Two Rivers Report: False ID’s & Resistance
Editor’s Note: I interviewed and photographed Pedro Rabago Gutierrez several times over the last few months in relation to his opposition to Energy Transfer Partners’ Trans-Pecos Pipeline. I knew him […]
Tag Archives: energy
Seeking A Cheap Solar Battery? Urine Luck
A battery made with urea, commonly found in fertilizers and mammal urine, could provide a low-cost way of storing energy produced through solar power or other forms of renewable energy […]
Fracking, Mining, Damming: ‘Homemade’ Quakes Increasing
[EDITOR’S NOTE: As clear and vital as the following article is, it avoids entirely a sleeping giant of human-caused earthquake risk: climate change. If you’re interested in how our industrially […]
Protectors: We Want Parks, Not Pipelines (VIDEO)
Calls for ETP CEO Kelcy Warren to resign Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission seat fill chamber. The “pipeline cowboy,” as Bloomberg News describes Energy Transfer Partners’ CEO Kelcy Warren, should […]
New DOE spill response: “Oops!”
Rick Perry, former governor of Texas, two-time presidential candidate, and one-time Dancing With the Stars contestant, is reportedly President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the Department of Energy — an […]
Defend Big Bend: Indigenous Resistance to Texas Trans-Pecos Pipeline Growing
On Sunday, November 20, members of Defend Big Bend, the Society of Native Nations, and several tribal groups, marched from the Marfa Mystery Lights Viewing Area outside Marfa, Texas, to […]
This is How Fast the Arctic is Melting
On September 10th, the Arctic hit its annual summertime ice minimum. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, it was the second lowest summertime low since satellite record-keeping […]
Lamar Smith: Guardian of Exxon’s Secrets
U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) called this week’s hearing of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology in the hopes of rounding up support. The defender of all things […]
Driverless big rigs headed for the highway
In the opening of Steven Spielberg’s 1971 film Duel, an impatient salesman gets stuck behind a rattling, soot-belching tractor-trailer on a lonely stretch of California highway. Just before the truck’s […]
Your brain on climate change: why the apathy?
Voter behavior has long held mysteries for both politicians and psychologists. Why do poor and working-class voters across the US South, for instance, still line up to support conservative candidates […]
Questions for San Antonio’s Calumet Refinery
Consider this my spring cleaning, late as it is. The subject: the mangle of flares and flanges known as the Calumet (or NuStar, or AGE) refinery in South SA. While some […]
Fact-Checking Lamar Smith
Unpacking the National Climate Assessment and its call for urgent climate action. The summer of 2011 should have been a wake-up call for Texans. Not only was there a withering […]
Storm the Crossroads: How the Fracking ‘Revolution’ Gambles Our Already-Tenuous Future
We idle at a crossroads. It’s a harried intersection, to be sure, at a twilight hour. From one direction flow the rail cars of explosive oil, streams of latticed drilling […]
Eagle Ford Fracking: Texas Doing Little To Protect Residents From Pollution
An eight-month investigation by the Center for Public Integrity, InsideClimate News and The Weather Channel reveals Texas has done next to nothing to protect people in the Eagle Ford’s booming […]
Companies Embrace Rainwater Harvesting Even As U.S. States Go Slow
Texas approved funding for a $50bn water plan, but left out a tool that has been growing in popularity among corporations (First published by Guardian Sustainable Business.) Texas voters last night […]
Lone Star Green: Texas Prop 6 Would Waste Billions Getting The Water Equation Right
For a plan that purports to thoughtfully guide Texas through a more crowded and thirsty future, the 2012 State Water Plan reads unsettlingly like a playbook from the last century: […]
Mi’kmaq Warrior Society Shuts Down Houston Fracking Company
“Even the corporate monsters are envious of what we have, because we have all the love…” More information at Halifax Media Co-op.
Lone Star Green: Policing The Oil Patch
Hector Zertuche’s first environmental crime occurred around 2009 when he discovered a truckload of oilfield drilling muds dumped on the banks of the Nueces River outside Sandia. “We matched the […]
Solar Must Power 10 Percent Of World Needs By 2025
Despite the U.S.’s failure to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol all these years, many U.S. cities have pledged to chart a course for 20-percent renewable power by 2020. However, […]
Eagle Ford’s Fracking Dumping Ground Learning To Stick Up For Itself
Frio County, Texas, Struggles with Fracking’s Leftovers (First published at the Texas Observer.) On a gravel road in rural Frio County, sheriff’s deputies are doing something they never thought they would—enforcing […]
Lone Star Green: Population blame excuses our failures, discounts our creativity
When The Population Bomb exploded on the scene in 1968 with breathless warnings that humans were breeding themselves into a global environmental catastrophe, it got a lot of people talking […]
Population Aplomb: Real Ecological Disaster Is In Oprah’s Purse
Carolyn Lochhead opens her recent sprawling indictment of human population growth as the driver of global environmental destabilization with a raft of Texas-specific statistics. Strung together with hardly a verb […]
Climate Activism and Mental Resiliency: Strategies for Keeping On Keeping On
Responding emotionally and honestly to the sometimes overwhelming challenges of our times takes an inevitable toll. Sometimes the psychological distress that builds inside us as our knowledge of the ramifications […]
Climate Change To Cause More Energy Breakdowns: Solar & Energy Security
I’m wagering that only the most determined readers — those already committed to social justice and the rapid transformation of our energy system — found their way to the other […]
Sea-Level Rise in Texas: Science & Self-Censorship In An Age of Urgency
A new report on the dangers of accelerating sea-level rise along the Texas Gulf Coast from a coalition of leading scientists and state research institutions is a call to action. […]
Endangered Species Act Has Kept the Water Flowing in South Texas
Imagine you’re flying 20,000 feet above a tempestuous sea, fiddling with a stalling engine. As you walk the wing and hunch over the engine, you’re dropping tools and tossing out […]
exploding refineries and dumb ways to die
Besides my feature stories on food justice in San Antonio and the exploration of magnetic therapies targeting modern-day melancholy (“Rebooting Depression”), I’ve been blogging, blogging, blogging, daddy.
czar palin, crude nuke, & deceit
I’ve been picking up a new book my sis sent down from Denver post-convention. It’s about energy. More specifically, it’s a hyper-annotated challenge to these isolationist chanters enervating over energy “independence” who have have grown so pervasive of late. It’ll likely be one of those great love-hate reads that pushes me to grouse, kvetch, and argue into some new realizations.
roots
It seems an appropriate time and place to be recording my dream of roots, post Independence Day, writing on my father’s computer. The dream was one of those that takes […]
