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.
Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras are seperated by the Rio Grande and the international border. Neither barrier stops air pollution from traveling from one side to the other.
At first glance it might seem like good news. Carbon emissions in the US have dropped in recent years. Texas, the country’s biggest CO2 polluter, has started turning away from coal as a source of electricity. But that doesn’t mean the coal is staying in the ground. More and more often it’s shipped to other countries with weak records of environmental enforcement.
That trend is especially troubling for communities on the Texas-Mexico border.
In the rural parts of Maverick County all sorts of things still manage to move unhindered between Mexico and the US. Some welcome, some not. Residents like Rosa O’Donnell recall a day last year when the air was filled with smoke from agricultural fires.
“All the neighbors, we were out on the road driving, trying to drive back and forth down the road until the deputy stopped and said ‘don’t worry the fires are in Mexico,’ O’Donell remembered recently. “Because we were worried.”
These days, smoke from burning fields seems like the least of their concerns. For around 20 years a site for a strip mine has sat essentially unused next door to O’Donnell’s property. The Mexican owners of the Dos Republicas mine are now ready to start digging. They want to ship coal to Mexico and burn it in power plants outside the City of Piedras Negras, right across the border. And while some people in Maverick County welcome the jobs that could bring, many, including city and county governments, are vehemently opposed to it. Continue Reading →
But what about making the most of the water we already have?
Lyle Larson, Texas State Representative for San Antonio, has a plan that involves much more than a rain dance. Called the Emergency Water Act, the proposal contains a set of guidelines for state-wide desalination, cloud-seeding, and aquifer storage. Modeled after tactics adopted in the past by equally rain-strapped governments in Australia, India, and Argentina, the plan aims to offset the drought by immediately revamping the state’s water infrastructure.
I sat down recently to ask Rep. Larson about the inspiration behind the Emergency Water Act and his vision for an economically-developed, technologically-innovative, and above all, wetter, Texas.
Q: Could you explain what this plan is about and what motivated it?
A: The Emergency Water Plan involved looking at what Texas can do if we experience the drought of 2011 in 2012. All the climatologists are indicating that 2012 will be as dry or dryer than 2011. Continue Reading →
Photo by Flickr user Sharon Drummond/Creative Commons
Deregulation turns ten years old in Texas this year.
Anniversaries are horrible things to forget, so here’s one that you might have let slip by. This month marks ten years of de-regulation in the Texas electricity market.
But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing for rate payers since then, according to one new study.
A typical electric customer paid $3,000 in added costs over the last ten years because of deregulation, according to a history commissioned by the Texas Coalition for Affordable Power. The report estimates that Texans spent $11 billion cumulatively because of higher rates. Continue Reading →
The field behind Robert Cervenka’s ranch in the small town of Riesel, Texas is scattered with historic equipment. There are horse-drawn plows and pickup trucks from bygone eras. Want to know what a 1954 John Deer tractor looks like? He’ll be happy to oblige. Cervenka’s been ranching since he was eight years old.
And now he’s eighty-one. “At my age I don’t want to buy any new tractors or anything,” he says, chuckling.
But not everything here is antique. A few years ago, much to his chagrin, Cervenka got a brand new coal-fired power plant as a neighbor, right next door to his ranch. The Sandy Creek Power Station was set to produce 925 megawatts of electricity for this energy hungry state, enough to power an estimated 900,000 homes. The chimney from the plant rises 360 feet in the air, higher than the Taj Mahal.
Cervenka opposed it, but in the end he watched from his field as it was built, and watched as plumes of steam and smoke first rose from it last fall. “They were what’s called cooking the boilers,” he recalls. “They were heating them up and making steam and trying to blow out all the pipes and tubing that may had welders slag or tools or anything in the pipes. And then one day, all of a sudden, it quit.”
It’s still not clear exactly what happened at the plant the day it quit on Oct. 17th last year. Continue Reading →
Then, there’s the slow burn. It’s the news story that doesn’t initially inspire much interest, but gradually attracts a steady amount of traffic. It’s the tortoise in the race.
Recently, the tortoise has been a Tiger Prawn.
