Boy Scouts can earn merit badges in everything from Atomic Energy to Shotgun Shooting. But there has never been a badge for sustaining the planet, until now.
On July 15, the Boy Scouts of America introduced the Sustainability merit badge, a new award designed to teach scouts about conservation and natural resource management. The badge is particularly important since scouts will be required to get it in order to earn the Eagle Scout rank, the organization’s highest award.
Boy Scouts can earn merit badges in over 100 different topics. To earn a badge, scouts must learn certain skills and competencies related to that particular subject.
For the Sustainability badge, scouts have to develop and implement plans to reduce their family’s water and electric usage. They also must learn about topics such as climate change, species decline, and population concerns.
view of the dry bed of the E.V. Spence Reservoir in Robert Lee, Texas October 28, 2011.
Recent rains have brought some relief to some parts of Texas afflicted by drought, especially around Central Texas: reservoir levels are a little higher, and the moisture has greened vegetation that was previously tinderbox-dry, potentially reducing the risk of wildfires this summer.
Now for some bad news: national meteorologists expect the drought to continue or worsen through late summer and early fall in Texas, and ocean patterns are troublingly similar to those during the “drought of record” in the 1950s.
Today, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its latest drought forecast. It predicts the drought will persist or intensify in most of Texas from July through October. But there is one exception — in Far West Texas, August and September rains are expected to bring some relief to an area from Midland to El Paso, according to NOAA meteorologist Victor Murphy. Continue Reading →
The Department of Energy released a report recently looking at how climate change and extreme weather could make our power supplies more vulnerable. Given that it’s the nation’s leader in energy production, Texas was prominently featured.
The report looks at both current and future threats to the energy sector from climate change. There are three major trends, it says:
Air and water temperatures are increasing
Water availability is decreasing in certain regions
Storms, instances of flooding, and sea levels are increasing in frequency and intensity
Though the report stressed how different regions of the country are connected by the energy sector, StateImpact Texas found five key takeaways that relate to Texas. Let’s take a look: Continue Reading →
Jefferson County Court at Law Judge Tom Rugg listens to arguments in a property rights case.
This is part three of a three-part series devoted to looking at efforts to overhaul eminent domain in Texas and what may come next for landowners, pipeline companies, and the oil and gas industry. Read Part One here and Part Two here.
At the O’Keefe’s farm outside of Beaumont, Texas, Dick and his sister Margaret O’Keefe stood by their front door on a muggy day this summer and watch a truck pull up the long dirt road into their neighbor’s field.
The truck was headed to work on the Crosstex NGL pipeline. This is a project that had declared itself a “common carrier,” a pipeline with the right to claim private property.
But after the pipeline was in the ground, a Beaumont judge found otherwise.
“They just claim it, and it’s up to the individual landowners to challenge them,” Dick O’Keefe said. “That’s where I think the state could do a better job of policing what the pipeline companies are doing.”
For landowners like Dick O’Keefe, lawmakers’ failure to create a system in which pipeline companies prove their right to claim land is deeply frustrating. The pipeline industry was also upset by inaction at the legislature, but for different reasons. It wanted rules that freed it from the prospect of multiple landowner lawsuits.
Colorado now has what the drilling industry there calls “the most rigorous statewide mandatory groundwater sampling and monitoring rules in the United States.” Wyoming is considering similar regulations to make oil and gas well drillers test the groundwater on nearby property before they begin to drill.
Texas has over 800 rigs at work, far more than any other state, but has no such requirements for what’s called baseline water testing.
“I think it is a good idea to do baseline studies instead of figuring out ways to blame something or someone for something they might do. It might be better to figure what we have in our own backyard already,” said Don Van Nieuwenhuise, a former oil company geologist and now Director of Petroleum Geosience at the University of Houston.
Efforts to overhaul land rights failed in this years regular legislative session.
This is part two of a three-part series devoted to looking at efforts to overhaul eminent domain in Texas and what may come next for landowners, pipeline companies, and the oil and gas industry. Read Part One here.
At the outset of this year’s regular legislative session, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle filed a handful of bills to change how pipeline companies can take land in Texas. While the bills tackled the issue differently, they had one thing in common: they sought to move some of the debate over a pipeline’s use of condemnation from county courthouses to state agencies. In the end it was that commonality that became a sticking point in the debate over Texas land rights.
Along the way, some very big names in politics and industry got involved.
