Photo courtesy of NASA via Flickr’s Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/5246675993/lightbox/#/photos/gsfc/5246675993/
This NASA photo shows an algae bloom near New Zealand’s Chatham Islands. The bloom is an example of a carbon sink, an area that absorbs more carbon than it produces.
Carbon emission is one of the scientific issues of our time. While an overwhelming majority of scientists see a link between man-made emissions and global climate change, the rate at which emissions are entering the atmosphere and their precise impact continues to be hotly debated.
FSC sustainable logging being carried out in the natural forest of Cameroon.
Woe is the eco-conscious consumer. Just when they think they’re buying green, something screws it all up. The latest group allegedly mucking things up is the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), which is losing corporate sponsors amid allegations of “green-washing.”
First, some background. SFI officially started as a division of the the industry group American Forest and Paper Association (AF&PA). Although it officially broke away and turned non-profit in 2001, the now-separate organizations remain closely associated. SFI continues to be funded by AF&PA in the form of tax-deductible donations, according to a new report by the watchdog group (and, in a sense, competitors of SFI) ForestEthics. They allege that those timber industry funds given to SFI “support advertising and brand enhancement for the AF&PA-represented paper and timber industry.”
ForestEthics says that “out of 543 audits of SFI-certified companies since 2004, not one acknowledges any major issues—such as soil erosion, clearcutting, water quality, or chemical usage—that are known to be problems with large-scale timber operations.”
While ForestEthics is the leader of this movement, it isn’t alone. Between March and September of last year, several major companies — including Aetna, Allstate, AT&T, Office Depot, State Farm, and Sprint — publicly announced their intention to remove the SFI label from their products and/or to avoid the use of SFI-labeled products in the future. Just last week, according to ForestEthics, several more big brands — including Philips Van Heusen, Shutterfly, and U.S. Airways — decided to let go of SFI as well.
Photo courtesy of Lunchbox Photography via Flikr's Creative Commons. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcorduroy/6817020034/
Even Thor's lightening, thunder and rain didn't free Central Texas fully from drought.
The word Thursday derives from the Old Norse thorsdagr, meaning “Thor’s Day.”
But here at StateImpact Texas, Thursday means something else entirely. It’s the day the U.S. drought monitor releases it’s weekly drought map!
Thor was the Norse god of thunder, and parts of Texas saw plenty of storms (and rain) last week, raising hopes that the central part of the state would finally be able to proclaim itself drought free. Unfortunately, those hopes were dashed by the new map which shows the western edges of the Hill Country are still in moderate or severe drought.
Pipe is stacked at the southern site of the Keystone XL pipeline on March 22, 2012 in Cushing, Oklahoma.
The debate over TransCanada’s proposed oil pipeline from the oil sands of Alberta to the Texas Gulf Coast has mostly focused on the environmental and economic impacts. People in favor say it will bring jobs and energy security. Opponents say the pipeline, and the crude it will carry, will harm the earth.
But the project might have another consequence that’s been largely overlooked. Some analysts say it could actually raise gas prices for many American consumers.
Wind turbines provide a sustainable source of energy in that they don't emit carbon dioxide or require water.
Texas has lots of ambition. Some Texans strive to open the world’s largest convenience store. But of more interest to us is another goal: the state wants to have10,000 megawatts of the power in its portfolio come from renewable energy by 2025. And according a new report by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state continues to well exceed that.
While the state first achieved the goal, known as the renewable portfolio standard, in 2009, green energy in the grid continues to grow. Thirteen percent more power on the state’s grid came from renewables in 2011 than it did in 2010. In all, renewables provided enough power for about 31,000 Texas homes last year. (The state grid supplies about 85 percent of the juice in Texas.)
The big winners? Solar and biomass. Solar energy production jumped up 153 percent from 2010 to 2011, while biomass went up 40 percent. In the middle? Wind, which went up fifteen percent. But it still accounts for the majority of renewable energy generation in Texas, which has the most wind energy in the nation (and is the fifth-highest producer of wind energy in the world). Wind provided 30.8 million of the 31.7 million megawatt hours of renewable energy in Texas last year. Fossil fuels still produced about 80 percent of energy in Texas last year.
