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.
Larry Lambert and his grandson, Noah, cut hay near Weston, north of Dallas, in the August heat.
The latest U.S. Drought Monitor map shows no signs of improvement for much of Texas, and some portions of Central Texas have moved from moderate to severe drought.
Overall, the state is in much, much better shape than a year ago, when nearly 80 percent of Texas was in the worst stage of drought, “exceptional.” Less than one percent of the state is at that level now.
But despite a wet winter and some good rain events since, rainfall averages from June and July combined were a bit lower than normal for the state. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) new seasonal drought outlook says that in western parts of the state, dry conditions are are likely to “persist or intensify,” while in Central and East Texas, some improvement is possible over the next few months.
Farmers and ranchers are keeping a watchful eye on rain and weather conditions. Mostly, they’re seeing a lot of heat. On August 13, 15 high-temperature records were broken. “The heat has been hard on already stressed crops,” the Texas Agrilife Extension writes in its latest crop and weather outlook. “All dryland cotton has been abandoned in Hardeman County, as well as a quarter of the irrigated cotton.”  An Agrilife extension agent in the county said they’ve had four straight 112-degree days and “near-record” heat over the past few weeks.
But as the La Nina weather pattern leaves and her El Nino counterpart enters, Texas could be in for a wetter fall. Continue Reading →
Joe Crane in front of his rice drying and storgage plant. He expects business to be down drastically this year after water was cut off to rice farmers for the first time in history.
The solution? Building more buckets downstream to catch heavy rains when they do come. And now the LCRA has moved one step closer to that goal.
First, the LCRA is looking to purchase several parcels of agricultural land in Wharton and Colorado counties, where it could build “off-channel” reservoirs from the Colorado River. When excess rains fall, those smaller reservoirs could store the water and save it for rice farmers and others downstream to use. Continue Reading →
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has openly bragged about suing the federal government, despite a losing track record.
Speaking at a conference this morning in Houston, Texas Attorney General Gregg Abbott talked a bit about what he likes to do for fun.
“What I really do for fun is I go into the office,” Abbott said at the Texas Hispanic Leadership Forum, “[and] I sue the Obama adminstration.”
Abbott has openly bragged of his proclivity for suing the feds, with some 24 lawsuits at a cost over $1.25 million, several of them aimed at the Environmental Protection Agency, according to the Texas Tribune.
One of those lawsuits took a slight turn in Abbott’s favor this week, when an appeals court found that the EPA hadn’t properly rejected a state permitting program for a small number of industrial facilities. But of the 140 facilities under the old permitting program, all but six have moved, or are moving to, EPA-approved standard permits, making the lawsuit something of a moot point. Continue Reading →
A father and daughter play on the beach in Galveston in 2005. A red tide in Galveston Bay is causing dead fish to wash up on shore this week.
Thousands of dead fish are washing up on the beaches of the Upper Texas coast, as the first red tide of the season strikes the Gulf. So this means parts of Galveston Bay are closed off for shellfish harvesting, including Texas Gulf oysters.
A red tide is also known as an algal bloom, and gets its name from how it can color the seas. When algae proliferates in the water, it takes away oxygen and nutrients from fish. “If the algae are there, and there’s no oxygen there, the fish will either move out, or they’ll start to die,” Leslie Hartmann, Matagorda Bay Ecosystem Leader at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, explained in an interview with StateImpact Texas a few months back. “And it gets into a vicious cycle whereas fish start to die, they start to decompose which adds to the whole taking out the oxygen from the water.”
Part of the blame could be due to less fresh water coming into the bay from rivers and streams. As the water becomes more salty, algae “blooms,” resulting in a red tide. (Warm temperatures help, too.) Last year’s red tides, greatly exacerbated by the record single-year drought, nearly killed the entire Texas oyster season.
Norman Augustine, who was formerly on the board of directors of ConocoPhillips, has been selected to chair a review of a controversial study on hydraulic fracturing.
A few weeks back we reported that the lead author of an academic study on hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” had been sitting on the board of a drilling company at the time, earning well over a million dollars in compensation. After the financial ties came to light, the University of Texas at Austin, whose Energy Institute conducted the study, said it would commission an independent review. And now the university has announced some of the particulars.
There will be three people on the panel, and the university says they’ll have “free reign” in their process. Provost Steven Leslie said in a statement that he’ll follow whatever their reccomendations are. The three members of the panel are chair Norman Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin; James Duderstadt, President Emeritus of the University of Michigan; and Rita Colwell, a former director of the National Science Foundation.
But a watchdog group that first revealed the potential conflict of interest in the original study is skeptical. The Public Accountability Initiative says the university is taking “an important step” after misleading the public, but believes there are “serious questions about the independence” of the panel.
Here’s what the group found about the chair of the panel, from a statement emailed to StateImpact Texas: Continue Reading →
Julia Trigg Crawford has several hundred acres of land in northeast Texas. And the Keystone XL pipeline may have to go through it.
