Mose Buchele is the Austin-based broadcast reporter for StateImpact. He has been on staff at KUT 90.5 in Austin since 2009, covering local and state issues. Mose has also worked as a blogger on politics and an education reporter at his hometown paper in Western Massachusetts. He holds masters degrees in Latin American Studies and Journalism from UT Austin.
US President Barack Obama addresses a crowd of supporters on stage on election night November 6, 2012 in Chicago, Illinois.
Even before the president’s State of the Union Address was over last night, some environmental and renewable energy groups were sending out congratulatory emails.
And while some observed that the president’s proposals lacked specifics, most agreed that he was sounding a bolder tone on global climate change.
“Climate change, it’s no longer a forbidden topic,” Michael Webber, co-chair of UT Austin’s Clean Energy Incubator and head of the Webber Energy Group told StateImpact Texas.
State Sen. Judith Zaffirini (D-Laredo) is a founding member of the Eagle Ford Shale Legislative Caucus.
The way State Senator Judith Zaffirini tells it, the idea first came from a constituent.
The Laredo Democrat was hosting a legislative summit in her hometown when “somebody just rose from the audience during a Q&A and suggested this.”
And so the Eagle Ford Shale Legislative Caucus was born.
As most Texans know by now, new drilling technology has spurred an unprecedented oil and gas boom across the South Texas Eagle Ford shale formation. Zaffirini’s bi-partisan group of over 20 state Senators and Representatives hopes to guide that transformation.
The group held its first formal event at the old State Supreme Court Chambers Wednesday at the Capitol.
State Rep. Lyle Larson (R-San Antonio) says drought restriction enforcement should be uniform throughout the state.
Two billion dollars is a lot of money. It’s also how much some state lawmakers want to spend to protect Texas from future water shortages.
A lot has been made of that price tag. But when three state lawmakers sat down with StateImpact Texas at a forum in Austin last night, they also talked rulemaking.
State Rep. Lyle Larson, a Republican from San Antonio, said one thing the lege should tackle this session is how drought restrictions are enforced across the state. Â He pointed out that in 2011, when almost all of Texas was in drought, some counties mandated conservation, while others just sort of let it slide.
“And so we’ve gotta fix that so everybody plays nice,” Larson said. “One county, they’re not watering their yards. They’ve got their car washes turned off, and 100 yards away they’ve got a community that’s got their car washes going.” Continue Reading →
Update, Jan. 29: On January 29, very early in the morning, another quake struck Timpson, measuring 2.8, according to the USGS.
Original story, Jan. 25:Â A magnitude 4.1 earthquake struck about two miles Northwest of Timpson,Texas at around 1:00 AM this morning, shaking doors open, knocking pictures off walls, and causing at least one chimney to reportedly collapse in the small East Texas community. You can see where the quake struck in the interactive map above. It occurred three miles below the surface.
“It was like a rumbling, shaking, knocking-you-out-of-the-bed type feeling. It was very, very intense,” Timpson Municipal Court Clerk Paula Mullins told StateImpact Texas by phone. Mullins said she had heard of a neighbor’s chimney falling over, but no reports of injuries.
Quakes have become a semi-regular feature of life in the area lately. The strongest recent quake registered a 4.8 in May.
Researchers say previous quakes in the area have been caused by the use of disposal wells to store waste form oil and gas drilling. Timpson sits in the drilling area of the Haynesville Shale, one of several areas in Texas experiencing a drilling boom.
“At the moment, we are actually linking them [earthquakes] to injection wells that are located close to where the earthquakes are in the Timpson area,” Dr. Wesley Brown, an Associate Professor in the Department of Geology at Stephen F. Austin University told the regional newspaper Light and Champion in December. “We have one a little bit to the north, and [the wells] are north and south of each other,” said Dr. Brown. “The volume, especially for the one in the south, is up over 200,000 barrels of water per month.”
Funding, like water, can be diverted or even dry up.
The Texas State Water Plan has been described as a $53 billion dollar wish list. It’s full of local projects, proposed by regional water districts. They are meant to be enough to secure water for Texas for 50 years. But those projects remain largely unprioritized and unfunded.
Now state legislators say they are serious about funding the plan, but what projects may receive money remains a mystery.
On Wednesday two lawmakers, Senator Troy Fraser (R-Horshoe Bay) and Rep. Allan Ritter (R-Nederland) provided some hints at a Public Forum Hosted by the Texas Association of Realtors, the Austin Board of Realtors and the group H204TX.
