Record hot days in December. Should we be happy or worried?
It was a beautiful weekend in much of Texas. Here in Austin, people arrived in t-shirts and shorts at the annual lighting of the Capitol Christmas Tree. They sang carols in the old fashioned way, but some may have decided to forgo the hot chocolate.
The temperatures hovered around 80.
Austin wasn’t alone in being unseasonably warm — Houston had record highs Saturday and Sunday.
As an unusually warm year stretches into December, more and more people are experiencing two conflicting emotions simultaneously. They’re happy with temperatures that allow outdoor barbeques and even a dip in the pool as winter begins, but concerned that it’s all somehow related to global climate change.
And they’re at a loss for succinct ways to express those feelings.
“This is great weather, but…” is one option. But could there be an easier way?
In the Texas Hill Country, one landfill’s trash powers homes
New Braunfels is best known for its clear-running rivers, the Guadalupe and the Comal seen here behind a city waste container.
For over two decades, trash from New Braunfels headed to the Mesquite Creek Landfill on the edge of town.
Garbage rich in organic matter arrives by the ton.
Compacted by heavy equipment, each “cell” of trash covers some 15 acres and will eventually be covered with soil.
A gas recovery system is made up of 2.5 miles of pipe and 67 gas extraction wells.
Paul Pabor is Vice President of Renewable Energy for the site’s operator, Waste Management, a Houston-based nationwide disposal giant.
From the landfill, the methane gas is piped to a cement-block building across the road.
Methane powers two huge engines that produce electricity.
Each engine cranks out about 1500 kilowatts
The electricity is then sent to the electric grid, enough to power up to 1800 homes in New Braunfels.
Landfills keep on producing methane for decades. This is the entrance to a city landfill in Houston and though closed in 1970, it’s listed by the US EPA as a potential project to produce methane for nearby industries.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), there are 27 landfills in Texas that are producing enough methane gas to make electricity or provide fuel to power industrial equipment. The agency says another 57 landfills are candidates for such projects.
“Texas is one of the few remaining states with a large number of landfills that don’t already have landfill gas energy projects and may have the potential to support them,” the EPA wrote in a lengthy statement emailed to StateImpact Texas.
East Texas landowner Mike Bishop is suing a state agency for allowing the Keystone XL pipeline to cross his property.
Mike Bishop is fired up. He’s standing with about a dozen protestors and half that many reporters in front of a state office building, waving a lawsuit in his hands.
âItâs beyond me why regulatory agencies and elected officials canât say, âYou know what? I made a mistake. Iâm so sorry. You know what weâre going to do? Weâre going to correct that mistake.'” he intones, slamming his fists.
Bishop is unhappy with how state agencies are handling pipelines in Texas, specifically the Keystone XL pipeline, which will soon cross his land in Nacodoches County.
A coal miner at a Mitt Romney campaign rally at American Energy Corportation on August 14, 2012 in Beallsville, Ohio.
One of the few coal power plants still being planned in Texas is facing setbacks.
The controversial White Stallion Energy Center in Matagorda County had been working with the Texas grid to examine how it will work once its completed, a process called a grid interconnection study. Itâs a typical requirement for new power plants, along with an air permit. But earlier this fall the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) cancelled that study.
âThat process has taken longer than we anticipated,” Randy Bird, the Chief Operating Officer for the coal power project. “And most of the delay was on our side. Because of market conditions.â
Those market conditions are making coal power unattractive in Texas, and the nation. Low prices for natural gas (thanks to the widespread adoption of hyrdaulic fracturing, or “fracking”) and declining accessibility and quality of domestic coal have made natural gas the preferred option for new power. Continue Reading →
Cracked ground in far West Texas. Some parts of the state never fully recovered from the drought of 2011.
Only a quarter inch of rain will have fallen on average in Texas through the entire month of November, according to estimates provided to StateImpact Texas by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
That would make it about the 3rd or 4th driest November since record keeping started in 1895. If you look at the last two months together, estimates say itâs been the driest October and November since the drought of record in the 1950s.
“The worst one year drought in Texas on record began in October 2010 and lasted about a year,” NOAA meteorologist Victor Murphy tells StateImpact Texas.
“We saw some brief improvement in late 2011, early 2012, and now boom! We’re right back in a pretty dry pattern again,” Murphy added. “So, arguably, you could make the case that perhaps we’re in the third year of drought here in Texas. Especially certain parts of the state, we obviously are.â
Strutting its Stuff. The Lesser Prairie Chicken was proposed for listing as "threatened" today by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Today the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced the start of a process that could lead to the listing of the Lesser Prairie Chicken as a ‘threatened species’ under the Endangered Species Act.
