Texas Environmental News - compiled by West Texas Wind (FB) radio Dec 7,2018

Fracking in the Permian Basin is down according to Bloomberg News. The number of fracking crews peaked in May with 190 roaming the 80,000 square miles of the most prolific oil field in the country. The December 1st count was 167 crews. Schlumberger, the biggest oil field service provider in the world, is reporting a 15% drop in sales for the last quarter in 2018. A triplet of factors is associated with the downturn including a drop in crude prices, over-extended exploration budgets and a shortage of pipeline takeaway. Perhaps the realization of Climate Change and the competitiveness of clean energy is part of it too. The average Permian well is fracked 6 to 7 times and uses about 250,000 barrels of fresh water each time along with a number of fracking fluids including acids, radioactive tracking isotopes, emulsifiers, diesel, biocides, propylene glycol, lubricants, anti-corrosives and other toxic chemicals.

Texas utility provider Excel plans to be fossil fuel free by 2050. But is that timely enough? According to Dallas News, Excel, based in Minneapolis, with over a quarter million customers in TX, would have to shut down or sell its entire Texas generating portfolio which includes two coal plants, two methane plants and a combination fuel oil -methane plant. Other utilities have already shuddered three coal plants this year in Texas.

Former Oilman and President George H W Bush was buried in Houston this week. During the 1988 presidential campaign he famously said, “Read my lips no new taxes.” Which he went on to do. He also said, not so famously, “I will use the White House effect to control the Green House effect.” Which He did not do. Nor did any of those who followed him, frankly. Bill McKibben of 350.org wrote last week in The New Yorker,” What has defied expectations is the slowness of the response. The climatologist James Hansen testified before Congress about the dangers of human-caused climate change thirty years ago. Since then, carbon emissions have increased with each year except 2009 and the newest data show that 2018 will set another record. Simple inertia and the human tendency to prioritize short-term gains have played a role, but the fossil-fuel industry’s contribution has been by far the most damaging. Alex Steffen, an environmental writer, coined the term “predatory delay” to describe “the blocking or slowing of needed change, in order to make money off unsustainable, unjust systems in the meantime.” The behavior of the oil companies, which have pulled off perhaps the most consequential deception in mankind’s history, is a prime example.”

Plastic factories presently are seen as a petro-chemical growth area for the fossil fuel industry but could these projections be wrong? The European Union voted this week 571 to 53 to ban single-use plastics such as straws, plates, and cutlery by 2021. In India many hotels refuse to provide bottled water and parks throughout Australia post signs reading “No polyethylene allowed.” England and China also have restrictions on single use plastic. The World Economic Forum states that there is 50 million tons of plastic in the world’s oceans that could take hundreds of years to degrade. The forum warned that there would be more plastic than fish in weight in oceans by 2050. Meantime Exxon-Mobil continues to push through the permitting process to build the largest plastics factory in the world at the Port of Corpus Christi.

Dallas-based Exxon-Mobil agreed to buy 500 megawatts of wind and solar power to power its Permian Basin fossil fuel production operations. Carolyn Fortuna writes in CleanTechnic,  “Hallelujah! But, wait. Should we cheer?” Meantime Exxon has pledged to triple their methane production in the Permian by 2025. Fortuna continues, “Does bringing in renewable energy in the Permian Basin — … — even start to make amends for Exxon Mobil’s incredible, lasting, and shattering impacts on the planet of fossil fuel drilling and burning? ... Don’t we need to get fossil fuels out of our buildings in order to slash US fossil fuel use by 80% by 2050? …How does Exxon-Mobil’s expansive drilling in the Permian Basin achieve those goals, even with a nod to wind and solar?” The Carbon Majors Report, prepared by Climate Accountability Institute last year, found 25 corporations led by Exxon-Mobile were responsible for 1/2 of all carbon emissions since 1988. In 1977, James Black, an Exxon senior scientist, addressed the company’s top leaders, writing, “There is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon-dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.” That’s a pretty clear statement from over 40 years ago. Dear Exxon, the epoch is over, did you not get the memo?

"Predatory delay" a term conceived by Alex Steffen, is used to describe “the blocking or slowing of needed change, in order to make money off unsustainable, unjust systems in the meantime.” The pathos of the oil companies, and their enablers, including legislators and politically- fired judges, have accomplished the most damning deception in the history of mankind - "there's nothing wrong with our product" - a prime example of predatory delay.

