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.
The endangered golden-cheeked warbler could be at even greater risk, depending on what climate change does to its habitat.
Over three hundred species of birds are at risk from climate change in North America, according to a report from the National Audubon Society. Many of them can be found in Texas.
Brian Trusty, Executive Director of Audubon Texas, says the study has identified over one hundred Texas species that run the risk of losing significant habitat due to climate change (see below for details on this list).
These are birds species that “will see a significant change and or reduction of the climate suitable habitat over the next 10, 40 or 60 years,”  Trusty tells StateImpact Texas.
The report used projected migration paths to determine the fate of bird species. It also pulled from bird “census” data, like the Christmas Bird Count, to determine traditional nesting ranges, and preferred weather conditions of bird species.
“We were utilizing over a hundred years collected from data to pinpoint the suitable climate areas of the home ranges of those species,” says Trusty.
Climatologists could one day predict the viability of soil by measuring and forecasting moisture levels.
A couple years ago UT Professor Zong-Liang Yang was at a conference on extreme weather in the Netherlands. It was 2012, just one year after the worst single-year drought in Texas history.
When it came to discussing extreme weather, Texas seemed like a good place to be. Â He suggested to colleagues that their next conference should take place in the Lone Star State.
Two years later, he and dozens of some of the world’s leading climate experts from 10 different countries have descended upon UT-Austin to talk about improving our ability to forecast and prepare for extreme weather. They seem confident that they’re making progress.
That might come as a surprise considering how often meteorologists appear to get it wrong, but Yang points out that forecasting is a science that’s made massive leaps in the past fifty years.
Austin's Decker Lake is used for electricity production and recreations. But it could be re-purposed for municipal water use.
The funny thing about Walter E. Long Lake: most people don’t know it exists.
The lake, tucked into a rural-feeling part of North East Austin is big, by Austin standards. It can hold more water than Austin’s two central city Lakes -Lake Austin and Lady Bird Lake- combined. It was created to host a power plant, which it’s done for for nearly 50 years. That’s how it got its other name: Decker Lake.
But Last week, Austin’s city council voted on a plan to wean Austin off Decker Power Plant electricity, opting to shutter the plant to lower citywide emissions. If that happens, the lake could serve as Austin’s a new city reservoir.
“It’s a body of water most people don’t know about. Some people use it, you’ll see fishing boats out there on the lake,” says Sharlene Leurig, who works at Ceres, a non-profit specializing in sustainability. “But for the most part it’s the unappreciated stepchild of the lakes we have here in Austin.”
After a surge in earthquakes across Texas over the last several years, state regulators are considering their options.
After a surge in earthquakes across Texas over the last several years, state regulators are considering their options. On Monday, the House Subcommittee on Seismic Activity heard some of them.
Many of the quakes are likely caused by wastewater disposal wells, where the liquid waste from oil and gas drilling is pumped back into the ground. The Railroad Commission of Texas is the agency that regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, and it’s proposing new rules for those wells.
David Craig Pearson, the Railroad Commission’s staff seismologist, told lawmakers that under the new rules, companies applying for a disposal well permit would need to report whether there was a history of earthquakes in the area.
The company would also need to estimate how much pressure the wells would be putting on nearby fault lines after a 10-year time span.
The proposed rules also give Railroad Commission staff the power to limit how waste is injected into a well that could be causing earthquakes, or shut the well down completely. Pearson said that would be an option of last resort, however.
The LCRA operates the six dams on the Colorado River that form the scenic Highland Lakes of Central Texas. Photo by Reshma Kirpalani for KUT News and Reporting Texas
Water from the Highland Lakes is important to everyone in Central Texas — from urban Austinites to rural rice farmers downstream. Wednesday, the board of the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) was set to vote on a much-delayed plan to manage that water, but the authority’s board postponed that vote to gather more public input.
The proposed plan, which would ensure that more water stays in the lakes in times of drought, is widely supported by upstream stakeholders, namely the City of Austin. But it’s unpopular downstream with agricultural interests that would likely see themselves cut off from water more often. The plan must ultimately be approved by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ).
The LCRA board postponed the vote on the plan for thirty days until Sept. 17 to get more public input. But the board made it clear it doesn’t want to change the “framework of the plan” — including a provision to maintain “above 600,000 acre-feet of water” in the lakes. Under previous water plans, water could be sent to agricultural users even if storage dropped below that level.