The bird lives in the grasslands of the Texas panhandle, as well as in Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas, and Colorado. The proposal to list it as “threatened” rather than “endangered” allows Fish and Wildlife more flexibility in crafting conservation measures for the animal.
Under the listing, “we can tailor ‘take’ prohibitions under section 4d of the Act,” Leslie Gray, Texas Public Affairs Specialist with the Service, told StateImpact Texas.
A “take” is an action that harms, harasses or kills the animal. Continue Reading →
Under Texas' Sunset Review, state agencies sometimes face a choice: reform or be eliminated.
The Sunset Advisory Commission, a state agency dedicated to reviewing how the rest of the state agencies are working and spending money, just released this thing called âThe Sunset Reportâ. Well, they actually released several reports. The reviews look closely at some state agencies, deciding whether or not the institutions should be put on the chopping block.
As we reported earlier this week, the Texas Railroad Commission recently received a Sunset review. Proposed changes include a name change, as well as campaign finance restrictions for commissioners. Before the Sunset legislation is called to a vote next year, we thought weâd take a moment to break down exactly who the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission is and how these Sunset Reports came to be.
What is the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission?
The Sunset Advisory Commission began in 1977 as a way to look closely at the effectiveness of Texas state agencies and determine their utility and worth. The Commission is made of 5 Texas House Members, 5 Senators, and 2 members of the public, appointed by the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the House of Representatives. The Commissionâs main function is to propose Sunset review recommendations to the Texas Legislature as a Sunset Bill.
At a speech before the Dallas Regional Chamber of Commerce today, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst said lawmakers should look into using $1 billion from the state’s Rainy Day Fund to finance water projects this upcoming legislative session. You can watch his remarks above, the funding for water projects starts at the 22 minute mark.
The Rainy Day Fund is a pot of money (currently sitting at about $8 Billion) collected primarily from oil and gas development taxes. It is designed to be very difficult for lawmakers to get their hands on, and is set aside by state law for use only in circumstances like an extreme budget shortfall, or to respond to a natural disaster.
Texas’ current political leadership was reluctant to tap into the fund even at the height of the recent nationwide recession.
It took the driest one-year period in Texas history to convince some in power that it’s time to tap the fund. Today, Dewhurst suggested that Texas’ looming water crisis meets the benchmark to open up the fund. He joins other voices at the state capitol who see funding for water projects as an crucial issue for Texas, but who are unable or unwilling to raise taxes or create other forms of revenue to do it.
An LCRA Tanker truck pumps water into the Spicewood Beach water system. A second truck was destroyed in an accident in October.
We recently brought you an update from Spicewood Beach, the first town in Texas to run out of water in the great Texas drought.
As we reported, things have not gotten much better there, and in some ways they’ve gotten worse. People are moving out, property values have plummeted, and residents face the prospect of nearby lake levels (and, by extension, their water table) dropping even lower, if water is released from the Highland Lakes to rice farmers downstream in January.
You can now add to that list of concerns the loss of one of the trucks that was hauling water into town.
A Texas scientist dubiously claims she's sequenced Bigfoot's DNA. So is it legal to kill him/it now?
Update, 2/14/13: The second week of February, Ketchum released her paper claiming to have sequenced Sasquatch DNA. It was published in a ‘scientific journal’ created only a week earlier. You can read more over at the Houston Chronicle.
You may have read some dubious new claims by a Texas “scientist” that Bigfoot is real. Nacogdoches veterinarian Melba Ketchum (who claims to also be a a scientist in “Forensics and Hominid Research” on her Twitter profile) announced this week that her company, DNA Diagnostics, has successfully sequenced the DNA of not just one, but several Bigfoots. (Or is that Bigfeet?)
Using DNA apparently found from hair, blood and tissue samples, Ketchum says she’s sequenced Bigfoot. Those samples may have come from cryptid enthusiast Robin Lynne, who claims to have several Sasquatch roaming the land around her Michigan property. She says … wait for it … she’s enticed them there with blueberry bagels.
The news is even being covered by major outlets like CNN, FOX and TIME. (For a robust, skeptical take on the new claims, check out Eric Berger’s solid debunking in the Houston Chronicle.)
But if Bigfoot were indeed real, and you were out hunting in Texas, it may surprise you to know that you have some options once you encounter him/her/it.
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