Predatory Delay?

The L’eau Est La Vie resistance camp battling the Dallas-based Energy Transfer Bayou Bridge crude oil pipeline, running through the heart of America’s biggest swamp, the Atchafalaya Basin of Louisiana, won a victory in court this week.  Louisiana State Judge Keith Comeaux found the corporation guilty of trespassing. He fined them a perfunctory four-hundred-and fifty dollars. One-hundred-foot cypress and tupelo trees were bulldozed and mulched, while barge mounted excavators tore through private property without permission in order to meet shareholders completion date expectations. Many at the feminist indigenous led camp were arrested themselves for felony trespassing despite having permission from the landowners to protect the private property from ET CEO Kelsey Warren’s pipeliners. During the trial, according to the Baton Rouge Advocate, a philosophical question arose: Does the damage of trenching the wetlands and fail-safing more greenhouse gas releases by permitting additional fossil fuel infrastructure outweigh strengthening Louisiana’s petrochemical economy? At stake in the courtroom was whether Energy Transfer could be found guilty of trespassing and still be allowed to seize the property ad hoc through eminent domain thereby green-lighting the final segment of the 163-mile pipeline. Judge Comeaux, deferred and allowed Energy Transfer to seize the property by stating, “The Court should not supplant the well-thought and well-researched opinions of the various agencies that permitted this project,” Comeaux wrote in his judgment. “Therefore, the Court finds that the proper permitting has been done, and that the public purpose and necessity has been proven by Bayou Bridge Pipeline.” Dockets for the criminal trials of the L’Eau Est La Vie water protectors that defended the property have not been set.

PREDATORY DELAY? - L'eau Est La Vie camp update - December 7, 2018

"Predatory delay" a term conceived by Alex Steffen, is used to describe “the blocking or slowing of needed change, in order to make money off unsustainable, unjust systems in the meantime.” The pathos of the oil companies, and their enablers,including legislators and politically- fired judges, have accomplished  the most damning deception in the history of mankind - "there's nothing wrong with our product" - a prime example of predatory delay.

The L’eau Est La Vie resistance camp battling the Dallas-based Energy Transfer Bayou Bridge crude oil pipeline, running through the heart of America’s biggest swamp, the Atchafalaya Basin of Louisiana, won a victory in court this week.  Louisiana State Judge Keith Comeaux found the corporation guilty of trespassing. He fined them four-hundred-and fifty dollars. One-hundred-foot cypress and tupelo trees were bulldozed and mulched, while barge mounted excavators tore through private property without permission in order to meet shareholders completion date expectations. Many at the feminist indigenous led camp were arrested themselves for felony trespassing despite having permission from the landowners to protect the private property from ET CEO Kelsey Warren’s pipeliners. During the trial, according to the Baton Rouge Advocate, a philosophical question arose: Does the damage of trenching the wetlands and fail-safing more greenhouse gas releases by permitting additional fossil fuel infrastructure outweigh strengthening Louisiana’s petrochemical economy? At stake in the courtroom was whether Energy Transfer could be found guilty of trespassing and still be allowed to seize the property ad hoc through eminent domain thereby green-lighting the final segment of the 163-mile pipeline. Judge Comeaux, deferred and allowed Energy Transfer to seize the property by stating, “The Court should not supplant the well-thought and well-researched opinions of the various agencies that permitted this project,” Comeaux wrote in his judgment. “Therefore, the Court finds that the proper permitting has been done, and that the public purpose and necessity has been proven by Bayou Bridge Pipeline.” Dockets for the criminal trials of the L’Eau est la Vie water protectors that defended the property have not been set.

