The heat has returned to the Lone Star State, and once again the AC is revving up and the state’s power grid is stretching more and more to meet the demand.
A new report out this week from the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows that while prices are going to be down for power across much of the county this summer, Texas is the one place where they’re expected to go up by a fairly significant amount.
If you live in the Northeast, your power bills are expected to be down nearly three percent this year, mostly due to cooler temperatures. Overall, the country’s electric bills on average are projected to be the cheapest in four years. But here in Texas, they’re projected to be up nearly two percent. Continue Reading →
But for Those Outside the Boom, It’s Business as Usual
It’s been over four years since a drilling company first drilled for (and hit) oil and gas in the Eagle Ford Shale. Since then, the region has become an economic engine for Texas, and to some degree, the country.
While the region has seen several downsides to the current drilling boom, especially from traffic, accidents and water demands, a look at what the boom has done for coffers in the region shows just how rapidly things have changed.
StateImpact Texas recently analyzed data from the State Comptroller’s Office, which records the sales tax allocation history for most of Texas’ cities and counties. The more sales tax a municipality collects, the more goods and services it has sold. The results painted a vivid picture of just how much money is flowing through the Eagle Ford region. Continue Reading →
The Galveston Seawall was built to protect a portion of the Island after the massive hurricane of 1900
Petrochemical companies are spending billions of dollars to expand facilities along the Texas Gulf Coast. Which means when the next hurricane hits, there will be just that much more expensive infrastructure that could be damaged by the massive amount of seawater — or “storm surge” — pushed inland by the hurricane.
“There’s more development, more industrial development, just more things that need to be protected,” said Helen Young, Deputy Commissioner of Coastal Resources at the Texas General Land Office.
After Hurricane Ike destroyed 8,000 homes and apartment units in Southeast Texas and did $10 billion in overall damage in Harris County alone, researchers said it would be cheaper in the long run to spend money now to build barriers to reduce storm surge flooding from future hurricanes. Continue Reading →
Photo by Earl Nottingham / Texas Parks and Wildlife
A Texas game warden at work.
‘The Dog Ate My Fishing Limit,’ Tubing at Night and Massive Drug Busts
There is no typical shift for Texas’ 532 game wardens, part of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
One day you’re issuing citations for lapsed watercraft registrations, the next you’re seizing nearly two tons of marijuana from boats on Lake Falcon.
That’s what happened earlier this week according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD). The pot bust, known as Operation Tilapia, was announced today along with the confiscation of over 10,000 feet of illegal gill net. This is their second major marijuana seizure of the year. In April, game wardens captured over $4 million worth of marijuana near the border.
But it’s not all drug busts for Texas’ wardens. Monitoring the 3 million people who hunt and fish in the state each year is more than a full-time job, and it can make for some unexpected situations, like the fisherman who blames his dog for violating catch limits.
In a speech in Washington today, President Barack Obama unveiled a plan to deal with climate change, one that focuses on reducing emissions from the energy sector, building up the nation’s renewable energy and increasing energy efficiency. It also calls for the country to prepare for the impacts of climate change, like rising sea levels, and for the U.S. to become a leader in addressing increasing carbon emissions.
And for the first time, Obama is proposing to limit carbon emissions from existing power plants, which is sure to generate controversy in Texas, with a large fleet of aging coal power plants and state officials ready to fight federal regulation at every turn.
The plan says:
“… Climate change is no longer a distant threat – we are already feeling its impacts across the country and the world. Last year was the warmest year ever in the contiguous United States and about one-third of all Americans experienced 10 days or more of 100-degree heat. The 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15 years. Asthma rates have doubled in the past 30 years and our children will suffer more asthma attacks as air pollution gets worse. And increasing floods, heat waves, and droughts have put farmers out of business, which is already raising food prices dramatically. These changes come with far-reaching consequences and real economic costs.”
You can read the 21-page plan in full after the jump: Continue Reading →
Longtime resident L.J. Honeycutt says he knows water rates will go up soon for his community.
SPICEWOOD, Texas — Many people who retired in Spicewood Beach came here for the water — the boating, fishing, and the summer days they imagined their grandkids would spend swimming in Lake Travis. In this small community less than an hour outside of Austin, the Fourth of July used to mean eating barbecue at picnic tables on the shore and launching motorboats and Jet Skis from the boat ramp. But as the holiday approaches this year, the town’s mood seems more worried than celebratory, and the boat ramp ends in the sand, not water.
In only three years, the lake has steadily dried to the point where it resembles a creek at its northern end. On some parts of the shore, fishing docks are beginning to slide toward the lakebed. Boat docks in nearby Chimney Cove sit high and dry, far from the shallow water at the bottom of the lake. Residents can drive their golf carts from the browned lakeside golf course down onto dusty trails that were once deep below the water.