Right now, a company that wants to lay a pipeline in Texas can check a box on a form declaring itself a “common carrier.” The idea is that it will provide its services for hire to transport oil and gas. It’s that role  – which some say makes it similar to a utility – that gives it the right to take land.
Jake White, a Jefferson Country farmer, looks at a section of the Crosstex NGL pipeline before it is buried under his field.
This is part one of a three-part series devoted to looking at efforts to overhaul eminent domain in Texas and what may come next for landowners, pipeline companies, and the oil and gas industry. Read Part Two here.
At Margaret O’Keefe’s farm, outside of Beaumont in East Texas, they grow high quality Bermuda grass. The fields are flat, vibrant light green and dotted with crawfish burrows. They’re surrounded by woods of a darker, richer green.
The land has deep significance to the family. O’Keefe inherited it from her mother who divided it among her eight children.
“She used to call it ‘Enchanted Valley,'” O’Keefe reminisced on a muggy summer afternoon while driving through her fields. “Sometimes it rains here and it won’t rain anywhere else. And sometimes it rains outside of here and rain never touches here.”
Her ‘Enchanted Valley’ also lies in the path of the Crosstex NGL Pipeline. That’s a 130-mile, multimillion-dollar project to funnel natural gas liquids from Texas to processing plants in Louisiana.
All across the state, a rush is on to build up infrastructure to transport the vast reserves of oil and gas unleashed by hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Pipelines are the preferred method. But, as is the case at the O’Keefe’s farm, the plans of the pipeline companies often clash with the desires of landowners. Continue Reading →
The most recent Texas drought map released by the US drought monitor on Tuesday.
Texas is now in its third year of drought—but is the end in sight, or are conditions getting worse?
Far more of the state is in extreme or exceptional drought now than in July 2012. The Panhandle and the Southeast Texas coast, which are important regions for ranching and agriculture, have been especially hard-hit. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, over 90 percent of Texas is in drought, and about 35 percent is in extreme drought.
To prevent water shortages, 665 public water systems have implemented mandatory water restrictions, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. In many rural areas, farm and pastureland soils are dry, and grasshoppers, which eat crops, have become a problem. (The insects’ populations increase during droughts because the fungus that naturally limits their growth does not grow without moisture—although an extreme drought can prevent grasshopper eggs from hatching.)
The drought is not just a Texas problem. Most of the American West is in drought. The worst-affected regions are the state of New Mexico, and the entire Ogallala Aquifer region, stretching from the Texas Panhandle to Nebraska.
Federal agencies announced Wednesday that Shell Oil has agreed to pay $115 million to install pollution controls at their refinery and chemical plant in Deer Park, Texas to resolve alleged violations of the Clean Air Act. On top of that, the company will pay a $2.6 million civil penalty, and spend another million installing a monitoring system to detect benzene levels at the edges of the plant, which are near a neighborhood and school. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says those levels will be available to the public online.
The major spending for pollution controls will be on reducing and cleaning up flaring, a process where gases are burned off. Â As StateImpact Texas has reported, flaring of waste near fenceline communities like the one in Deer Park is suspected to have detrimental health effects and in some cases create dangerous conditions. The EPA says Shell will “recover and recycle” waste gases (it isn’t clear how much), which the agency says is the first time a chemical refinery has agreed to do so.
EPA says the new agreement will reduce pollution and carbon dioxide emissions.
“This case is part of EPA’s nationwide enforcement effort to protect fenceline neighborhoods by significantly reducing toxic pollution from flares and making information about pollution quickly available to affected communities,” said Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, in a statement.
This year, students at Rice University in Houston developed a shoe that can charge a battery—and may someday be able to recharge cell phones and pacemakers. At Rice and other universities, electronic clothing (aka “smart clothes”) is being developed that has the potential to change how people monitor their health, protect themselves from disease, and address a variety of other problems.
Rice’s generator shoe is still a prototype. The shoe cannot yet produce enough usable power for portable electronics, and it is made impractical by a clanking metal bar around the heel. In the fall, however, a new group of engineering students will begin refining the existing model.
But some electronic clothes are closer to becoming part of Americans’ wardrobes—if their inventors can find corporate partners. Electronic fibers already developed by researchers at Cornell University in New York can detect disease and radiation, control the release of pesticides, kill bacteria, and capture hazardous gases. Cornell has filed patents for these fibers, and in the not-so-distant future, some of them may be found in medical clinics, disaster zones, and even ordinary clothing stores. Continue Reading →
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