Spicewood, Texas, a small community on Lake Travis, is precariously close to becoming the state’s first community to run out of drinking water during this historic drought. On Monday, under dark clouds and with rain falling, Spicewood got its first delivery of 8,000-gallons of water after it became clear local wells could no longer produce enough water to meet the needs of the 1,100 residents.
Several communities in Texas have come close to running out of water during 2011, the driest year in Lone Star State history, but until now none had to truck in water.
For more than a year, nearly the entire state of Texas has been in some stage of severe or exceptional drought. Rain has been so scarce lakes across the state have been drying up. One town near Waco, Groesbeck, bought water from a rock quarry and built a seven-mile pipeline through a state park to get water. Some communities on Lake Travis moved their intake pipes into deeper water. And Houston started getting water from an alternative, farther away reservoir when Lake Houston ran too low.
Although it has started to rain more this winter, it is not enough to fill the state’s arid rivers and lakes. Austin, Tx still remains nearly 20 inches below normal rainfall for the past 12 months, so we are talking about rainfall events of 20 inches plus, basically flood events, to bring the lake levels up.
Under the current long term weather predictions, we are not likely to see such an extreme weather event as la Nina keeps its hold on Texas, bringing dryer than normal conditions through the spring. 2012 is going to be a difficult year for the Lone Star state.
Solyndra was the pie in the face, but Keystone XL is the rake in the yard the White House needs to avoid.
Approval of controversial pipeline is bad for the environment, and bad politics, as it would offend not just environmentalists, but voters of all stripes across America’s heartland who would have the pipeline run through their backyards. It is another ethics landmine that would invite more attack from the WH’s political enemies about pay to play politics– this time because of copious amounts of Big Oil influence-peddling.
We’ve previously talked about Solyndra. It’s not a problem with solar or of federal investment, but of questions about campaign finance and due diligence, problems which also exist in the much larger loan program for nuclear, especially when nuclear energy companies have been such big campaign backers of Obama’s.
But that is a tough legislative mountain to climb– and not one that it seems the White House has the intestinal fortitude for, given their willingness to always “compromise” (read: capitulate) to the Powers That Be. But those Powers That Be don’t Be without the steady stream of money they pour into campaign coffers, so its unlikely that Obama would rush to reform that system that has, so far at least, worked out better for him than his opponents.
So while it is unlikely Obama can avoid the ethical morass and swampland that is money for access and favors, one landmine he can avoid in approving the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring the world’s dirtiest oil from Canada to Texas.
The other question is obviously one of addiction. If we are to take seriously the metaphor of an addiction to oil, then Keystone XL is like a new meth dealer moving in next to our heroin dealer. Climate scientist Jim Hansen has called the approval of the pipeline “game over” for the climate.
But besides a discussion of the merits, there is the question of why is this the rake in the yard Obama needs to avoid? It starts with the voters, specifically those who will be affected by this pipeline.
Today at 1:30 pm Texas time, East Texas landowners who made up the group Stop Tarsands Oil Pipelines, or STOP, held a press conference detailing their opposition to this proposed monstrosity. Among their chief complaints were that the State Department had failed to account for the current devastating Texas drought in their environmental impact study. From STOP:
Strike 3: State Dept’s 3rd Pipeline Assessment Ignores Texas Drought
DOS puts Europe/China’s oil supply ahead of water for 12 million Texans and ag lands as wildfires burn
East Texas cattle rancher Don Williams has trimmed his herd in half, lost calves to drought, and now faces wildfires burning just 20 miles from his ranch. Even before all of this, Williams was concerned about the impact the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would have on water supplies in the Carrizo Wilcox aquifer, which most East Texans rely on.
When he learned that the State Department, in their review of the proposed pipeline, had not even looked at what drought conditions meant for the pipeline’s safety, he was outraged.
“We need that aquifer, and that they could just ‘overlook’ what’s happened here in the last year shows we can’t trust what they’re telling us,” said Williams who also serves on the City Council in New Summerfield, a town of just over 1,000 people. “Tar sands oil isn’t like regular crude – they’ve got to pack it with heavy metals and chemicals just to thin it down enough to pump it. The first pipeline they built spilled at least a dozen times in just one year of operation.”