On Friday, Judge Bill Harris of Lamar County heard arguments in a pre-trial hearing about the Keystone XL pipline’s use of eminent domain in North Texas. On one side of the court was Julia Trigg Crawford and her attorney. Crawford owns a farm north of Paris, and the pipeline would cross a portion of her land.
On the other side of the room? A team of lawyers and representatives for TransCanada, the company behind the controversial pipeline, all dressed in black, according to Crawford. “It would make Johnny Cash proud,” she says.
Crawford is one of the last holdouts among some 850 Texas landowners who signed agreements with the company to allow the pipeline on their land. During the negotiations with landowners, the company filed over a hundred eminent domain claims in Texas, pressuring some landowners to sign easements.
In a packed courtroom, Judge Harris heard six hours of arguments from both sides. Continue Reading →
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott speaks during a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Energy and Power Subcommittee on Capitol Hill February 9, 2011 in Washington, DC. Abbott has filed over 24 lawsuits against the federal government, six of them against the EPA.
You wouldn’t know it from much of the coverage out there, but a “victory” for Texas in its ongoing conflict with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Monday is something of a moot point.
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a 2-1 ruling yesterday saying that the EPA hadn’t properly rejected the state’s ‘Flexible Permitting Program.’ That was a system put in place in the nineties that was used by about ten percent of industrial facilities in the state to obtain air permits. (The rest of the facilities in the state used a standard permit approved by the EPA.) The court found that “the EPA based its disapproval on demands for language and program features of the EPA’s choosing, without basis in the Clean Air Act or its implementing regulations.” All three judges in the ruling were appointed by Republican presidents.
The state Attorney General Greg Abbott, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and several industry groups filed the suit, saying the EPA didn’t have the right to reject the permitting program. But while Texas fought the EPA’s decision, behind the scenes almost all of the facilities in the program went ahead and got a standard, federally-approved permit anyway. And the TCEQ also submitted a new Clean Air plan to the EPA (partly modeled after federal standards), which the agency approved in June. (The TCEQ points out that the new plan isn’t related to the old Flexible Permitting Program.)
So what’s the point of suing the EPA for permits no one really uses anymore? “This is all kind of beating a dead horse,” says Elena Craft with the Environmental Defense Fund. “The reality is that nothing on the ground is going to change.” Continue Reading →
One way Texas could "build" more power is by using less of it.
As we’ve been chronicling over the past few months, Texas is in a bit of a bind when it comes to power. There are more and more people, and fewer and fewer power plants. While natural gas prices stay low, that means power companies in Texas have to charge less (here’s a good explainer on how that all works), so there’s little incentive to build new plants.
One motivation has been to raise the prices generators can charge when the grid nears capacity, or peak demand, like it does on some of these hot August days. That’s when power companies make most of their profits.
But there’s another solution. And according to some observers, it has an attractive price tag: free.
The sun rises behind the Storm Memorial in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike on September 18, 2008 in Galveston, Texas. The sculpture was dedicated to remember the 6,000 killed when a hurricane hit the island in 1900.
Texas finds itself in the peculiar position of needing just the right storms this summer. Perhaps a light tropical depression that would bring rain to the parched parts of the state, but not bring damage to the coast. So it’s with a keen eye that the state looks to the updated summer hurricane forecast out this morning.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center says we may have a “busy second half” of the summer for hurricanes in the Atlantic Basin. “The updated outlook still indicates a 50 percent chance of a near-normal season,” the agency writes on its site today. But there’s a 35 percent chance of an above-normal season.
The agency predicts anywhere from five to eight hurricanes this season (including the ones we’ve already seen, Chris and Ernesto), and anywhere from twelve to seventeen named storms (with winds that reach 39 mph or higher). Of those hurricanes, two or three of them could be “major,” NOAA says, which means category three or higher, with winds of at least 111 mph (Chris and Ernesto were both category one).
So why did NOAA increase the odds of major storms from their initial outlook in May? Continue Reading →
New climate data shows it's much hotter, and drier, than normal.
New climate data out this week confirms what many parched, sweaty Americans have been suspecting: It is hot, way hotter than normal.
The numbers from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show that July was more than three degrees hotter than normal, making it the hottest month ever. The previous record was back in 1936.
And the heat wasn’t isolated to July. The agency says that so far, 2012 has been a year of record warmth, and the last twelve months have been the warmest on record as well.
It there’s any good news in the July report, it’s that Texas, in stark contrast to last year, fared better than much of the country. We ranked in the “above normal” heat category for July, as opposed to the Midwest and East, which were listed as “much above normal.”
It’s also been drier than normal for the U.S. “Near-record dry conditions were present for the middle of the nation, with the drought footprint expanding to cover nearly 63 percent of the Lower 48,” the report says. Texas, again, did a little better, with “above normal” precipitation.
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