $3,000 per megawatt/hour (during normal times, the price per megawatt/hour can be $50 or less). The commissioners are considering raising the cap to $4,500 this summer and to $9,000 by 2015. Continue Reading →
Tomatoes on the vine at Village Farms new thirty-acre greenhouse in Monahans, Texas.
The vines are suspended from the ceiling, with large cylinders circulating air beneath them.
The tomatoes are grown in coco peat instead of soil, greatly reducing impact on land and waterways.
Commissioner of Agriculture Todd Staples inspects the tomatoes.
Computers control temperature, air and humidity. Bees are allowed in for pollination, but other bugs are kept out, eliminating the need for pesticides. Large tubes keep air circulating beneath the tomatoes.
Doug Kling says “there’s a peacefulness” to the greenhouse.
The end product: bushels of Texas tomatoes.
Precisely-beveled glass diffuses light on the tomatoes, providing equal amounts of sunlight to the crop.
Commissioner of Agriculture Todd Staples and Village Farms officials tour the greenhouse.
Next time you buy a Texas tomato, check where it was grown. The answer might surprise you. That’s because ninety percent of the state’s tomatoes come from a few greenhouses in the arid deserts of Far West Texas. (You can see a detailed breakdown of how the process works in the slideshow above.)
The latest addition to that group is a massive glass facility in Monahans, outside of Odessa. It officially opened for business this week.
“Well, when you look at this, this is like a giant, 15-acre, indoor garden,” says Doug Kling, Senior Vice President for Village Farms, which owns and operates the greenhouse. “Pollinated [by] bees, and grown naturally. Where the sunlight comes in and you can smell the calyx. It’s kind of exciting. There’s a peacefulness to it.”Â
An Indian man uses protective goggles to view the solar eclipse in the village of Taregna, some 30 Kms. south of Patna early July 22, 2009.
A picture taken on January 04, 2011 in Rennes, western France, shows the world’s first partial solar eclipse of 2011.
Chart outlining the places and times of the May 20, 2012 solar eclipse.
The sun is seen partially covered by the moon on Easter Island, 3700 km off the Chilean coast in the Pacific Ocean, on July 11, 2010.
A picture taken on January 04, 2011 in Locon, northern France, shows the world’s first partial solar eclipse of 2011.
A man uses a filter to take a picture during the partial solar eclipse in Hong Kong on July 22, 2009.
A telescope’s eyepiece projects a penumbra onto a screen during a solar eclipse over New Delhi on July 22, 2009. Only a partial eclipse was able to be seen from the Indian capital.
In this multiple exposure image taken on July 22, 2009 shows the various stages of the total solar eclipse in Baihata village, 30 kms from Guwahati, the capital city of the northeastern state of Assam.
Indian youths use solar viewing goggles to view a solar eclipse in Siliguri on July 22, 2009.
You’re going to need something better than wayfarers this weekend. The first annular solar eclipse of the 21st century for the continental U.S. is coming to Texas Sunday. You can see photos of some notable eclipses in the slideshow above.
The eclipse will start in Eastern Asia and cross east over the Pacific, ending in Central Texas. Here’s an interactive map of where the eclipse will pass, with peak viewing times. NASA says the eclipse will begin at 7:35 pm in Texas and peak at sundown. The best views will be from West Texas, particularly Amarillo, Lubbock and Midland-Odessa, where the eclipse will peak right around 8:30 pm. For those of you in the big cities of Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio, you won’t get to see the full peak phase of the eclipse because the sun will have set by then. But you’ll still be able to see some of it.
An annular eclipse is close to a total eclipse, but not quite. With an annular solar eclipse, the moon directly passes between the earth and the sun, casting a shadow on the earth’s surface. For a viewer on earth, the light from the sun is almost fully blocked creating a “ring of fire” around the moon.
NASA cautions viewers to not look directly at the sun and to not rely on standard sunglasses. Looking directly at the eclipse can cause permanent eye damage. “The ring of sunlight during annularity is blindingly bright,” Fred Ezpenack, an eclipse expert at NASA, warns on their website. Continue Reading →
The Pennzenergy Company Oil Exploration Drilling Rig In The Gulf Of Mexico.
If you were hoping to get in on some of the action in offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, time is running out. On Thursday the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) gave final notice of an upcoming sale of nearly 38 million acres of offshore leases.
Those leases run an area from three to 230 miles off the coast, the BOEM says, and range anywhere from nine feet to more than two miles deep. The bureau estimates that there’s somewhere around 31 billion barrels of oil and 134 trillion cubic feet of natural gas waiting there that are “currently undiscovered and technically recoverable.” (But they say the actual production would likely be much less, resulting in 1 billion barrels of oil and 4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.)
The sale takes place June 20th at the Mercedez-Benz Superdome. But bids must be submitted by mail no later than June 19th. The Department says that the minimum bid for deepwater leases is $100 per acre.
The sale had been put on hold following the 2010 BP Oil spill disaster at the Deepwater Horizon rig. So what’s being done to prevent that from happening again? Continue Reading →
Photo courtesy of NASA via Flickr’s Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/5246675993/lightbox/#/photos/gsfc/5246675993/
This NASA photo shows an algae bloom near New Zealand’s Chatham Islands. The bloom is an example of a carbon sink, an area that absorbs more carbon than it produces.
Carbon emission is one of the scientific issues of our time. While an overwhelming majority of scientists see a link between man-made emissions and global climate change, the rate at which emissions are entering the atmosphere and their precise impact continues to be hotly debated.
FSC sustainable logging being carried out in the natural forest of Cameroon.
Woe is the eco-conscious consumer. Just when they think they’re buying green, something screws it all up. The latest group allegedly mucking things up is the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), which is losing corporate sponsors amid allegations of “green-washing.”
First, some background. SFI officially started as a division of the the industry group American Forest and Paper Association (AF&PA). Although it officially broke away and turned non-profit in 2001, the now-separate organizations remain closely associated. SFI continues to be funded by AF&PA in the form of tax-deductible donations, according to a new report by the watchdog group (and, in a sense, competitors of SFI) ForestEthics. They allege that those timber industry funds given to SFI “support advertising and brand enhancement for the AF&PA-represented paper and timber industry.”
ForestEthics says that “out of 543 audits of SFI-certified companies since 2004, not one acknowledges any major issues—such as soil erosion, clearcutting, water quality, or chemical usage—that are known to be problems with large-scale timber operations.”
While ForestEthics is the leader of this movement, it isn’t alone. Between March and September of last year, several major companies — including Aetna, Allstate, AT&T, Office Depot, State Farm, and Sprint — publicly announced their intention to remove the SFI label from their products and/or to avoid the use of SFI-labeled products in the future. Just last week, according to ForestEthics, several more big brands — including Philips Van Heusen, Shutterfly, and U.S. Airways — decided to let go of SFI as well.
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