A report released today by an East Texas group called Stop Tarsands Oil Pipelines corroborates Williams’s story, demonstrating
Drought? What Drought?
that the historic Texas drought, which has been devastating communities and grabbing headlines all summer long, was overlooked by the US State Department in its third and purportedly final environmental impact statement (FEIS) on the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
“Texas is burning, our firefighters have faced 300 consecutive days of wildfire,” said David Daniel, STOP’s Founder and President. “I’ve seen firsthand that a tar sands pipeline spill in Michigan is still contaminating water 14 months later, putting 40 miles of the Kalamazoo River off limits. If we had a similar spill in Texas under conditions like these where could we go for water for our homes, farms, and ranches?”
The report issued by STOP examines the implications for operating the proposed pipeline, which would push the denser and more toxic tar sands oil at higher pressures and temperatures than conventional oil pipelines, during droughts like the one currently scorching Texas. According to STOP, the impacts of a severe drought were ignored by the U.S. State Department in its review of the environmental impacts of the proposal.
STOP also documents that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has placed six TransCanada water withdrawal permit applications on hold due to drought.
“If State Department had bothered to talk to any Texans they would have realized that pumping 830,000 barrels a day of tar sands crude through the middle of Texas would be a grave mistake,” said Don Williams, East Texas Cattle rancher and City Councilman, New Summerfield. “We need all the water we have to keep our farms and ranches in business.”
To make matters worse, says David Daniel, the oil being delivered by this pipeline may not be intended for U.S. consumption. He points to a report by oil industry economist Philip K. Verleger, which concludes that the tar sands oil is much more likely to be exported to global markets for consumption in China and Europe.
“They’re selling this pipeline to the public as energy security, but the truth is that U.S. demand for oil has flat-lined whereas China’s demand keeps growing,” says Daniel. “Dr. Verleger is an oil industry economist who just happens to also be honest about what he sees, which is more than I can say for TransCanada after dealing with them the last couple years.”
Beyond that, with lobbyist ties to the White House, this makes approving the decision for the Keystone XL the biggest affirmation that pay-to-play politics and revolving door between industry and government are alive and well in Washington DC. TransCanada, the owner of the proposed pipeline, hired former Clinton campaign staffer Paul Elliot and several other Obama staffers to lobby the State Department and the White House. Is it any wonder why their analysis would overlook something so obvious as the Texas drought when they are being lobbied to get this out the door as quickly as possible?
It’s worth noting this is the third flawed FEIS that the State Department has produced. Three strikes and you’re out? Well, if there was any justice in this world, yes, as it would be obvious this is not due diligence, but pure politics and a Potemkin village of looking at impacts to local residents and their water supplies. It is a boneheaded mistake, and makes it look like the Obama administration is full of a bunch of rookies, making obvious mistakes like forgetting drought.
If Obama wants to avoid having his Presidency resemble The Three Stooges any more, he needs to clean the pie off his face from Solyndra, and don’t even go close to that rake. He can’t afford another similar self-inflicted wound, especially one that is not only so avoidable but also happens to be the right thing to do.
Now where are those three nincompoop chandelier hangers I hired?
Wildfires rage over Labor Day near Bastrop, TX, southeast of Austin
Our hearts, prayers and thoughts go out to the people currently evacuated and who have lost their homes this holiday weekend. I, myself, having gone through losing a home to fire I send my best to all of you affected, and have already contacting folks via our church to find out how we can help. I’ll post links as soon as I can get them to give directly to disaster relief. UPDATE: KVUE has a great list they are updating with where to donate. Please give what you can.
This puts into focus several things that have been ruminating in my head all weekend, and it all comes back to this one question– Why does Rice play Texas? This weekend, two of our nation’s best universities met on the football field. And while both Rice and University of Texas can duke it out on relatively equal footing on the basis of academics, Rice is. . . shall we say, not the athletic powerhouse that Texas is. So, why does Rice always begin its football season with a drubbing of 34-9 (hey, tip of the hat for getting 9 points on the scoreboard– I guarantee there will be teas that do less this year), with the Owls now having lost 41 games out of the last 42 meetings to the Longhorns? And here the answer lies with the other goings-on of this long weekend.
