What a time to start a weekly news wrap-up on the climate justice front. Stories of sweeping and rapid change have followed the incoming Biden Administration: reentering Paris and punking the KeystoneXL pipeline. On this front, a number of outlets have you covered. WaPo has (almost) all the executive-order action rolling into an environmental action tracker. (A week in, the administration had overturned eight of Trump’s environmental rollbacks; taken aim at 60 more, leaving 139 to go.) All this even as the most pro-coal Democrat is put on point for climate action.
At the Cultivator (if the name sticks), we’ll step up with national and international observations from time to time. Maybe we should note the approach of the e-car tipping point, for instance, definitely the countdown to genocidal Jair “Trump of the Tropics” Bolsonaro’s facing human-rights charges at International Criminal Court—or event the surprise turnabout for critically endangered North Atlantic right whales. But mostly we’re here to keep it strictly bioregional, friends.
With that understanding, may we?
San Antonio’s CPS Energy may dump coal by 2030
- At long last, the City-owned utility may have just been pushed, harassed, mocked, jostled, and petitioned to its senses. Here’s a collection of some of the coverage of this week’s CPS Energy announcement and related report non-release.
- CPS Energy to consider closing coal plant, but withholds details (San Antonio Express-News)
- Nirenberg: CPS must release plan for Spruce coal plant (San Antonio Express-News)
- A new report details the cost of closing CPS Energy’s coal plants. One board member is reluctant to release it (San Antonio Report)
- CPS Energy Proposes Moving ‘Beyond Coal’ by 2030 (Deceleration)
Related: Sierra Club flunks CPS in national climate report on day of report misfire. (San Antonio Current)
Uranium mining returns to Bee County in a big way
BEEVILLE—Uranium Energy Corp. is reopening one of the state’s most historically productive zones to help flood the US Uranium Reserve, which is a thing, apparently. (Corpus Christi Caller-Times)
Microplastics under the microscope in Matagorda Bay
PORT LAVACA—$3.2 million is headed to nine major Gulf Cost investigative and restoration projects through the Matagorda Bay Mitigation Trust. No need to thanks polluter Formosa Plastics for the millions in settlement money but mad props to the radical water protector who forced them to the table in the first place. (Victoria Advocate)
Blades piling up in West Texas wind turbine ‘graveyards’
SWEETWATER—Here’s a note on the not-so-renewable side of fiberglass power: “They have been cut into three pieces, laid down and piled up like empty straw wrappers discarded by giants. This is one of Texas’ first wind turbine graveyards.” (Texas Observer)
San Antonio Water System backs off on reform petition fight
SAWS, the City-owned water utility, curiously walked back on its stealth legal move to attempt to invalidate a reform petition, suggesting that SAWS Accountability Act PAC has run out of time to gather signatures anyway, which petitioners dispute.
Beyond Human Bonds
How an osprey united a San Antonio photographer and a Montana biologist
Or: From Yellowstone to Lake Brauning: The story of “81M” and the Osprey Project. (San Antonio Report)
Reflections on San Antonio’s alligators
Two calls in one month last year sent one gator back into the brush and other to the Snake Farm. (San Antonio Express-News)
Your Long Read: ‘Killing Trees’
Regulators working with San Antonio developers frustrated by ‘in the way’ trees know no such word as ‘no’ when it comes to requests for tree-clearing exemptions.
Update: Merely one week after feeling this press sting, San Antoio’s City Manager says sorry and they’ll all do much better in the future. (San Antonio Express-News)
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