Oklahoma's Creek Tribe Problem, Dec 2, 2018

Creek Tribe Native American - photo by Pinterest

Patrick Murphy, a Creek Indian, is on death Row at an Oklahoma State Prison for a murder that occurred on historic Creek land. His lawyer is now appealing the conviction to the Supreme Court, arguing that the trial should have never been tried in state court. Leading Creek authorities said the case should have been tried in either a Creek Court on a Federal court. This jurisdiction question now brings into play just who governs eastern Oklahoma. The land, granted by the federal government to the Creeks after they were purged from their native tribal lands of Georgia and Alabama in the early 1800’s now has nearly 2 million people living on it, most of whom who are neither Creek nor did their land deeds pass through Creeks. The Supreme Court according to NPR has long recognized reservation boundaries unless they’ve been revoked by Congress. Congress considered revocation of the Creek land in 1906 but did not follow through. In reality the land has been governed by the state for years and by all aspects of common law this essentially seems to give authority to the state. However James Floyd, principal chief of the Muscogee Creek Nation told NPR, “Well, during the period before statehood, when we had an allotment of land within the Muskogee Creek Nation boundaries and state law was being formulated essentially and the state became recognized as a state, we still existed. We still had our courts. We still had our schools. And we still had the governance of our people. The state basically came in on top of that and imposed its will on us. We continued to have governance at a much smaller scale until the mid-'70s.” The Chief went on to say that they will claim their rights even though they have not been enforced in a long time. A docket date has not yet been set by the Supreme Court.

TX Environmental News - December 1, compiled by West Texas Wind (FB) radio

                                         

Climate Specialist, Bruce Melton, of Austin wrote last week in Truthout, that climate change is not a linear phenomenon. In an article titled “California Wildfires: Where is the Climate Change Outrage,” he writes, “…the physics of warming determines that a little more warming doesn’t create a little more extremeness but a lot more.” He used the recent Camp Fire in Paradise, CA where at least 71 people have lost their lives and 12,000 structures were destroyed and the Mendocino Complex Fire in July that burned 459,000 acres as examples of “record-setting increases of these unheard-of extreme weather events.” “What will it take,” he asks “to allow us to treat climate change like it is the most important issue our society has ever faced…?”

The San Antonio Express News released a heat chart of the city last week that shows a 20-degree temperature difference between central city and the northern suburbs. The urban heat island effect map based on a satellite image taken on a recent summer night is part of the final phase of the city’s attempt to draft a climate action and adaption plan. The article reads, “Older residents and working-class families who live in the ‘heat island’ typically can least afford to spend more on summer air-conditioning bills.” Greg Harmon of the Sierra Club told the Express News, “Those people least responsible for our climate crisis are most vulnerable to its impacts.”

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are hoping to rollback car emissions despite twenty states who say they will sue the feds if they do (Texas is not one of them). MIT Professor Emeritus Noam Chomsky, points out that the administration’s detailed study calling for the end of vehicle emission regulation is one of the more evil documents produced by the Trump Administration to date. According to Truthout, Chomsky says the report extrapolates current consumption patterns, and concludes by saying that at the end of the century, societal patterns as we know it will be over and since automotive emissions don’t contribute that much to the catastrophe, there isn’t any point trying to limit them.

The pet industry is being blamed for an unwelcomed invasion of an exotic species. According to the Houston Chronicle, the venomous Lion Fish with no-known natural enemies on our side of the world, has now arrived in great numbers at the Gulf of Mexico’s Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, 100 miles off the coast of Galveston. The zebra-striped fish once found the waters of the Indo-Pacific home, but demand by aquarium lovers in the United States established a substantial import trade for the fish and through the cracks and toilets many of these warm-water-loving creatures escaped into the wild. Michelle Johnston, a sanctuary research biologist told the Chronicle, “They are the cockroaches of the sea. They reproduce every four days, and every four days they can release up to 50,000 eggs. Plus, nothing really eats them, they have venomous spines and the native fish are terrified of them.”

A gas pipeline owned by Dallas-based Energy Transfer exploded last week at the Waha Transfer Hub near Coyanosa sending two contract men to the hospital. It is not known if the men had medical coverage.  The 24-inch pipeline ruptured inside a gas processing facility where according to a local resident a series of four explosions occurred the day after Thanksgiving. Energy Transfer spokesperson Vicki Granado said at the time of the incident, the fire would be left alone until it burned itself out, which according to another local resident – it did, two days later.  Post explosion security was tight at the scene where charred grounds and metal detritus could be seen. The Texas Railroad Commission will investigate the incident. Natural Gas Intelligence reports a marked uptick in flaring has occurred in the region since the explosion. Environmentalists claim Energy Transfer, who owns over 70,000 miles of pipelines, most of it in Texas, has an accident every 12 days.

