You’re probably recovering from too much nog and eating leftover ham sandwiches, but in case you missed it, here’s out top five new posts from the last week:
Due to Drought, Houston Drinking More Dallas Wastewater:Â It’s long been a joke based on facts: take a drink from a tap in Houston and say ‘thank you’ to your friends in Dallas for flushing their toilets. We explain what’s exactly coming out of your faucet.
Fracking Company Goes on the Offensive Against EPA Report:Â The company behind a fracking well in Wyoming that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says may have contaminated water sources isn’t taking the agency’s accusations lying down.
What is Santa’s Carbon Footprint? Yes, someone actually took the time to calculate Santa’s impact on the atmosphere. While we all know he brings plenty of cheer, a new infographic shows his operation has a carbon footprint much bigger than a lump of coal.
Texas Wildfires Scattered Birds to the Wind: During a year of exceptional drought, heat and wildfires, conservationists across Texas are paying close attention to the welfare of local bird populations.
A map shows the 0.01 percent of Texas no longer in drought.
Christmas came a little early for a small slice of Texas this year. We can now say that part of Texas is no longer in drought. A small part, to be sure, only 0.01 percent, but it’s happy news nonetheless.
According to new data from the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska (with a grateful hat tip to Kate Galbraith of the Texas Tribune), a sliver of Texas along the Texas-Oklahoma border is officially drought-free. Just east of Paris, Texas, 3.7 percent of Red River County is no longer in drought, representing 0.01 percent of the entire state. Continue Reading →
Amid the ruins of Bastrop, many new homes have already been built.
Some families have taken to making their own road signs
A Texas flag sits on a sign advertising a construction company.
This story was co-reported with Andy Uhler of KUT News.
On the Sunday of Labor Day weekend in Bastrop County, Kasey Tausch had just woken up from an afternoon nap. She heard her son come into their house yelling. “Mom! There’s a fire!” her son called out. She opened the front door and saw a sea of pitch black smoke. “It seemed like the fire was right there, but it was really miles away,” she remembers.
The family quickly grabbed some things and left their home. It would be gone when they came back. “We were literally driving through fire,” Kasey says. “We were just watching in amazement.”
For Kasey and her family and thousands of others in Bastrop this year, it won’t be Christmas as usual. After fires that destroyed 34,000 acres, more than 1,600 homes and claimed two lives, the holiday is going to be markedly different. Continue Reading →
In October, word got out of a scuffle between scientists and the Texas government. On one side, Rice University oceanographer John Anderson, who submitted an article on rising sea levels for a report to be published by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) on Galveston Bay. On the other, the TCEQ itself, which didn’t like some of what Anderson had to say, and excised his references to climate change and human impacts.
An agreement has now been reached between the two parties that will result in Anderson’s article being published in the commission’s report. Continue Reading →
What are the carbon emissions of Santa's operation?
Yes, someone actually took the time to calculate Santa’s impact on the atmosphere. While we all know he brings plenty of cheer, a new infographic by the environmentally-friendly shopping website Ethical Ocean shows his operation has a carbon footprint much bigger than a lump of coal.
The group estimates that Santa’s sleigh trip alone involves over 69 million metric tons of carbon emissions. They actually crunched the numbers on the height of Santa’s reindeer, the weight of Santa himself (300 pounds), and the payload of his sleigh (nearly 321,000 tons of toys, the top contributor). Over his 122 million-mile journey delivering cheer across the world, Santa’s guilty of emitting in one night the equivalent of the annual carbon footprint of the entire country of Qatar. Continue Reading →
The Fayette Power Project coal plant in La Grange, Texas. The plant will need to make upgrades to comply with new EPA rules.
In a move the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is calling “historic,” new rules were approved today that mandate reduced emissions of mercury and other pollutants from U.S. coal power plants. In a statement released today, the agency says that these are the first national standards that “will slash emissions of these dangerous pollutants by relying on widely available, proven pollution controls that are already in use at more than half of the nation’s coal-fired power plants.”
The agency estimates that the new rules “will prevent as many as 11,000 premature deaths and 4,700 heart attacks a year.” It also says that the rules will reduce childhood asthma symptoms and result in less acute bronchitis in children.
“Power plants are the largest remaining source of several toxic air pollutants, including mercury, arsenic, cyanide, and a range of other dangerous pollutants,” the agency says. Â They “are responsible for half of the mercury and over 75 percent of the acid gas emissions in the United States.” Continue Reading →
A woman protests against the proposed tax exemptions for Valero Energy Corporation in November.
A request for a tax refund by the Valero Energy Corporation, one of the world’s largest oil refiners, has been rejected by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), the Associated Press reports. Valero asked for the money under a state law that says companies don’t have to pay taxes on equipment that reduces on-site pollution.
The request was originally made in 2007, when Valero bought the equipment. The money, potentially as much as $92 million, would have come from property tax refunds in appraisal districts. Which means it would have been taken back from cities and schools that are already struggling.
The Associated Press obtained a letter dated December 14 from the executive director of the TCEQ, Mark Vickery, to Valero’s six refineries in Texas. Vickery wrote that the company “does not demonstrate that the hydrotreating equipment provides a partial environmental benefit at the site.” Continue Reading →
Birdwatchers at a recent trip at the Hyatt Lost Pines Resort.
Tens of thousands of birdwatchers across the country are participating in the Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count this month. But in Central Texas, the tradition has a special importance. During a year of exceptional drought, heat and wildfires, conservationists across Texas are paying close attention to the welfare of local bird populations.
This is the 112th year of the count, which helps Audubon and other groups to do a wildlife census of birds. Houston birdwatcher Michael Jewell didn’t know what to expect from the outing this year. When he drove to Austin last weekend to do the count, it was his first opportunity to see the devastation wrought by the Bastrop wildfires. “Although the fire to us may be big, maybe from a birds-eye-view, maybe it’s not as large as we think it is,” he said.
FM 3278 crosses the Trinity River just downstream from the Lake Livingston Dam
Once called the “River of Death” because it was so polluted with sewage and waste from slaughterhouses, the Trinity River has defied the great drought and helped maintain one of Houston’s critical supplies of water. And much of the credit goes to what a century ago made the river so polluted: the wastewater from Dallas-Fort Worth.
The Trinity flows past Dallas and goes south 200 miles to Lake Livingston. Even after the long summer of record drought and heat,
Map courtesy TRA
Click on the image above to trace the Trinity River Basin's route.
thousands of gallons of water still cascade every second down the lake’s spillway. From there, the flow again takes the form of a river and 80 miles later, the Trinity ends at Trinity Bay on the Gulf of Mexico.
The British oil company, BP, is shutting down its solar power operation BP Solar, Bloomberg reported today. BP is the second-largest oil company in Europe.
The company said it was closing down its solar division after 40 years because it has become unprofitable. BP Solar’s end will affect about 100 employees, the company said in an internal letter to employees. More from Bloomberg:
BP Solar is the latest victim in a solar market that is facing oversupply and price pressures since Asian manufacturers started ramping up. Crashing module prices helped tip three U.S. makers including Solyndra LLC into bankruptcy this year, and Solon SE, Germany’s first listed solar company, filed for insolvency last week.
The company’s solar division hasn’t manufactured much in the way of solar panels since 2009, Bloomberg says. Then it closed several factories in Spain and eliminated 480 jobs when the Spanish stock market nosedived, “triggering the industry’s first period of strong oversupply.” BP decided in July to stop manufacturing solar projects. The company said in the internal memo that its other renewable projects will remain, among them wind and biofuel.
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