When I first reported on the arrival of foot-long Asian Tiger Prawns in the Gulf of Mexico, fewer readers took noticed than I had hoped. But over time, the piece has provoked some comments and continued to attract visitors. For all of you concerned or curious about this invasive species and it’s impact on the Gulf ecosystem, here are several theories of how the prawn first established itself in the Gulf of Mexico:
Thanks, South Carolina. In 1988, an accident at an fish farming facility in South Carolina inadvertently released pond-raised tiger prawns into the ocean where they were caught off shore for years afterward. “Like a lot of introduced species, they got out, everybody was concerned, but nature took its course and we never saw them after 91,” says Texas Parks and Wildlife Leslie Hartman, “until again after 2006.” Hartman is participating in genetic testing to see if the Tiger Prawns that are now showing up in shrimping nets in the Gulf could be related to those South Carolinian escapees. Continue Reading →
Marjorie Farabee was stopped from bringing her wagon to the steps of the capitol. But she did deliver around 100,000 signatures collected online to protest the burro killings.
Words matter in life. And the case of the the wild donkeys of West Texas is no exception.
If you call them “Wild Burros” you could be inclined to see them as scrappy survivors, emblems of the Old West. If you call them “Feral Donkeys,” well, then they sound like pests that need to be exterminated.
In Texas, what we have here is a failure to communicate.
If you were near the State Capitol Wednesday, you got a first-hand glimpse of the fight heating up between the two camps. Six donkeys (including “Miss Abby,” a Donkey with her own blog), and about a dozen protesters were there to deliver a message to the Texas Governor: “Stop killing the wild burros of Texas.” Continue Reading →
The 380 acre Webberville Solar Farm outside of Austin will power 5000 homes.
A ribbon-cutting ceremony Friday marked the official opening of the Webberville Solar Farm, an array of 127,000 solar panels set to provide enough electricity to power 5,000 homes in the Austin area. The farm will be the largest of its kind in Texas, and is the largest solar project of any public power utility in the United States, according to Austin Energy CEO Larry Weiss.
Politicians, green energy advocates and industry representatives were on hand, hoping the event would showcase the promise of renewable energy after a turbulent year for the solar industry. Continue Reading →
Photo Courtesy of Jim Gossen, Louisiana Foods - Global Seafood Source
An Asian Tiger Prawn caught last September near Little Lake in Larose, LA
The Asian Tiger Prawn can grow over a foot long. It’s a species from the Western Pacific Ocean that first showed up off the coast of Alabama in 2006, when a single, solitary prawn was reported. If the story ended there, we wouldn’t have much to talk about.
But it doesn’t.
“The next year in 2007, you had some pop up in Louisiana just one or two, in 2008, three or four, [and in] 2009 a couple,” Leslie Hartman, the Matagorda Bay Ecosystem leader with Texas Parks and Wildlife, told Stateimpact Texas.
Governor Rick Perry will continue campaigning for president despite his fifth-place loss in Iowa. But with his presidential prospects diminished, the governor might start wondering what challenges await him in Texas if he doesn’t end up in the White House.
His underwhelming campaign performance also has political analysts wondering whether the governor will be equipped to face those challenges.
“Perry’s absence doesn’t do him good politically in the state,” University of Texas at Austin professor Bruce Buchanan told StateImpact Texas.”People want the Governor on the scene when there are problems and crisis and he has not been, and his critics will call that to his attention.” Continue Reading →
Texas just capped a year drier than a week-old kolache, with record heat and rainfall totals a good foot or more below where they should have been. Some towns have actually come close to running out of water. And while above-average December rains helped much of the state, they didn’t do enough to restore water levels in lakes, rivers and reservoirs. The main lakes that supply Central Texas with water are at a combined 37% of capacity. If rains don’t come in the spring, the situation could become far worse.
But one desert city suffering through the drought has plenty of water left.
El Paso has, by its own estimates, enough water underground to last it at least a hundred years. Tonight Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will visit El Paso to highlight how the city has found innovative ways to source and conserve water. El Paso could stop getting water from the Rio Grande tomorrow and still be okay well into the next century.
So how did this desert city end up with an abundance of water, and what lessons can be applied from El Paso to the rest of the state? I spoke with Congressman Silvestre Reyes, who will be hosting the visit, today to find out. He was part of a group that led the city’s efforts to secure a potable future:
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