Port of Corpus Christi CEO Sean Strawbridge is showing frustration after convincing the people of the Coastal Bend to spend a billion dollars and allow the Port Authority to dredge the ship channel from 42 feet to 54 feet and heighten the Portland Bridge. But, Trafigura, a behemoth Swiss commodity trading house, hopes to build a tanker terminal twenty miles offshore and by-pass the port.  Strawbridge told KRIS-TV, “When you look at these offshore buoys, they are usually in venues that don’t have the same type of quality infrastructure that we have here in the United States. Places like Africa and India.” The Port of Corpus Christi is the No.1 US oil exporting port. But 54 feet of water draft is not enough for today’s very large crude carriers. The Trafigura proposed off shore terminal will have a water draft of 75 feet and no bridges to pass under. Transportation economies of scale is key as some of the largest tankers can carry 500,000 tons of cargo when fully loaded. The billion-dollar project to allow bigger ships to call the port may have some people asking why did we spend the money? Meantime, the dredge spoils, allegedly clean and uncontaminated from the deepening of the refinery-lined ship channel, will create an offshore island 22 miles long, 5 miles wide and 25 feet thick.

Texas Railroad Commissioner Ryan Sitton spoke glowingly about record oil production in Texas at last month’s Permian Basin Petroleum Association Annual Meeting in Midland. Sitton said, “Oil and gas production in the Permian has grown exponentially over the last few years, bringing with it unprecedented job growth and revenue for the State of Texas.” The commissioner did not address the growing Permian drug addiction, traffic mortality, teacher shortage, the worst asthma counties of the state nor did he speak to the correlation of fossil fuels and climate change or the $540 hotel rates at Super Eight.

Attorneys for Exxon-Mobil met attorneys from the Sierra Club and Environment Texas this month in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals as the oil giant tries to reduce the $20 million fine imposed on their Baytown Refinery earlier this year. Over 16,000 violations were recorded against the refinery over an 8-year span.  Luke Metzger, Director of Environment Texas told 740-Radio, “They don't dispute that there was 16,000 violations, they dispute whether we have the right to sue them over all 16,000. Basically these are equipment fails or an operator makes a mistake, things that are largely preventable by better investment in equipment, better training or more personnel.” Exxon argues the violations, in the form of air and water pollution, are too severe and only worth $1.6 million in fines. In the 3rd quarter of 2018 Exxon-Mobile generated 6.8 billion dollars of profit.

What kind of mind thinks of ways to stump wind and solar energy at this point in time in history? Well, according to the Houston Chronicle it might be the mind of old energy. Despite the incredible evidence of an Earth going turtle and the correlation between fossil fuels, climate change and toxicity, Houston oil utilities Calpine Corp and NRG Energy have petitioned the TX Public Utilities Commission to make west Texas wind and solar energy more expensive by adding a surcharge in the transmission of electricity to urban areas.  According to the Chronicle, Texas is the largest producer of wind energy and the 3^rd largest producer of solar, attracting billions of dollars of investment without the use of state tax credits.

Elon Musk, owner of Space X and top rival of Jeff Bezos, the Blue Origin rocket launcher owner north of Van Horn, admitted his one-way-tickets to Mars are not for everybody. But the 47-year-old Musk defended the Mars migration and suggested it was a better bang-for-the-buck than Bezos’s sub-orbital space round trip plans that Blue Origin plans to offer next year. Moreover, Musk, who was interviewed by HBO last week, told critics, who say his Mars plans are only for the rich, "Really the ad for going to Mars would be like Shackleton's ad for going to the Antarctic. It's gonna be hard. There's a good chance of death. Going in a little can through deep space, you might land successfully, once you land successfully, you'll be working nonstop to build the base. Not much time for leisure, and once you get there, even after doing all this, it's a very harsh environment, so there's a good chance you die there. We think you can come back, but we're not sure. Now does that sound like an escape hatch for rich people?" Musk said there was a 70 per cent chance that he would move to the Red Planet.

