Terrence Henry reports on energy and the environment for StateImpact Texas. His radio, print and television work has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, The Texas Tribune, The History Channel and other outlets.
He has previously worked at The Washington Post and The Atlantic. He earned a Bachelor’s Degree in International Relations from Brigham Young University.
A rancher in South Texas burns cactus to feed cattle.
New numbers out this week show an increasing percentage of Texas facing drought conditions, according to the US Drought Monitor Map. More than 96 percent of the state is classified as at least “abnormally dry.” That’s an 8 percent increase in the past week.
State climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon warned on his blog earlier this week that Texas reservoir levels are back to where they where in August 2011, near the peak of the drought. “If the drought continues as I have depicted it, [by] the end of the summer it will be the second-worst drought on record, behind only the drought of the 1950s,” Nielsen-Gammon writes.
In a series of disturbing charts, Nielsen-Gammon shows that precipitation trends for the current water year (which began in October) are much closer to the extreme drought of 2011 than a normal year, and predicts reservoir levels in the state will drop below 50 percent in September. The Texas Water Development Board shows reservoir levels in Texas currently at just over 66 percent.
If the drought does continue, cattle ranchers are in for a summer similar to that of 2011, when they suffered over $3 billion in losses. Some South Texas farmers have already had to resort to an emergency method of feeding their cattle, and it’s not cheap.
Original Story, March 5, 2013: Texas is in a third year of drought, with 89 percent of the state in some level of drought conditions according to the latest U.S. Drought Monitor Map. In Texas, landscaping can make up about 30 percent of residential water use, and that goes up during dry times like these. While many Texans are cutting back on their water use by switching to drought-friendly landscaping, some may find an obstacle in their way: Homeowners Associations (HOAs). A new bill in the state legislature would change that.Â
“It’s about personal property rights,” Watson testified this morning as he presented his bill to the State Senate Natural Resources Committee. “It’s about allowing Texans to protect themselves from drought and manage their water bills.” Continue Reading →
While American homes have grown larger and larger over the years on average, a small group has decided to buck that trend to live tiny. Really small. As in, under 200 square feet small.  A new film, ‘TINY,’ which premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin last week, takes a look inside this movement while chronicling the story of one man’s adventure building his own diminutive home.
With a lot of elbow grease and some instructional help from YouTube (along with some funding from Kickstarter), filmmaker Christopher Smith set out in the spring of 2011 to build his own tiny, 124 square foot house for a plot of isolated land in Colorado. While he originally budgeted three months for the build, it ended up taking him a year.
The advantages to such a tiny home? Adherents in the documentary say they can live nearly debt-free (the director estimates his own tiny house cost him $26,000), along with low power bills and taxes. They say they’re doing it more for peace of mind and money as opposed to environmental reasons.
For one of the leaders of the tiny house movement, it’s more of a philosophy than a strict code. Continue Reading →
Photo Illustration by Miguel Villagran/Getty Images
A new EPA report says that fuel efficiency is the highest its ever been, while vehicle emissions are down.
A new report says you’re likely to be feeling less pain at the pump than in years past – and not just because gas prices are down a bit this week. Cars and trucks are getting better mileage than ever, and the air is cleaner as a result.
The new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report says that greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks are at their lowest levels in decades. Fuel economy, meanwhile, is the highest it’s ever been. The report says that in just the last five years, fuel economy went up sixteen percent. The average fuel economy these days is now 23 miles per gallon, and that’s expected to double under new federal standards by 2025. The EPA says all the advances in fuel efficiency will save the equivalent of twelve billion barrels of oil in that time frame.
What’s behind the change? The report credits a transition to fuel injection from carburetors, and even more recent advances in fuel injection technology. That’s in addition to slightly larger market for hybrid and diesel vehicles, and better mileage options overall. “There are almost 3 times more SUVs with combined labels of 25 mpg or more and 6Â times more cars with ratings of 30 mpg or more,” the report says.
You may have seen the TED talk, or read the book, or just seen an interview with him somewhere like CNN or the Daily Show. He’s William Kamkwamaba, a young man from Malawi, who dropped out of school at a young age and built his family a windmill. From junk. And it worked.
In the early 2000s, Malawi was suffering through a crippling drought, which led to the worst famine in its history. The Malawis primarily grow maize, and as their crops withered, people starved. William’s solution was to build a windmill to pump water. Then he built another. His family’s crops were able to grow despite the drought, and soon his story became a well-known TED talk. That’s when entrepreneur Tom Rielly heard his story and thought, ‘This kid needs a chance.’
So Rielly took William under his wing, and got him back into school (a prestigious magnet school in South Africa), and eventually college. A book (which became a bestseller) and a film deal also came together.
A new film premiering at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin this week, ‘William and the Windmill,’ tells the story of what it was like for William to have his story told. In other words, it looks at what life is like when you’re simple village teenager who all of the sudden becomes an energy icon. It also asks important questions about international aid and development. Continue Reading →
Photo Illustration by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
A bill to provide major funding for new water projects in Texas moved one step closer to becoming a reality today.