First off, funding.
Both Ritter and Fraser want to pull $2 Billion dollars from the state’s rainy day fund. The state would give that money out as loans so that regional entities can jumpstart their water projects. Without money from the fund, Senator Fraser says the whole thing would probably fall apart. Continue Reading →
Feeling the Heat: President Obama said the country had a duty to act on climate change in his speech.
Citing “the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms” President Barack Obama put tackling climate change on a list of goals for his second presidential term today.
In an inaugural speech that served to set an agenda for the next four years, the president said that failure to respond to the threat of climate change “would betray our children and future generations.”
The issue of climate change was noticeably absent during much of the presidential campaign. One debate between the president and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney marked the first time in 24 years in which global warming was not mentioned even once.
Photo Courtesy of the USDA. http://www.flickr.com/photos/usdagov/7732742494/in/photostream/
USDA workers inspect an unnamed beef processing plant in Plainview, Texas in 1991.
A beef processing plant in Plainview, Texas will close its doors today, citing a dwindling cattle supply in the region. Wichita, Kansas-based Cargill Beef said in a press release that about 2,000 jobs will be lost. The supply issue was brought on primarily by “years of drought in Texas and the Southern Plains states,” the company says.
“The U.S. cattle herd is at its lowest level since 1952,” Cargill president John Keating said in the statement. “Increased feed costs resulting from the prolonged drought, combined with herd liquidations by cattle ranchers, are severely and adversely contributing to the challenging business conditions we face as an industry.”
A rainier-than-expected winter and spring last year prompted some to think the Texas cattle industry might rebound, but the closure underlines the long-term effects that the years long dry spell has had on Texas agriculture.
“You can’t just bring cattle back the day it rains. You have to let grasses regrow and your forage base reestablish before you can bring cattle in,” Travis Miller, a scientist with Texas A&M’s Agrilife Extension Service, told KUT radio.
Still image taken from video posted to Flikr Creative Commons by Waifer X. http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/2658307394/
A seismograph measures feet stomping nearby at the Thomas A. Jaggar Museum, Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, HI.
StateImpact Texas’ Terrence Henry contributed reporting to this article.
Close to midnight last September 29th, the Tarrant County 9-1-1 call center lit up with phone calls from outside its usual service area. The ground was shaking again, and people in nearby Irving, Texas had overwhelmed their own 9-1-1 system.
“What’s going on are we having tremors?” one woman asked.
On the call, obtained by StateImpact Texas in an open records request, a child is heard yelling in the background.
“It was an earthquake, Yes ma’am. Apparently [Irving’s 911] phones are being inundated with calls and they’re overflowing into our police department,” said the operator.
Tom Ellis has been making mandolins in Austin since the 1970s. He says the restrictions on importing and exporting some rare tone woods have had a chilling effect on small traditional manufacturers.
Mandolins, guitars and banjos line the walls of the Fiddlers Green Music Shop in Austin, Texas. Every instrument has its own unique sound, something that depends on craftsmanship and musicianship and something else: wood.
“This is a Dreadnought. This would be in the style of a Martin, this has an Adirondack spruce top. And then Indian Rosewood back and sides. It’s all solid wood,” says employee Ben Hodges, as he tours the shop floor.
Each year, thousands of trees are harvested for the tonal properties of their wood, some of them so rare that they’re in danger of going extinct. But the law, created to help save rare species of trees, has had an unexpected effect on the musical industry. Ever since the U.S. government put endangered woods on its list of items restricted for import, some guitar makers, sellers, and even musicians have worried that they could be breaking the law simply by owning or trading in wooden instruments. Continue Reading →
Photo courtesy of dshortey via Flickr's Creative Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dshortey/
The Qudrantid Meteor Shower will be visible early Thursday Morning before sunrise.
Update: If you’re reading these words the peak of the Quadrantid Meteor Shower has passed. But if you missed it, you can check out this slideshow or check out the video embedded below the jump.
Earlier: If you didn’t see any fireworks on New Year’s Eve, you might want to look to the skies tonight (well, technically very early tomorrow). That’s when the Quadrantid Meteor Shower will reach its peek visibility for the year.
Between 3 a.m. and sunrise Thursday morning, as many as 120 meteors an hour fall to earth in the shower. That could make for quite a show, but there’s a problem for people who want to watch in Texas. Actually, there are two of them.
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