Texas Environmental News - Week 42 (courtesy of West Texas Wind)

Protesters disrupted the annual Energy Transfer Partners shareholders meeting last week at a Hilton in Dallas. Holding signs outside the hotel and chanting “Water is Life,” the protesters seemed most irked about the ETP owned Bayou Bridge Pipeline that crosses 700 Louisiana waterways in route to the Mississippi River where North Dakota crude will be exported. Inside the meeting, protesters notified stock holders that ETP had the worst safety record in the industry, with toxic spills occurring every 11 days. The protesters also questioned the complicity of shareholder investment in profitable yet ostensible socially and environmentally bankrupt corporations. Billionaire and Chairman of the Board, Kelsey Warren, reportedly fled the room after a water main burst. Two arrests were made.

The EPA is now considering lowering the definitional standards of clean water under the Clean Water Act according to the Houston Chronicle. Should the water standards be lowered by the Trump Administration, it will enable the oil&gas industry to rid themselves of waste water more conveniently.  Lakes, streams, city water treatment centers and other surface settings could be environmentally challenged. Dirtier clean water discharged back into surface re-circulation keeps the water in the hydrologic cycle but contamination has always been the reason why oil field waste water has been injected into deep disposal wells, some as deep as 15,000 feet. Texas has over 250,000 of them. But now as the supply of deep waste disposal wells shrink as new concerns about earthquake pro-genesis and water table pollution become part of the Leave Fossil Fuels in the Ground debate, Permian operators are scrambling to find ways to be rid of the 660 million gallons of waste water generated per day in the region. Waste water pipelines to whoosh waste to cheaper dumping grounds and new filtering processes are some of the potential solutions but none represent as cheap an alternative to the industry as dumping lower quality water onto the surface environment.

Settlement funds for the BP Deepwater-Horizon Oil Spill of 2010 are slowly funding coastal restoration projects in Texas. The Texas share, 238 million dollars, has funded in part four big projects to date according to the Houston Chronicle. The cargo ship “Kracken” was sunk of the coast of Freeport as part of a series of artificial reefs to create habitat for recreational fishing. 10.7 million funded the redevelopment of Galveston Island State Park. Three rookery islands in Galveston and Matagorda Bays are the recipient of $20 million to help protect herons, pelicans and gulls at the Big Bogg National Wildlife Refuge. And another 20 million has been designated for Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle habitat. Although Texas nesting numbers were down for several years after the 3.1-million-barrel oil spill, a record number of nests, 353, were counted in 2017.

Pilgrim’s Pride poultry in Mount Pleasant is the third worst polluting meat packing house in the country according to Environment Texas. A report by the Environmental Integrity Project and Earth Justice, called, “Water Pollution from Slaughter Houses” shows that nearly 75% of the nation’s large meat processing plants have violated their pollution control permits in the last 24 months --with some dumping more nitrogen pollution than small cities. Peter Lehner, senior attorney at Earthjustice, said: “Slaughterhouses are another dirty link in the highly polluting industrial meat production chain.  From polluted runoff from over-fertilized fields growing animal feed, to often-leaking manure lagoons and contaminated runoff at concentrated animal feeding operations, and to industrial slaughterhouses, the way most of our meat is now produced impairs our drinking water and public health. We need to clean up every stage.” The report statistically arranges the slaughterhouse polluters in quantities of released nitrogen --which fuels algae growth and creates low-oxygen dead zones. Pilgrims Pride discharged 1,700 pounds of nitrogen a day, into Lake O’ the Pines last year. Brian Zabcik, a Clean Water Advocate with Environment Texas said, “Texans love barbecue — but nobody orders a side of water pollution with their meat.” He added, “The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality needs to issue stronger water pollution control permits for the slaughterhouses in East Texas and elsewhere — and then enforce them, so they stop contaminating our waterways.”

Physicist and author Jan Dash told the Houston Chronicle this week, “The biggest step in reducing global warming requires transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewable energies.” He went on to say, “It is scientifically certain that burning fossil fuels increases atmospheric carbon dioxide, which then produces the global warming trend observed over the last 40 years. While fossil fuels made modern civilization possible, fossil fuels have also led to the distinct possibility that the Earth may become unlivable sooner or later.” Meantime the Army Corp of Engineers predicts a 12-inch sea level rise in Houston by 2038. Dash commented, “Another foot of water at the shoreline means another foot of storm surge in a hurricane. One foot of extra water would be enough to flood New York City subways regularly. The U.S. Navy’s scenarios of sea level rise by 2100 go up to 6 feet. Sea level rise of that magnitude will flood coastal cities and farms, producing mass migrations of hundreds of millions of people worldwide with catastrophic consequences.” Meantime Houston city planning continues to issue building permits in flood zones.

