With the release of yet another report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chronicling the dangers our planet is steaming toward, it’s easy to forget that global warming is already damaging lands and injuring people worldwide. While the human impact from the recent uptick in billion-dollar disasters in the […]
Tag: texas
Scientist’s Call To Action at Austin Climate Symposium
Greg Harman Texas has a tough climate. Throughout human habitation here, people have regularly suffered through extended periods of drought followed by violent flooding and storms. But, with all things being equal, things have always managed to return to something we know as normal. So why should we care about climate […]
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 tracks to a nearby resident,” the Jim Wells County Sheriff’s Deputy told me recently. “But we messed up. We cited […]
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 state environmental laws in the oilpatch. The truck drivers they were ticketing were certainly surprised. “No, I don’t understand,” a […]
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 about the earth’s finite resources for the first time. It also launched many heated public discussions about ways to force […]
‘Dirty’ Deely Coal Plant Explosion Punctuates Rate-Hike Debate In SA
Greg Harman An explosion at a San Antonio power plant this week either bolstered the utility’s case for rate hikes to keep up with infrastructure maintenance demands or those of some critics who say the aged J.T. Deely coal plant — scheduled for decommissioning ahead of schedule in 2018 — […]
CPS Energy Rate-Hike Hearing, Climate Change, & Keystone XL Protest
Upcoming and imminent events related to the sustainable path in San Antonio… Tonight: Public hearing on CPS Energy’s proposed rate hike The first in what is likely to be a series of rate hikes in San Antonio by CPS Energy gets an airing at a public hearing tonight. Here’s CPS […]
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 or adjective to buffer the cold facts, it imparts an unshakeable sense of despair: “196 endangered or threatened species, severe […]