- October 10th Benefit to Save Lake Travis
For more information about the issue read about it in an earlier blog!
Posts Tagged ‘water’
Join Us Sunday to Save Lake Travis
Posted in Air Quality, Coal, tagged Austin music, Coal, power plants, Texas, water on October 4, 2010 |
GasLand: A Must Watch Documentary
Posted in Energy, Global Warming, natural gas, Renewables, solar, tagged air pollution, Air Quality, documentary, drinking water, faucet on fire, fracking, gasland, HBO, HBO Documentaries, josh fox, Larry King, Larry King Live, natural gas drilling, oil and gas wells, pipe explosion, rig explosion, T. Boone Pickens, Texas, water, water on fire, Water Pollution, Water Quality on June 23, 2010 |
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtpSgqUZ3oA]
A few days ago, Larry King interviewed T. Boone Pickens and if you were watching it, you heard him condemn the spill and the US dependence on oil then he raved about natural gas and how safe it is to drill for it.
Pickens is not the first. Many have claimed that natural gas is better, safer, and cheaper. Simply, that is not the case. I have written about a couple of natural gas blow outs and pipe fractures in Texas this month alone but this documentary examines several other elements of natural gas impact than just rigs blowing up.
Yesterday, HBO aired a documentary that is both eye-opening and disturbing. It is called GasLand, in which Josh Fox, the director travels across the United States to explore the damage and contamination that has resulted from drilling for natural gas. In the documentary, Fox points out the different impacts of natural gas; on our drinking water, the air we breathe, and the nature that surrounds us. If the pictures of evaporating water mixed gas into the air to get rid of the waste (process done by gas-drilling facilities) won’t tell how bad natural gas is, then I am pretty sure watching people lighting their contaminated faucet water on fire will.
Fox collects water samples from homes with contaminated water and sends them to a lab for examination. I will leave it to you to watch his outrageous findings in the documentary.
In case you missed it, Josh Fox’s GasLand will be airing on HBO at the following (central) times:
Thursday, June 24: 12:00PM
Thursday, June 24: 11:30PM
Saturday, June 26: 11:00AM
Wednesday, June 30: 08:45AM
For more information, visit the HBO schedule page or the webpage for GasLand.
Nukes in Texas are heating up again!
Posted in Global Warming, tagged Exelon, Nuclear, public hearing, Texas, tx, Victoria, water on March 22, 2010 |
Exelon Nuclear plans to file a 6,000-plus-page document that would give it as many as 40 years to begin work on a power plant in Victoria.
Exelon has looked at building a plant in this area of Texas since 2007. It plans to file an early site permit application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on March 25, 2010. This will allow them to keep their options open as the permit, if approved by the NRC, would give Exelon three to 20 years to decide whether to build a plant in Victoria County. It can be extended for another 20 years, giving the company up to 40 years to begin construction from the time that the NRC approves the permit.
Once the early site permit application is submitted, it undergoes a three- to four-year review process by the NRC in which it will evaluate the project’s environmental impact and safety preparedness.
The NRC will conduct a public meeting April 15 at the Victoria Community Center to explain what the review process entails.
Water use figures prominently into the concerns of many. The Guadalupe River is the designated water source for the possible power plant, and Exelon has a water reservation agreement with the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority (GBRA) that expires in 2013.
In the agreement with the GBRA, Exelon reserved 75,000 acre-feet of water every year. The plant’s water use supercedes that of other water users, including the city of Victoria and farmers in the region.
We strongly urge the public to attend this meeting.
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By promoting cleaner energy, cleaner government, and cleaner air for all Texans, we hope to provide for a healthy place to live and prosper. We are Public Citizen Texas.
Drop by Drop: 7 Ways Texas Cities Can Conserve Water
Posted in Global Warming, tagged Austin, climate change, Drop by Drop, ken kramer, mona avalos, National Wildlife Federation, outdoor water ordinances, population increase, San Antonio, Sierra Club, Texas, Texas Water Development Board, water, water conservation, water efficiency, water supplies on March 11, 2010 |
The National Wildlife Federation and the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club have created a splash with their latest report: Drop by Drop: 7 Ways Texas Cities Can Conserve Water.