While the President is trying to, I’d assume, take what he sees as the high ground and compromise with those people who claim that these regulations kill jobs, the opposite is, in fact, true. These National Ambient Air Quality Standards, or NAAQS, are set by the Clean Air Act and, defined by the Supreme Court, are to be based on the best available science about what levels of pollutants are healthy for human beings (people like you and me) to breathe. Tea partiers and some of their corporate paymasters in the fossil fuel industry have been caterwauling that these rules will be “too expensive” to implement, and therefore shut down a lot of old, dirty power plants.
Ummmm.. . . yes, please? Couldn’t we, nay, shouldn’t we shut them down? Our best available science tells us these pollution sources are making us sick. We need these life-saving regulations to help all of the sick children, the elderly, and just the plain folks who suffer from asthma and other respiratory disease. Count up the missed school days, the missed work days, the premature deaths– count how they hobble our economy. How can children compete in a global economy if they are missing days from school sick because they can’t breathe? How much work is done not on time? How much lost productivity have we hamstrung our economic engine with to cater to people who don’t know how to compete in a modern energy economy against cleaner forms of production? Because the new EPA rules won’t shut down all power plants, only those who can’t compete, who can’t run cleanly. And since there is also good evidence to show that these sorts of life-enhancing regulations actually help, not hurt, the economy. It also rebuts the White House’s own stated position that they posted just one. day. earlier. that clean air helps the economy, preventing in this year alone:
160,000premature deaths;
More than 80,000 emergency room visits;
Millions of cases of respiratory problems;
Millions of lost workdays, increasing productivity;
Millions of lost school days due to respiratory illness and other diseases caused or exacerbated by air pollution.
The impact on the climate if this is approved? Well, according to Jim Hanson, one of our top climate scientists, he called it “essentially game over.” Or, as Bill Paxton in Aliens put it: (WARNING: NSFW for swearsies, including the dreaded f-dash-dash-dash word)
Ok, well, all kidding aside because this is deathly serious, as in the fate of the planet’s climate, THIS is what Jim Hanson told climate protesters outside the White House just before he was arrested for his part in the protest.
Bill McKibben, environmental activist and one of the ringleaders of the several weeks long protest event, said this on Friday about how this is not the end of the protests, it’s only the beginning:
These are serious stakes. “Game Over” stakes. What does that mean? Well, for climate, if you’ve liked the record-breaking heat this year in Texas, you’re in luck, as this could easily become the new normal with climate change. And with the heat, we’ve got the huge economic impacts of the drought. For farmers and ranchers, the Dallas Morning News is reporting a 5 billion dollar loss. Thats Billion with a B, folks.
So next time someone starts talking about how it’s “too expensive” to deal with climate change, do what the Violent Femmes say to do and “Add it Up.” (warning:song lyrics also NSFW because of those darn swearsies) Loss from hurricanes like Irene, loss from this summer’s floods and tornadoes in Joplin, loss from drought, loss from wildfires, loss to the economy from dirty air (since hotter temperatures mean worse smog), and tell me that just continuing to do nothing and just putting more carbon into the atmosphere is potentially the most expensive thing we can do.
So, what does this have to do with Rice vs Texas? Well, what we have here is political expediency and taking the easy path instead of fighting for what is right. Regulations, regardless of their impact on a multinational corporation’s bottom line, save lives, and improve lives. This is what Ralph Nader fought for when he wrote Unsafe at Any Speed. Corporate whining and their record-breaking profits are not more important than people, and people’s’ rights to breathe clean air, or live in a stable climate. I, for one, am not willing to give up on Central Texas, and let this become the new normal for climate. When I first came to Austin, my literal first impression of the area was “I now understand why people were willing to die at The Alamo to protect this land.”
Decades ago, another President came to Texas to challenge a nation to go to the moon before the end of the decade, and asked an assembled crowd at Rice University the magic question.
“Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.” … But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?“
President Kennedy answered his own question:
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”
But, most importantly, he notes that “But this city of Houston, this state of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward.”