Texas Environmental News - Week 40 (West Texas Wind, valentineradio.net)

Gulf Coast Ammonia wants to dump 2.2 trillion gallons of industrial wastewater annually into Galveston Bay, one of the most polluted bays in America. The TCEQ is considering their permit request while Texas City officials are offering the plant, which will employ 25-50 full time employees, a ten-year tax abatement. Anhydrous ammonia, extremely toxic to aquatic life is used most often in the preparation of non-organic fertilizers. Shrimper Roy Lee Cannon told the Houston Chronicle, “I don’t see how they can say nothing’s going to be affected or there will be little effect on the environmental situation for the oysters, fish, shrimp etc because they have no way of knowing.” Buoyed by the Trump Administration’s pro fossil fuel stance, the build out of the Texas Gulf Coast petro-chemical industry is seeing its biggest expansion ever.

As the Permian fracking boom gets closer to the Big Bend so too the night lights. We should not feel alone. Today over 80% of all humans and more than 99% of people in the US and Europe live under light polluted skies according to the Scientist magazine. Kevin Gaston, a UK scientist told the magazine, “It’s become clear that light pollution is a major anthropogenic pressure on the environment.” Its effect on humans and other species is still being studied. Theresa Jones of the University of Melbourne said, “We have nothing in our genetic make-up that has been exposed to this type of challenge. It’s completely unprecedented in the history of the Earth.” Most humans and animals evolved with night and day perception, creating the circadian rhythms. Some fear this loss or modification of perception may link us to catastrophe. Franz Holker, a German scientist who was part of a study that reported a loss of nearly 75% of flying insects in parts of Germany over 30 years, warned that such declines have set the Earth on course for an “ecological Armageddon.” “When this study came out, they were thinking about land-use change, climate change, and pesticides,” Hölker said. “But these factors alone could not explain the population plunge. Light pollution might be the missing piece of the puzzle.” Holker’s team recently discovered that the regions of decimated insects also had high levels of night time illumination.

The EPA has rated Texas as the No.1 polluter in the country, siting the large scale petro-chemical industry along the Gulf Coast, fracking and a lax regulatory environment as the spawning ground for the state’s colossal anthropological footprint. But natural causes of pollutants, including the greenhouse gas CO2 in high latitude areas may soon give man-made sources, a run for their money. As temperatures increase, tundra in Alaska is off-gassing. A recent study, led by Harvard University, found that long-term records at Barrow, AK, suggest that CO2 emission rates from North Slope tundra have increased during the October through December period by 73% ± 11% since 1975, and are correlated with rising summer temperatures. Together, the report reads “these results imply increasing early winter respiration and net annual emission of CO2 in Alaska, in response to climate warming.”

Vicki Hollub, CEO of Houston-based Occidental Petroleum and Darren Woods, of Dallas-based Exxon-Mobil, joined 11 other CEOs from major oil companies worldwide at the first US meeting of a four-year-old group called Oil and Gas Climate Initiative. One hundred fifty people including high-ranking green group members, asked questions of the CEO panel in what Axios Magazine described as a “rare and surprising candid discussion.” Axios went on to say that “under pressure from investors and lawsuits, oil companies are starting to acknowledge climate change and slowly shift their business models in response.” The member companies including Saudi Aramco, Shell, Chevron represent a third of the world’s oil&gas production, and pledged last week at the Manhattan meeting, to cut their methane emissions by one fifth. Nigel Topping, CEO of a nonprofit coalition called We Mean Business, noted that the companies were still overwhelmingly investing in finding new oil and gas over cleaner energy resources.  But each of the members have ponied up their share of money creating a substantial fund managed by the group for alternative energy investments. Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, who attended, said, “The first thing they started tackling when they were formed four years ago was methane, and they’ve taken that issue very seriously. We think they are doing good things with the billion-dollar fund. We will keep watching. We will keep encouraging.”