Austin should be proud. Out of 19 cities studied in this report, our capital city was highly ranked on outdoor water ordinances and has an aggressive toilet replacement program. San Antonio has also set the bar high for effective and diverse water efficiency programs across the country. The cities surveyed were measured on: water pricing structure, water saving goals, toilet replacement, conservation funding, and outdoor watering. Though many cities and towns across the nation have made great strides to reduce water use, the report’s conclusion is that most cities are not doing as much as they could to efficiently use existing water supplies. (more…)
Green-up Your Life! Flushing trees down the toilet
Posted in Global Warming, tagged Carbon Dioxide, climate change, deforestation, forests, Global Warming, paper, post-consumer, pulp, recycle, recycling, Texas, toilet paper, trees, water on December 4, 2009 |
By Kirsten Bokenkamp
From office paper, to toilet paper, paper towels, paper coffee cups, newspapers, paper bags, magazines and catalogs, notebooks, napkins, and packaging, we cannot escape our dependency on paper products. Check out some of these crazy facts related to paper manufacturing and use:
- Deforestation causes more global warming pollution than all forms of transportation combined. A single forest tree absorbs 26 pounds of carbon dioxide per year, an acre of trees can remove 2.4 to 5 tons of carbon dioxide per year, and there are 728 million forested acres in the United States that remove more than 1.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year.
- 50-75% of the pulp used to make toilet paper comes from old growth forests, which are valuable ecosystems and also play a huge role in absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere.
- Americans consume more paper than any other country on earth. Each American, on average, uses 741 pounds of paper per year. Furthermore, The United States is the largest market for toilet paper, and only 2% of sales are from 100% recycled toilet paper.
- In addition to contributing to the detriments of deforestation, the pulp and paper industry is the third largest industrial emitter of global warming pollution (coming in after the chemical and steel industries). To make things worse, CO2 emissions from the paper industry are expected to double by 2020.
- 36% of the average landfill is comprised of paper. Americans discard 4 million tons of office paper each year, which is enough to build a 12-foot wall from Los Angeles to New York City.
- The pulp and paper industry is the single largest industrial consumer of freshwater.
As last week’s blog recommended, there is a lot we can do to reduce our use of paper: reusing shopping bags, printing on both sides, refusing junk mail, using cloth napkins, reusing coffee cups, and by buying products with less packaging. But, sometimes, even when we are doing all of these things, it is still easy to forget the most simple of tasks: buying recycled paper products, especially toilet paper!
Sure, it is not as fluffy – but let’s not exaggerate – the recycled stuff does the trick and it is far from sandpaper. And, wouldn’t you rather have a future where we have curbed climate change, still have forests, and have clean water to drink? I don’t mean to sound extreme – but that is what we are dealing with. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: as consumers we have tremendous power to change the world. The day we no longer demand the plushy, soft, and tree-killing kind of toilet paper, the market will no longer produce it. So next time you are faced with the choice – make the earth friendly one. I’m sure your skin will forgive you. If you are having trouble taking the plunge, just think that if every household replaced just one roll (500 sheets) of virgin fiber toilet paper with a 100% recycled one, we would save 423,900 trees!
Buying recycled office paper is also important. Ask your manager to green-up the office! How much of a difference can it make? According to the Public Works Department of San Mateo County, California:
Every 20 cases of recycled paper saves 17 trees, 390 gallons of oil, 7000 gallons of water, and 4100 kwh of energy. It also eliminates 60 pounds of air-polluting emissions and saves 8 cubic feet of landfill space.
While it is not always the first thing on our minds as we strive to green-up our lives, buying recycled toilet paper is an important step. In addition to saving old-growth forests, it gives recycled newspaper and office paper an afterlife to look forward to. In addition to 100% recycled, also buy the brand with the highest percentage of post-consumer material and make sure the bleaching process is elemental chlorine free. Check out one of the many buyers guides here.
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By promoting cleaner energy, cleaner government, cleaner cars, and cleaner air for all Texans, we hope to provide for a healthy place to live and prosper. We are Public Citizen Texas.
Worried About Water
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Agriculture, atascosa county, bastrop county, cinderella, clean water act, coal block, coal power, comanche peak, contaminated water, crop and livestock losses, drought, Exelon, federal disaster, fossil fuels, gerald north, Glen Rose, Global Warming, halliburton loophole, hay prices, hurrican katrina, hydraulic fracturing, ipcc, kerrville, lake buchanana, lake travis, matagorda bay, natural gas, Nuclear, safe drinking water act, San Antonio, Texas, texas a&m, Victoria, water, waxo, white stallion on July 22, 2009 |
I’ve been thinking (and worrying) about water a lot lately. I suppose that the drought has brought all this concern along. Just a few months ago, folks were comparing this drought to the one that devastated Texas agriculture in the ’50s (when crop yields dropped by as much as 50%, all but one county in Texas was declared a federal drought disaster area, and grasslands were scorched and ranchers that couldn’t afford high hay prices resorted to a mixture of prickly pear cactus and molasses), but now folks are saying that this drought is well on its way to being worse, and certainly more costly, than any other dry spell in Texas history.
