Welcome to Deceleration In Depth, where we are growing solutions for an overheating world. We highlight the latest global, national, and regional developments in climate and environmental justice to better inform local action. Deceleration is rooted in San Antonio and the South Texas bioregion but our concerns and enthusiasm are broad. Pitch us your story idea at editor@deceleration.news.
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Podcast
Inmates are Cooking Inside Texas Prisons. Are Reforms Coming at Last?
Deceleration speaks with Amite Dominick, founder & president of Texas Prisons Community Advocates, about efforts to force the state to install potentially life-saving air conditioning.
Greg Harman | Deceleration
Texas is getting hotter—nearly four degrees hotter in just the last few decades. The last 10 years all rank among the hottest years ever on the planet, with residents forced to navigate sometimes months upon months of 100-plus-degree days. We know our unhoused neighbors, residents without sufficient cooling, or those with medical conditions are highly vulnerable to heat stress and wildly undercounted heat-related death. But imagine trying to survive this monster heat in a 6x9 concrete box—without air conditioning—and you have a recipe for mass suffering and death. A judge already ruled the fact of most Texas prisons having no A/C unconstitutional. Now we’re waiting for the fix.
This week, Deceleration speaks with Dr. Amite Dominick, founder & president of Texas Prisons Community Advocates (TPCA), about her long-standing advocacy for the incarcerated. She details how the fight began, the response from those in elected power, and why it’s very possible a breakthrough is right around the corner.
Reporting
$1.7B Big Bend Border Wall Contract Awarded Amidst Public Confusion Over Plans
The contract comes just a week after Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott said the agency would not build a wall in Big Bend National Park.
Ayden Runnels | Texas Tribune
U.S. Customs and Border Protection awarded a $1.7 billion federal contract listed for border wall construction in the Big Bend region, fueling public confusion over the project after a previous assurance from a top agency official that no barriers would be built at the region’s national park.
The contract, awarded Monday, is designated “for border wall in Big Bend Texas” in its description. The $1.7 billion allocated in the contract is the single-highest amount awarded for a contract in Texas related to the border wall, according to listings on usaspending.gov, the U.S. government’s official public spending database.
A second contract for $4.5 million was awarded on Thursday for “resource monitoring support” of border wall construction in a separate area of the Big Bend region.
The new awards come a week after CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott told the Washington Examiner there would be no border wall built at Big Bend National Park because of pushback from local residents. Scott’s statements to the Examiner and a statement from CBP last week to The Texas Tribune indicated the agency would instead pave roads along the border in the national park and use digital surveillance equipment.
Calendar
ICE Watch
Dealing Gov. Abbott a Blow, Federal Judge Blocked (Most Of) SB4 This Week
SB4 would allow Texas to single-handedly take on federal immigration enforcement duties.
Roxana Rojas | Deceleration
We have seen domestic violence victims targeted for immigration enforcement when calling for help. We've seen high schoolers getting sent to detention days before graduation for expired tags. We have seen terminally ill U.S. citizens make a life-threatening trip to Mexico to see their deported parents as their last dying wish. We have seen children waiting for the school bus get picked up and thrown into detention camps.
All of this under the guise of public safety, law, and order. Meanwhile the sick are not making it to their doctor’s appointments out of fear of getting detained because of the mandatory question health-care provider offices now have to ask in Texas: “What is your legal status?”
Meanwhile in the state with some of the highest domestic violence rates, people are not making the calls for help. Meanwhile DPS is stretched thin to respond to events such as highway car accidents because of its new marching orders to enforce immigration law. This is not making our state or our country safer. Clearly, there's much evidence to the contrary.
Deceleration Opinion
'Come In the Right Way!' — The U.S. Betrayal of Those Who Tried
'We are in a period of stark moral offense. Torture and death are hallmarks of the entire detention system today.'
Greg Harman | Deceleration
It’s been about two years since I first reported on Corpus Christi’s water. I shouldn’t be at all surprised that what residents were worried about back then has not only happened—a city so enamored with billion-dollar industry that it pushed into the bleeding edge of water promises to the detriment of residents—but is even worse than predicted. Yet here I am, writing this from just a few hours away in Austin, Texas, after screening the documentary Shifting Baselines by Julien Elie, being surprised for another reason.
It has to do with the idea behind the title of the film. That idea was first elucidated by Daniel Pauly, a fisheries biologist who is heavily featured in the film.
Here’s a good Ted Talk listen on the concept of shifting baselines from Pauly himself, but think of it as our collective understanding of “normal” changing imperceptibly, year by year, until the new “normal” begins to collapse. Only then would people notice anything was different at all.
For instance, if you were to watch any Corpus Christi council meeting or see its city manager, Peter Zanoni, talk about water, you’d assume the industrial companies and the region’s drought were always there, beyond history, in a productive tension. It’s a convenient illusion for industry boosters. But the people who live there know better.
Reporting
Data Centers Could Start Construction Before Receiving Air Permits, Under Proposed EPA Rule
Allowing gas plants, factories, and data centers to move ahead of regulators would ramp up the pressure for permit approval.
Charles Paullin | Inside Climate News
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced proposed changes Monday that would allow gas power plants, data centers and factories to begin construction on non-polluting components such as piping, wiring, cement pads and other support structures before obtaining air-emission permits.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a news release that the “proposal works to provide solutions to issues that have held up critical American infrastructure and advance the next great technological forefront.” The changes will undergo a 45-day public comment period.
The action comes as the Trump administration moves to reduce an array of environmental protections to speed construction and win a global AI race with China and other adversaries. Big Tech companies like Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Google are furiously working across the nation to build the data centers—massive facilities with networked computer servers—to power the energy-intensive new technology.
In pursuit of winning the AI race, President Donald Trump last year issued an executive order to revoke many guardrails that could slow down AI development.
Video
‘La Cancion de Nosotr@s,' is attributed to Dr. H.H. Coyotl and read here by Roxana Rojas, editor of the ICE Watch newsletter. Follow Deceleration on YouTube.
Installment No. 2 from Dr. Coyotl & Read by Roxana Rojas.
About This Series: The heaviness of our current reality requires creativity and imagination to propel us towards the future we want for ourselves and future generations. In the same vein that painters, musicians, poets, and other creatives imagined a different world through their art during times of political strife, we too can participate in the coloring of our future and the creative analysis of our present. As the Zapatistas wrote communiques from the Lacandon jungle under the name of Subcomandante Marcos to expose the realities of neoliberal violence on indigenous communities, and as Albert Camus wrote letters to a fictional German friend during the Nazi occupation to argue for the French cause, this letter to a fictional ICE agent penned under the name of Dr. H.H. Coyotl is a call to the resistance of our time.