Let me take liberty with JFK’s speech where he talks about the need to build a space industry and replace it with a clean energy economy. “If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The [creation of a clean energy economy] will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for [clean energy]. Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolution, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of [energy]. We mean to be a part of it—we mean to lead it.“
Our economic torpor, our environmental problems, and yes, our hurricanes and droughts and wildfires, are ALL things we can solve if we are willing to take this same leadership role. Surely there will be pollution in the future, there will be recessions, there will be storms and droughts and fires– but they will NOT be supercharged by an ever-increasing blanket of carbon making our planet warmer and warmer. We must stop doing the same things over and over, relying on fossil fuels, and expecting different results. We must put our courage to the sticking place, and say that we will not allow the voices of a few, economically powerful and well-connected industries to wreak untold havoc on us and our neighborhoods.
You’ll notice, in JFK’s speech, he talks about the costs that a trip to the moon will require. He advocates not spending money recklessly, but in spending a large amount of money to win this challenge.
To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money. This year’s space budget is three times what it was in January 1961, and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined. That budget now stands at 5 billion 400 million dollars a year—a staggering sum, though somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year. Space expenditures will soon rise some more, from 40 cents per person per week to more than 50 cents a week for every man, woman and child in the United States, for we have given this program a high national priority—even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us. But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240 thousand miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25 thousand miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun—almost as hot as it is here today—and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out—then we must be bold…
However, I think we’re going to do it, and I think that we must pay what needs to be paid. I don’t think we ought to waste any money, but I think we ought to do the job.”
President Obama will be giving a speech on jobs later this week. In it, I’d love to hear even a smidgen of the boldness and realism of Kennedy. I’d love for him to recant his statement on the EPA smog rule, and say that he will stop the Keystone XL pipeline, as it will only increase our dependence on oil when we need to be quitting it. But I doubt it.
Apologies for the political birdwalk and the sniping at the two likely major-party candidates for the Presidency. What is clear is what JFK was talking about: we must do things like fight climate change not because they are easy, but because they are hard, and because they are a challenge we are willing to accept and unwilling to postpone. It is a fight we must win, it is a fight for our very existence as we know it here in Texas.
This Saturday my alma mater will be coming to Austin to play Texas, and as my BYU Cougars sit as 4.5 point underdogs against the Longhorns, they and we must remember that this is why Rice plays Texas. This is why BYU plays Texas. To challenge ourselves, and organize our best efforts to make us better. That is why Rice plays Texas. And that is ultimately why we must get our head in the game on clean energy and quit our addictions to fossil fuels and their campaign contributions.
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Millions of people have been farming in Texas for a very long time. In fact, agriculture is one of the major components of the state’s economy. But news reports have been showing that the farming industry is facing real problems that pertain to climate change. That’s right, many farmers have to cut back their production, if not stop entirely, due to insufficiency of water.
Rice Farming
As many know, Texas has been experiencing a serious drought, one that is comparable to the drought back in the 5o’s. The National Climatic Data Center describes the 50′s drought as ”characterized by both low rainfall amounts and excessively high temperatures.” Sounds familiar? The Austin American Statesman reports that, “The Lower Colorado River Authority could soon ask the state environmental agency to declare the current drought worse than the one in the 1950s.”
The Lower Colorado River Authority is now trying to get the EPA to regulate the water Texas farmers are using. This will affect as many as 70 counties in central and southeast Texas. For example, the Highland Lakes, a water supply to most rice farms in southeast Texas, might soon be cut off to farmers under the LCRA’s pending water management plan.
More than 42 million acres are affected, which is about a quarter of our state, an area roughly equal to the total land area of New England.
The LCRA is the same entity that allows the South Texas Project nuclear plant to withdraw as much water as it needs. A proposed project to add two more nuclear reactors to the South Texas Project will require as much water as what half of the city of San Antonio needs in a dry year. It seems a little contradictory. If we need to cut back and become more conservative in using our resources, we all need to cut back and not just some of us. We should also be careful that our energy sources don’t unnecessarily use up the water that we need for residents and agriculture — and surely not when other energy sources (wind, solar, energy efficiency, to name a few) are available with minimal water use.
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