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.
Environmental groups filed a petition with the Public Utility Commission of Texas to ramp up solar and geothermal power production in the state.
While state officials and representatives from the energy industry met at a conference to talk about the future of Texas renewables, environmental groups filed a petition charging the state’s Public Utility Commission with dragging its feet on solar and geothermal energy.
At the heart of the petition is a question that’s come up before: whether the PUC is mandated by the state legislature to reach renewable energy “targets.” Environmental groups say it is, and by not complying the PUC is depriving Texas of cleaner power. Sierra Club lawyer Casey Roberts says in 2007 lawmakers amended the Renewable Portfolio Standard, so that private and public electric utilities would comply with the renewable goals.
“That’s a clear indication that the legislature believes that that’s something to comply with,” said Casey in a conference call with reporters.
The PUC has not seen it that way. At the conference today, former PUC Commissioner and current Texas Railroad Commissioner Barry Smitherman fielded a question about the rule. He said the last time it came up before the PUC “we didn’t feel like it was a mandate we felt like it was guidance.”
Hundreds of people turned out at a recent public hearing in Round Rock to discuss the listing of four Central Texas Salamanders as Endangered Species.
When it comes to the battle over what qualifies as an endangered species, the script practically writes itself. The government proposes adding new animals to the list; business interests and land owners fight the proposal, fearing the financial impact; environmentalists rally around the critters, arguing for sustainability.
These days, it’s Central Texas’ turn. The creatures in question? Four tiny salamanders.
On a recent evening in the town of Round Rock in Williamson County, hundreds of people packed into a nondescript convention center just off the interstate to talk amphibians. Round Rock is a suburban Austin community, the second-fastest growing metro region in the country, and most of the people at the public hearing opposed listing the creatures.
State officials, conservationists, and representatives from donor groups marked the start of a tree replanting campaign by watering seedlings in Bastrop State Park.
Well-wishers and reporters sweated under the late summer sun recently in Bastrop State Park, as officials announced the start of a tree planting campaign for a forest that was 95 percent destroyed by fire last year.
Texas Parks and Wildlife hopes to raise millions of dollars to fund a vast tree replanting effort. For many, that campaign marks a new beginning in the life of the park.
“You know the good thing about today and what this kind of symbolizes is that we’re through looking back. We’re looking forward. And that’s what planting a pine seedling is all about,” Texas Forest Service Director Tom Boggus told the crowd.
But as the speakers gathered for a photo-op to water the seedlings, the past wasn’t really that far behind. The fact that the seedlings were there at allcame down to a very close call about a year ago, when the Forest Service had almost thrown away all the seeds that are now so essential to the park’s recovery. Continue Reading →
Greg Creacy, with Texas Parks and Wildlife, says the wildfires in Bastrop revealed hidden structures and historic roads.
When the Rock House Fire struck Far West Texas in 2011, it didn’t just leave over 300,000 acres of scorched earth in its wake.
It also left bones.
The bleached white bones of wild animals, including the disappearing Pronghorn of the Trans-Pecos, were scattered across the ashes of the high desert, recalls wildlife management graduate student Justin Hoffman. Generations of dead creatures that had previously lain hidden in the tall grass were suddenly revealed, painting a stark picture of how many had died in the previous years from drought and other still-unknown causes.
“Being out here in the field a lot more than I ever have before, you start seeing that the die-off, it’s a lot more significant than I could ever have imagined,” Hoffman says, touring the site of the fire a year later.
Rotting corn damaged by severe drought on a farm near Bruceville, Indiana last week. Record heat throughout the US farm belt states have curtailed crop production and likely will send corn and soybean prices to record highs, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
It’s a sad irony that just as much of Texas has pulled out of exceptional drought, the rest of the country has entered into it. But even though the severely dry weather is now outside of Texas’ borders, that doesn’t mean the state isn’t feeling the effects.
Remember last year when the Texas drought forced ranchers to sell off their herds or ship cattle to parts of the country where there was enough hay to feed them?
Well, times have changed.
“A lot of those cattle that went up north last year are now heading back south,” says Bexar County Agrilife Extension agent Brian Davis.