Chair-lady of the Texas Railroad Commission, Christi Craddick, never met a flare she didn’t like or so it seems. In fact, the 3 member TRC board has approved 20,000 flaring permits in the past 5 years according to the Wall Street Journal and not one has been denied. Including a drill site known as Ringo 9. Christi Craddick has an interest in Ringo 9 and 174 other wells according to the Austin-Statesman. So does she have a conflict of interest? Should she have recused herself from approving flaring at Ringo 9? Oil, the gold, comes with associated gas including the greenhouse gas methane, carcinogens toluene and benzene, and VOCs hydrogen sulfide, nitrous oxide and others. If a gas pipeline is not available at the drill site the driller asks the TRC for a permit to flare. The problem is the TRC doesn’t distinguish between flaring and venting and flares don’t always work. In light of the overwhelming evidence of climate change and the role these gasses play, perhaps not issuing a flare permit is the responsible thing to do. Get the pipeline in to take away the associated gas before producing oil. Craddick is up for re-election this November.

Prisoners at Karnes County Residential Center, a privately-operated prison for immigrants seeking asylum, are at risk for cancer, brain damage and respiratory problems according to Deceleration News. Twenty-three-hundred active oil&gas wells are spewing tons of toxins in Karnes County and some wells are as close as 100 feet to the facility. Unlike the 15,000 residents of the county, the asylum seekers have no place to escape the fumes. Priscilla Villa, of Earthworks told Deceleration “The prisoners have no choice but to inhale the toxic fumes coming from these sites. Fracking emissions are harmful to human health and especially hazardous to vulnerable populations, which includes all children, newborns and pregnant women at this detention center.”

Sempra LNG also known as Port Arthur LNG is hoping to build an LNG export terminal at a wildlife management area on the Sabine River. Texas Parks & Wildlife are, behind closed doors, considering trading 120 acres of the JD Murphree Wildlife Management Area to the corporation for an undisclosed property elsewhere. Sempra plans to produce 13.5 million tons of liquified methane at the facility. Three compression stations will be required and horsepower sufficient to cool the methane to a negative 265 degrees below zero for liquification of the gas. Texas Parks & Wildlife have yet to provide information on how they plan to manage this piece of the people’s land.

Weekly Texas Coal News - April 14, 2018

Reggie James, ED of the Lone Star chapter of the Sierra Club spoke at the Crowley Theater last Tuesday night in Marfa. James suggested that the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign that closed or phased out 240 coal plants in the country between 2009 and 2013 saved Americans 100 billion dollars in health costs. He said the legal strategy simple used laws already in place, primarily the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts of the Nixon administration. The coal companies could not meet the pollution standards. US electricity generated by coal dropped from 50% in 2005 to less than 1/3 in 2012. James went on to say that fossils fuels, primarily gas and oil will likely die out in the next 30 years with the present level of subsidies and exclusions from environmental regulations. “Without the subsides and artificial support,” he said, “I would think fossil fuels dies 10 years earlier.” James said that renewable energy is already cheaper pointing out that 2/3 of all new electrical capacity installed in 2015 was wind or solar.

 
Coal Extractors in the Powder River Basin, a strip of land running through Montana and Wyoming that produces 40% of America's coal, were stunned last month when US District Court Judge Brian Morris ruled that the Bureau of Land Management officials must plan reductions in coal mining. Environmentalists who were pushing for complete closure of coal mining were cautiously optimistic. Mike Scott of the Sierra Club Montana said in a press release, “For decades, the federal government has kept their head in the sand over the climate impacts of fossil fuel extraction on public land. This ruling is the latest example of courts forcing the federal government to be honest with the American public about how coal, and oil and gas leasing is contributing to the growing impacts of climate change.”

The Dos Republicas coal mine near Eagle Pass Texas continues to export low quality lignite coal to the Mexican Electricity company known as CFE. The coal is burned at

Carbon 1 and Carbon 2, in Piedras Negras 10 miles from the Texas border, 20 miles from the Texas mine sight. The plant is the largest coal fired electricity plant in Central America. They are not fitted with anti-pollution scrubbers. According to the Bravo Study of 2004, Carbon 1 and Carbon 2, are the primary source of air pollution in the Big Bend region. National Parks Service stated that air quality in the BBNP is consistently the worst of all national parks.