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.
Al Armendariz is the regional administrator for the EPA.
Days after a video surfaced of him making controversial remarks about enforcement, the regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Al Armendariz, has resigned.
In a letter to the head administrator of the agency, Lisa Jackson, Armendariz says that he has “come to the conclusion that my continued service will distract you and the agency from its important work.” He also said that the “comments… made several years ago… do not in any way reflect my work as regional administrator.” Armendariz said his resignation is effective today.
Jackson issed a statement saying that she accepted the resignation. “I respect the difficult decision he made and his wish to avoid distracting from the important work of the Agency. We are all grateful for Dr. Armendariz’s service to EPA and to our nation,” Jackson said.
The remarks that got him in hot water surfaced after Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe talked about them in a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday morning, and called for an investigation.
In the video, Armendariz, an El Paso native and former professor at Southern Methodist University, says that his philosophy of enforcement is to make a big example of lawbreakers. “It was kinda like how the Romans used to conquer those villages in the Mediterranean,” he says in the video. “They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they’d crucify them. And you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”
Judge John Dietz has made a ruling that could cost the state billions in tax revenues.
Travis County District Judge John Dietz is reportedly “reconsidering” a recent decision that could cost the state of Texas billions in tax revenue. Ruling in favor of the drilling company Southwest Royalties a few weeks ago, Judge Dietz found that oil and gas equipment used for exploring and completing wells should not be subject to sales tax, because it qualifies for an manufacturing exemption. Now he’s not so sure that’s the best idea.
“On Thursday, the ever-colorful Dietz recalled that he had been reading The Wall Street Journal over a breakfast of oat gruel when he saw that some Texas judge had recently overturned 50 years of tax law and crippled the state budget. “What fool did that?” Dietz said he wondered as he read the story. “I’ll be damned; it’s me.”
Dietz said that he does not typically hold “stinkin’ rehearings” but that the reaction to his ruling two weeks ago had caused him pause.”I worry about being in error,” he said.”
The judge told the Statesman that “he plans to rule within a week” and expects an appeal regardless of what he decides.
Maybe not. For one thing, the military is investing in green projects. Big Time.
As Kate Galbraith reports today for the Texas Tribune and New York Times, two major bases in Texas are part of a bigger effort by the military to be less dependent on fossil fuels and reduce waste.
Galbraith writes:
“Solar panels are popping up across Fort Bliss, which is the nation’s largest army post by physical size, covering an area slightly larger than Rhode Island. The panels are part of the base’s effort to cut its net energy and water usage, reduce waste and thus demonstrate self-sufficiency, a concept that can have a large impact on operations abroad. The military refers to it as “net zero,” and bases like Fort Bliss and Fort Hood have embraced it, but high upfront costs pose challenges.
In Central Texas, Fort Hood has a goal of “net zero” waste by 2020. The base, second to Fort Bragg in total number of soldiers, will claim success if about 90 percent of its trash avoids a landfill, according to Brian Dosa, Fort Hood’s director of public works. Right now, more than half goes into the base’s landfill.”
Chesapeake CEO Aubrey McClendon has come under fire for using his company's wells to finance over a billion dollars in personal loans.
An unconventional and controversial perk for the head of a fracking giant will come to an end. Aubrey McClendon, the eccentric CEO of Chesapeake Energy, which fracks for natural gas in the Barnett Shale of Texas and other parts of the country, will no longer get a stake of every well the natural gas giant drills. He used that partial ownership to secure more than a billion dollars in personal loans. The company announced it will not extend the arrangement (currently set to expire in 2015) and is negotiating with McClendon to reach an early termination.
The perk and the loans McClendon made with it was first disclosed by Reuters in a piece earlier this month. In a program called the “Founder Well Participation Program,” McClendon was allowed to purchase an interest in each well the company owned, up to 2.5 percent. McClendon then went and borrowed against those future potential profits, which totaled more than a billion dollars of loans. (Chesapeake’s stock has gone down nearly a quarter since the loans were revealed.)
The company also says that when it earlier stated that it was completely in the know about McClendon’s loans, it may have overstated how informed it really was. As in, it didn’t really know about them at all until that first Reuters report. Continue Reading →
Video has surfaced of a 2010 speech by Armendariz, an El Paso native and former professor at Southern Methodist University, where he seems to have contracted a bit of foot-in-mouth disease.
“I was in a meeting once, and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philospophy of enforcement,” Armendariz said. “And I think it was probably a little crude and maybe not appropriate for the meeting, but I’ll tell you what I said.”
Indeed, it is a crude analogy. Here’s what Armendariz said about how he approaches enforcement:
“It was kinda like how the Romans used to conquer those villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they’d crucify them. And you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”
Then he provides some context:
“You make examples out of people who, in this case, are not complying with the law. Hit them as hard as you can and make examples out of them. There’s a deterrent factor. Companies that are smart see that, they don’t want to play that. And they decide at that point that it’s time to clean up.”
Some in the oil and gas industry and the Republican party are already having a field day with Armendariz’s comments.
The first case of mad cow disease in the U.S. in five years was discovered this week.
The first case of mad cow disease in the U.S. since 2006 was found in California this week. While the diseased cow didn’t enter the food supply, consumers, ranchers and officials are all watching and waiting to see what happens next.
So does Texas have cause to be concerned? The state’s agriculture commissioner, Todd Staples, said in a statement Tuesday that “American consumers can remain confident our food supply is the safest in the world, and Texas beef is as safe as ever.”