Significant new funding for water projects in a dry, thirsty Texas moved one step closer to becoming a reality today. The bill, HB 4, would take money from the state’s Rainy Day Fund to start a loan program for new water projects. It passed unanimously in a committee, and now it heads to the House floor for a vote. (From there? Well, it’s probably a good time to brush up on how a bill becomes a law, or just watch the classic video.)
The bill’s latest version (which isn’t available online yet) that passed today is much more detailed, going from eight pages to 31, and puts added focus on conservation. As before, 20 percent of the funding would go towards conservation projects. But it also includes conservation as a factor for water supply projects that want funding from the new program. “There was a lot of detail added to this bill,” Laura Huffman, Texas State Director of the Nature Conservancy, tells StateImpact Texas. “They’ve put in place a prioritization scheme that would ask utilities and the state agency to prioritize those projects that have good conservation plans that are implemented. Not just talked about, but implemented.”
Huffman also applauded a stipulation that utilities with good conservation programs would get premium interest rates for loans from the water bank. “That would include things like low per capita water use, low water losses,” she says. “Those kind of indicators that show a utility is really functioning at the highest level.”
As the state looks to fund water projects, concerns are being raised that not enough conservation is being encouraged.
Within days of the announcement earlier this year that the state legislature could get serious about funding new water projects in Texas, folks started having questions. Where will that money go? Why not make more of the water we have instead of building more reservoirs? And what’s to prevent the proposed $2 billion ‘water bank’ from suffering the same problems and controversies as other state funds have?
Texas faces the conundrum of a rapidly growing population, with increased water demands, in the face of falling water supplies and hotter, drier weather. How to ensure the state has enough water going forward has been one of the key issues this legislative session.
Environmental groups looked at the list this week and quickly became concerned that it emphasized building new water supplies over conservation. Continue Reading →
Shark fins for sale in Texas (like the ones in the this photo from China) would be banned under proposed legislation.
We all know there are sharks in the Gulf of Mexico. But why would Texas lawmakers care? AÂ bill that went before the Senate Natural Resources Committee Tuesday says they should.
State Senator Larry Taylor, R-Friendswood, whose district includes Galveston, filed Senate Bill 572, which would outlaw the buying and selling of shark fins. Shark fins are a sought-after ingredient for shark fin soup and foods considered a delicacy in some Asian dishes. They can sell for up to $700 dollars a pound.
“What they are doing is bringing in the largest sharks that they can and clipping their fins off,” Pickett told the committee. “And, well, that just ain’t fair.”
While the process known as “finning” is banned by federal law, the sale and trade of shark fins isn’t. Only five states have enacted bans like the one Texas is considering. So why do it here? Continue Reading →
Juan Rico culls cotton plants growing between rows in an irrigated cotton field July 27, 2011 near Hermleigh, Texas. A new bill would require most farmers to report their water usage to the state.
A Texas lawmaker has introduced a bill that would help the state keep better track of how much water it’s using. State Senator Kel Seliger, R-Amarillo, has filed a bill, SB 272, requiring most farmers to report their water usage to the Texas Water Development Board.
“It’s important to have an empirical measure of groundwater being removed from the modeled available groundwater,” Seliger tells StateImpact Texas. “So we know where we are at all times.”
Most of the water in Texas is used for farming and ranching, 56 percent of it. And much of that water comes from sources underground. So water planners need to understand how much is being used from those resources they can’t necessarily see. The Ogallala Aquifer in the Texas Panhandle, for instance, experienced its largest drop in 25 years in 2011.
Water in many parts of the state is managed by Groundwater Conservation Districts (GCDs), which number near a hundred and are mostly created by the legislature to help balance water needs and supplies. At the moment, neither the Texas Water Development Board or groundwater districts require water withdrawal reporting, according to the bill’s analysis by the non-partisan Senate Research Center. (Some groundwater districts already require reporting, but this law would make it mandatory.)
So does this mean farmers and ranchers would have to install meters on their wells?
Graphic courtesy of UT Austin/Jackson School of Geosciences
A map from the research shows the most (red) and least (blue) productive areas of the Barnett Shale drilling area near Dallas-Fort Worth.
A common question arises when people talk about “fracking,” the colloquial term for the drilling process of hydraulic fracturing — how much oil and gas is really down there? New research led by the University of Texas at Austin says it’s not as much as some expected, but not as little as expected, either. And it can largely depend on where you drill.
A team of researchers, led by UT’s Bureau of Economic Geology Director Scott Tinker, took a “bottom-up” approach in measuring the production of wells drilled using fracking in the Barnett Shale of Texas. “We were looking at shale gas potential in the United States, and we asked the question: what is the production and what are the reserves of natural gas in that shale over the next couple of decades?” Tinker tells StateImpact Texas.
They got production data for 16,000-plus wells in the region, every single well that had been drilled up until that point, and then looked at what areas still hadn’t been drilled. “When that was all said and done, we came away with the conclusion that a lot of gas has been produced up there,” Tinker says. “But there’s still quite a bit left to produce over the next couple of decades.”
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