Early last year, Spicewood Beach became the first Texas town to run out of water during the current drought. Since then, the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), which owned and managed the community’s water system, has been trucking approximately 32,500 gallons of water per day to the small community, and an extra 6,500-gallon truckload on weekends. Spicewood Beach has been under Stage Four watering restrictions for over a year, meaning that residents are not allowed to conduct any outdoor watering. Continue Reading →
Texas Parks and Wildlife Natural Resources Coodinator Greg Creacy looks at a pine tree burned in the historic wildfires of 2011. Oak trees grow behind him.
Take a trip to the lake at Bastrop State Park, and -at first glance- everything appears normal. The loblolly pine trees that line the shore are singed, but not decimated by the wildfires that struck there in 2011. A turtle suns itself on a rock, a lizard scurries into the underbrush.
Look closer and you see something strange. Large air bubbles are rising from the center of the lake. Erosion caused by those fires is depleting the water of oxygen, so park officials pump air into the water to help all those turtles, fish, and the rest survive.
Welcome to an ecosystem on life support.
In 2011, wildfires burned around 95 percent percent of the Park, which was part of the south westernmost loblolly pine forest in Texas. Now, officials are trying to restore that forest, and their efforts are revealing lessons about the land that could help after fires in other parts of the country.
A new report shows how rising sea levels, less water and a warming world will impact humanity.
The world is warming, sea levels are rising, and that isn’t likely to change anytime soon. In Texas, the heat waves of 2011 have been “explicitly attributed” to man’s impact on the climate, according to a 2012 World Bank report, ‘Turn Down the Heat.’ And the extreme drought of that same year — the driest year in recorded Texas history — was much more likely because of the changing climate.
A new report from the group this week follows up on that earlier one. It looks at the human cost of climate change, zeroing in on the areas of Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia:
“Regular food shortages in Sub-Saharan Africa … shifting rain patterns in South Asia leaving some parts under water and others without enough water for power generation, irrigation, or drinking … degradation and loss of reefs in South East Asia resulting in reduced fish stocks and coastal communities and cities more vulnerable to increasingly violent storms … these are but a few of the likely impacts of a possible global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius in the next few decades that threatens to trap millions of people in poverty.”
To break down the full report, the group put together an infographic to visualize that impact: Continue Reading →
Roy Thornhill Sr. (center) voices his concern as residents of the City of Blue Mound, Texas, gather at their community center, on Monday, March 4, 2013. The small North Texas City of Blue Mound held a town hall meeting on Monday, March 4, for its residents to sign a petition against what they say are unjustifiably high water rate increases.
Officials in the North Texas town of Blue Mound and the town’s representative in the state House say they are upset and baffled by Gov. Rick Perry’s veto of a bill that would have made it easier for Blue Mound to gain control of its water system.
The town’s water is provided by a private company, Monarch Utilities, a subsidiary of SouthWest Water Company. Officials in Blue Mound, which is north of Fort Worth and home to about 2,400 people, have complained that they have considerably higher water rates than the town’s neighbors. House Bill 1160, sponsored by State Rep. Charlie Geren, R-Fort Worth, would have made it easier for Blue Mound to obtain the right to run its system.
Perry vetoed the bill on Friday. “At a time when infrastructure is a focus for our growing state, this bill would provide a disincentive for development by private utilities,” the governor said in a statement accompanying the veto. He noted there is also “pending litigation directly related to this issue.” Continue Reading →
Update 6/23: The TPWD has now announced that zebra mussels have been found in Lewisville Lake northeast of Dallas. The United States Geological Survey discovered juvenile mussels near the lake’s dam. Lewisville Lake is the third Texas lake with an established zebra mussel population. Now, they may flow downstream on the Trinity River, which could threaten Lake Livingston and, through the Luce Bayou Project, Lake Houston.
Original story: Millions of tiny mollusks in two North Texas lakes will raise the cost of water in the region as soon as this summer, and experts say they could do the same in other parts of the state.
Texas is entering its peak season for the spread of zebra mussels, a small species of invasive bivalve, and populations in Lake Texoma and Lake Ray Roberts have already caused one water district to spend millions on a new pipeline.
Brian Van Zee, an Inland Fisheries Regional Director with Texas Parks and Wildlife, has fought zebra mussels since they first arrived in Texas in 2009. He says the trick is to stop them from colonizing a new body of water.
“Once you get them into a large reservoir like we’ve got here in Texas, there’s really no way of eradicating them,” Van Zee said.
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The heat has returned to the Lone Star State, and once again the AC is revving up and the state’s power grid is stretching more and more to meet the demand.