One possible effect of the mad cow case is a rise in beef prices. In an interview with KUT News, Staples said that he and the Texas beef industry are looking at beef futures markets to see what’s ahead. “I feel pretty good that we’ll be able to move forward,” he told KUT. “The fact that there is an all-time low in the number of Texas and U.S. beef herds also indicates that maybe it won’t have an economic impact.”
NPR’s food blog The Salt has a handy FAQ about the disease and the food supply. They say that “the cow in question wasn’t destined for the food supply. Its carcass had been sent to a rendering plant in California,” where it would likely end up as pet food or some kind of industrial product. And the cow had a rare form of mad cow disease, which is “different than getting the disease from eating feed made out of bone and tissue from infected cattle, which caused the outbreaks in England in the 1980s and 1990s.” You can read the full post here.Â
Photo courtesy of Pearsall Volunteer Fire Department
An explosion and fire rocked an oil fracking site in South Texas Jan. 19. Three were injured.
The Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), a division of the Department of Labor, has issued citations for ten “serious safety violations” to High Roller Wells, Inc., a company that owns a disposal well in Pearsall, Texas, some 50 miles southwest of San Antonio in the Eagle Ford Shale.
As we reported earlier this year, a Jan. 19 explosion blew the lid off a storage tank, injuring three. A fire burned for over an hour as the all-volunteer Pearsall Fire Department (and three other nearby departments) battled the flames with twelve trucks and 33 firefighters. The explosion likely started when workers there were welding near storage tanks — a decision that had many in the industry scratching their heads. The site is used for disposing of fluids from hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”
In a phone call with StateImpact Texas, OSHA’s San Antonio-area director Jeff Funke said that “we don’t issues citations lightly. We look at what’s legally sufficient. “These are measures that should have been in place before we got there.” In a news release, Funke also said that “if OSHA’s standards had been followed, it is possible this unfortunate incident could have been avoided.”
While the well is operated by a company called High Roller Wells (which doesn’t appear to have a website), it’s unclear who actually owns it. When asked about it earlier this year, the Railroad Commission would only say that it does not “have information on investors or owners of oil and gas facilities.” Continue Reading →
Photo courtesy of the Texas House of Representatives
Warren Chisum has the lead in the race for the open seat on the Railroad Commission, according to the Texas Tribune's latest insiders poll
Our friends at the Texas Tribune and Texas Weekly released their latest ‘Inside Intelligence’ poll to the public today, a survey of several “insiders” with their projections for some of the upcoming races. The poll, conducted last week, takes a look at the Republican Primary race for the open seat on the Railroad Commission of Texas (currently occupied by interim appointee Buddy Garcia). Whoever wins the primary will go on to face Democrat Dale Henry (who’ll be running for the Commission for a third time) in the general election in November.
The poll found an edge for Panhandle Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, with 58 percent of the insiders favoring him to win. 37 percent give the primary rice to Christi Craddick, daughter of state Rep. Tom Craddick. Only five percent favor Roland Sledge, an energy attorney in Houston.
Some of the choice quotes from respondents? Here you go:
On Chisum: “Who would voters trust more than a good ‘ol boy from West Texas?”
On Craddick: “Daddy’s million will put her over the top but she is doing very well on her own.”
And lastly: “I’m working very hard to bring this one up to the level of indifference. Failing so far.”
A dead fish is seen on the beach May 5, 2010 in Pass Christian, Mississippi. The BP spill was the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.
The first criminal charges in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill were filed today by the Department of Justice, two years after the disaster began. Former BP engineer Kurt Mix was arrested today and charged with two counts of obstruction of justice for “intentionally destroying evidence,” according to the Department. The former engineer is from Katy, Texas. NPR broke the story earlier today.
Mix is alleged to have destroyed more than 200 text messages he sent to a BP supervisor about the company’s efforts to stop the leak and estimate how much oil was flowing out of it, despite being told by the company to preserve all of his communications. The Justice Department says that Mix deleted the messages in early October 2010 after learning they would be collected by BP’s lawyers. “The deleted texts, some of which were recovered forensically, included sensitive internal BP information collected in real-time as the Top Kill operation was occurring, which indicated that Top Kill was failing,” the department says in a press release.
Yul Kwon is the host of a new PBS series that peels back the layers of our energy, foodn transportation and manufacturing.
We all use electricity – but what systems are in place to make sure it’s there when we need it? How does the whole grid work in the first place? Those are questions examined in the latest episode of a new series on PBS called America Revealed, which aims to peel back the layers of how complex systems like energy work in the U.S. Show host Yul Kwon spoke with StateImpact Texas lead station KUT Austin this week about the program. Kwon says the show looks at the massive systems that we use everyday in the U.S. but that most people don’t understand – or just don’t think about.
Q: Green energy has become a larger and larger thing in Texas. We are the top wind energy producer in the country. How have you seen, as you were producing your program, the green energy movement put its stamp on the electrical system?
A: It’s a making a huge impact. Again, we go through the evolution of how our energy grid developed, how the electric power grid developed. And you know, to this day, coal is still the dominant source of energy. In terms of producing power, it accounts for about half of the total power production. The average American uses about four tons of coal every single year. So, that’s not going to change any time soon. But, at the same time, we are seeing this huge growing awareness of the need to produce more sustainable resources. Continue Reading →
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