The big loser? Hydro-electric generation, which went down a whopping 56 percent in 2011. ERCOT says that “due to the ongoing drought in most of the state, generation of hydroelectric power decreased by more than half.”
The Rio Grande River in Eagle Pass at sunset, looking west toward the International Bridge to Piedras Negras, Mexico.
Our friends at the Texas Tribunereport today that the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas has dropped its opposition to a coal mining project along the Texas-Mexico border.
While some people in Maverick County welcome the jobs that could bring, many, including city and county governments, are vehemently opposed to it. Several locals have formed the Maverick County Environmental and Public Health Association to fight the mine.
“We’re sending coal over there that the United States will not use because it’s so low quality, and then we’re sending it to Mexico so they can burn it over there, and it pollutes us over there and it pollutes us over here when it goes through town every day,” Association member Martha Baxter told StateImpact Texas earlier this year.
Photo courtesy of Center for Plant Science Innovation/UNL
Professor Michael Fromm says plants remember stress, and that can help them weather droughts.
Do you remember the last time you were stressed out? You’re not alone. According to a new study, plants are feeling it, too. The report says that plants have a sort of “stress memory,” and it could help them survive drought.
Researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have recently confirmed what gardeners have long claimed: after surviving the stress of a drought, plants are better able to withstand future droughts—in the short-term, at least.
The team worked with Arabidopsis, a member of the mustard family, to compare stressed plants (plants that had been previously dehydrated, like in a drought) to non-stressed plants (plants that had never been dehydrated) in a simulated drought situation. The pre-stressed mustard plants consistently rebounded far more quickly than the non-stressed mustard plants.
Fromm and his team repeated this study with two other species, and the results were the same: plants are smart. Continue Reading →
Piles of petroleum coke sit uncovered on the ship canal in Corpus Christi.
On the northern end of the Corpus Christi ship canal, in the shadow of six major oil refineries, sit several large black mounds. They’re piles of petroleum coke, the carbon solids left over from the process of refining. Across the canal there are several hundred homes where locals live, known as Refinery Row. And until this week, the Las Brisas Energy Center was close to building a power plant that would burn that coke for energy.
In a letter Monday, Judge Stephen Yelenosky of the 345th Judicial District Civil Court said he intends to reverse the potential plant’s air permit. The Las Brisas power plant was given the permit in January 2011 by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). But in his announcement, the judge found several things wrong with how the TCEQ processed the permit, and said it failed to meet the requirements of the Clean Air Act, among other issues.
“The letter basically says that he found a number of legal errors in the TCEQ’s decision to grant the permit,” says attorney Erin Fonken with the Environmental Integrity Project, which was one of the parties that brought the case to court. “These aren’t just little things where they didn’t check a box. There are substantial analyses that [the TCEQ] failed to have the applicant do at all. These are some pretty serious errors.”
Without the air permit, which the company called “an important project milestone” when it was issued, things get set back significantly. Continue Reading →
Photographer and author Thomas Bachand put the Keystone Mapping Project together. While he only has data for four states, he’s still hoping to map out the rest. In an email to StateImpact Texas he wrote that he started the project because “neither TransCanada Corporation nor the U.S. Department of State (DOS) have been forthcoming with this project’s GIS information. This has made it impossible to evaluate the potential environmental impacts of the Keystone XL pipeline,” he wrote. “While it’s a good start, the scarcity of data underscores the lack of transparency and inadequacy of the Keystone XL review process.”
Photo by Flickr user GrungeTextures/Creative Commons
The Texas drought has killed an estimated 5.6 million urban trees and 500 million forest trees, roughly 10 percent of the trees in Texas.
The Texas Forest Service plans to take a long look at Texas’ trees to see how much damage the ongoing drought has done.
Last December, the forest service released a preliminary estimate of between 100 and 500 million trees killed by the drought. A later estimate of tree losses in urban areas of Texas have been pegged at more than five million. Both of those surveys relied on satellite imagery of trees in Texas.
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