When you look at a map of the drought in the U.S. this summer, it almost looks like last year’s weather pattern is turned on its head. The entire middle part of the country is suffering through something much like what Texas suffered through last year. And what do they grow in the middle part of the country? Well, among other things, corn. And it turns out that corn is key to understanding how drought in the Midwest is affecting Texas. Not to sound too insensitive about it, but, in a certain way, their loss is our gain. Continue Reading →
Texas was ranked tenth among states that released the most toxic emissions from power plants in 2010, and first among states in mercury pollution. The report says emissions have increased three percent since the previous year, and takes aim at lawmakers, many of whom can be found in Texas, who have fought tougher emissions standards from the Environmental Protection Agency.
All told, electricity generation comprises 25 percent of toxic emissions in Texas according to the report, with the chemical sector responsible for 40 percent. While the state is listed among the most polluting, no individual Texas power plant was among the top ten most polluting in the country. The report was compiled using data released annually from the EPA.
Photo from Nan Palmero via Flikr http://www.flickr.com/photos/nanpalmero
San Antonio is considered a leader in municipal water policy, and with much of the country in drought other cities may start taking notice.
With families picnicking, children playing, and ducks quacking along the river, visitors to San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park on a recent afternoon would be forgiven for forgetting the drought that’s plagued Texas for well over a year.
That is, until they hear the pumps.
Tucked discretely behind the Witte Museum, the water pumps produce a steady hum, churning treated waste water into the river and allowing it to flow with the strength of a waterway in a far wetter place. The water re-use system keeps the San Antonio River rolling, and keeps people visiting the popular River Walk.
That’s right, this park’s beauty is brought, in part, by water that was recently flushed down the toilets of the Alamo City. Continue Reading →
Texas isn't the only place that gets a visit from Saharan dust. In this photo, dust and mist from the Sirocco, a Mediterranean wind that comes from the Sahara, obscure the moon above the Spanish Canary island of Tenerife on March 9, 2011.
If the sky looked a little hazier here in Texas over the weekend, it’s not necessarily air pollution you were seeing. Rather it was likely the result of extreme weather a half a world away.
Every now and again, massive sandstorms kick up in the Saharan Desert. That would normally go unnoticed in Central Texas, except when the dust from those storms is picked up by Atlantic trade winds, as it is around this time every year.
“And these trade winds will actually transport the dust all the way across the Atlantic all the way through the Caribbean, all the way through the Gulf of Mexico, and they then end up in Texas,” says Bob Rose, chief meteorologist for the Lower Colorado River Authority. He says that’s what happened this past weekend.
Now, to be clear, the dust we’re talking about is only a fraction of the circumference of a human hair. So that’s why we didn’t see a sandstorm of Lawrence of Arabia proportions. Continue Reading →
Land set aside as part of the USDA's Conservation Reserve Program will be used to produce hay under the new plan.
Farmers and ranchers will be allowed to graze cattle and grow hay on land typically reserved for conservation under an initiative announced by the US Department of Agriculture on Monday. US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack told reporters that the move aims to increase the food supply for cattle in parts of the country gripped by this year’s drought .
Under the initiative, land that is part of the USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program [CRP] in counties designated as drought-stricken or abnormally dry can be used to produce cattle feed. That’s an expansion of an emergency drought plan announced last week that opened up CRP land in areas stricken by severe drought.
“All counties in the country which are currently on the drought monitor as being somewhere between abnormally dry to extremely dry will now be included in the emergency haying and grazing effort,” Vilsack told reporters.
A man herds cattle at the West Auction in the winter of 2012.
“There was nothing we could do.”
It’s a phrase that rancher Jerry Abel returns to often when talking about the the day that his cattle dropped dead on his ranch. Listening to him talk about it, one is struck by the sense of powerlessness he felt watching the animals succumb.
Abel raises cattle for rodeo events, and it was after a roping exercise last May that he set his cows to pasture.
“The field adjacent to their pen, it wasn’t really good enough because of the drought for haying,” Abel told StateImpact Texas. “But there was quite a bit of grass on there. So we decided we could just turn the cattle out on it so they could graze some.”
It was about two hours later that the cows started to bellow. Abel and his trainer rushed back to see what was the matter.
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