Texas is getting more oil out of the ground than it has since the great boom of the 1970s. And it’s not alone: the oil fields of North Dakota are, for the first time ever, producing over one million barrels a day. Across the country, the boom has lead to predictions that the U.S. will overtake even Saudi Arabia in oil production by the end of the year. But is all that drilling helping American consumers at the pump?
A quick look at the numbers before the long weekend would indicate not. Prices were about 20 cents per gallon higher than this time last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
There’s a lot more to what you pay when you fill up your car than how much oil is out there. Market speculation can inflate prices. Then there’s how much it costs to move oil around. You can drill for all the crude you want, but it’s another thing to bring it to a refinery. Add to that the role played by OPEC in setting prices, and it’s clear that what you’re paying is not dictated by simple supply and demand.
Nonetheless, some analysts say consumers are benefiting from the boom. They just might not notice it.
The Texas Ag Commissioner's role is about much more than just farming.
Every time a cow is sold in Texas, a dollar of that sale goes to industry groups that use it to promote and research beef. It’s part of a national program called the “beef checkoff,” and that charge will now rise to two dollars in Texas after a statewide vote by cattle owners.
The vote to raise the fee passed by nearly 67 percent. The results were announced Wednesday and hailed by agriculture and cattle industry groups, who say the money is needed to keep beef competitive.
“The beef checkoff program was initiated (at one dollar per sale) back in the 1980s; we’re down to about 40 cents on the dollar for that value today,” says Jay Evans, Chair of the Natural Resource and Environment Committee of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. The association has received support from the beef checkoff program and nominates members to the board that distributes money from the program.
The existing program splits the dollar charge between national and state groups. The new charge approved by the recent vote will stay in Texas and be controlled by the Texas Beef Council.
Wind turbines in West Texas help produce record amounts of electricity for the state.
In the coming years, the federal government wants Texas to reduce its carbon emissions by about 40 percent. With a goal like that, you might expect to see more programs aimed at promoting renewable energy in Texas. But something like the opposite appears to be happening.
Donna Nelson, chair of Texas’ Public Utility Commission, asked last month if wind power generators, not Texas utility customers, should pay for upgrades to transmission lines. The Commission regulates the state’s electric grid, among other things.
“This is really my attempt to flesh out some of the issues that are associated with the continued growth of renewable resources in Texas,” Nelson said. In a memo outlining her request, Nelson said wind and solar are already mature industries in Texas, and that federal subsidies distort the market. The federal tax credit for wind power was allowed to expire last year, but could be renewed by Congress this year.
Nelson’s idea got a lot of people talking. Texas’ much-touted Competitive Renewable Energy Zone (CREZ) transmission line project, that brings wind power from the West, were paid for by electric customers to encourage renewables. Those lines, along with federal subsidies, brought a boom in Texas wind power.
A boom, critics say, that Nelson of the PUC is trying to hinder by exploring the idea of a fee or tax. Continue Reading →
The Parrs say drilling near their property made them sick. A Dallas jury agreed, awarding them nearly $3 million.
A Texas family claiming emissions from gas drilling made them sick is one step closer to collecting a $3 million jury award against the drilling company, Aruba Petroleum.
When the Parr family of Wise County won their case, it was called the first successful “fracking lawsuit” in the county. Aruba asked Dallas County Judge Mark Greenberg to throw out the three million dollar verdict. But late Thursday Greenberg denied that motion.
The case is important because drilling companies often reach out-of-court settlements with plaintiffs. Those can include gag orders. This time there was no settlement, so the details of the Parrs’ sickness, including nosebleeds, rashes and stomach problems were made public.
The case is being closely watch by industry and groups opposed to fracking.
Tom McGarity, a law professor at UT Austin calls the judge’s ruling “a bad precedent for the industry.”
“I think there are plaintiffs’ lawyers out there right now that are looking at this case and saying this is a really opportunity here to raise claims by people who have been damaged either in their property values or health,” he says.
Rulings from the Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott's Office say that homeland security concerns trump the public's right to know about dangerous chemicals in Texas .
It’s a trend that has open government advocates and some local officials worried.
The rulings from Abbott, who is running for Governor, came to light after an ammonia nitrate storage building in Athens, Texas caught fire last month. WFAA, an ABC affiliate station in Dallas, requested data from the Department of State Health Services on the building. Instead of getting the data, reporters were presented with this ruling from Attorney General Abbott, saying it was confidential.
The ruling came after DSHS asked for the Attorney General’s opinion. The Department sought the opinion because of a string of earlier rulings Abbott provided to other state agencies, all determining that information on dangerous chemicals should not be shared.
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