We’re already seeing ranching and agriculture suffer substantially from this drought. Agricultural officials are now pinning crop and livestock losses at $3.6 billion. Just 12% of the cotton acreage planted this year will be harvested, and many gins won’t open up this season because there isn’t enought work to justify it. Ranchers are also buying high priced hay and feed supplements because their own pastures haven’t produced enough to feed their herds. Ranchers are selling off calves younger and thinner than usual, and even letting go of the mature females that sustain their herds. In the last week, Bastrop County alone lost 12,000 cattle from the drought. As Roy Wheeler, an Atascosa County rancher told the San Antonio Express-News, “We’re selling the factory, so they say.”
So why worry about the weather, you may ask. Haven’t farmers and ranchers been scraping by and beaten by the weather since the first man stuck a seed in the ground? Perhaps, but during the dust bowl and in this last great drought in the ’50s, we could still shake our fists at the sky and vow never to go hungry again — but now we can only shake our fists at ourselves. There’s not a doubt in my mind that this drought is a result of human interference. I’m no scientist, just an educated girl with a blog, but I’d bet the farm that we’re seeing global warming in action.
But you don’t have take my word for it. Take the word of Dr. Gerald North, a climate scientist at that notorious liberal holdout Texas A&M, who says that this drought is the beginning of a permanent trend for Texas. He cites the 2007 IPCC report, which shows trends toward hotter and drier summers. In reference to this weather pattern, North told the Environment News Service that, “It could be just a fluke that persists for a decade… But my guess is that it’s here to stay, but with fluctuations up and down.”
Of course we can’t point at any one weather event and say that it is a direct result of global warming, but we can take events as indicative of what is to come as global warming progresses. Just as Hurricane Katrina woke up the world to the devastation that will ensue as storms of increase in frequency and severity from climate change, this current drought can give Texans a hint of what the future of Texas weather will look like.
There’s a terrible element of irony here. Our current trajectory of unsustainable growth and energy consumption increase the likelihood that drought in Texas will become the new norm. AND those same industries and energy sources which have poisoned our atmosphere and raised global temperatures… use enormous amounts of water. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear — which propents are trying to sell as “the low-carbon cure we need” — are incredibly, enormously, despicably water intensive. (more…)
Citizens Oppose Comanche Peak Expansion before Atomic Safety and Licensing Board
Posted in Global Warming, tagged atomic safety and licensing board, biocides, bob eye, chemicals, citizen opposition, cola, comanche peak, Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant Units 3 and 4, combined operating license application, contentions, don young, fire hazards, fort worth, granbury, hood county, j. nile fischer, Karen Hadden, lon burnam, Luminant, nita o'neal, NRC, Nuclear Power, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, petition to intervene, Public Citizen, radioactive waste, risk, robert v. eye, secretary of energy, sediment control, SEED Coalition, solar, steven chu, Texas, true cost of nukes, water, west pearl st, wind energy, yucca mountain on June 9, 2009 |
Oral Hearing Set for June 10th-11th in Granbury, TX
Citizen opposition to more nuclear reactors in Texas continues. On June 10th-11th an oral hearing will be held before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board on Citizens’ petition to intervene in Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant Units 3 and 4.
“I have many grave concerns about building more nuclear reactors in Texas,” said Texas Representative Lon Burnam, District 90, Ft. Worth, one of the petitioners seeking to intervene in the proposed expansion of Comanche Peak. “The risks are simply too high. As the most expensive and most water intensive energy source, and with the unsolved problem of how to handle the radioactive waste, Texans deserve better.”
SEED Coalition, Public Citizen and the Ft. Worth-based True Cost of Nukes are also petitioners. Attorney, Robert V. Eye, will go before the designated Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel and argue the admissibility of the 19 contentions citizens filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on April 6th. These contentions point out the inadequacies and the incompleteness of Luminant’s combined operating license application (COLA) to construct and operate Comanche Peak Units 3 and 4.
“Luminant has failed to comply with new federal regulations regarding aircraft impacts,” stated Mr. Eye. “These new regulations are very specific and require the applicant to plan for catastrophic fires and/or explosions that would cause the loss of major critical functional components in the plant. After 9-11, an aircraft attack on a nuclear power plant is a real and credible threat. Moreover, fire hazards represent about half of the risk of a nuclear reactor meltdown. Luminant’s noncompliance with these regulations puts citizens around Comanche Peak in a dangerous position, which is completely unacceptable.”
“Nuclear power is dangerous, expensive and obsolete,” says Karen Hadden, Executive Director of Sustainable Energy and Economic Development (SEED) Coalition. “Wind energy is booming and the cost of solar is coming down, while the costs of proposed nuclear plants is skyrocketing. Although they’re required to do so, Luminant failed to fully consider safer, more affordable alternatives to nuclear in their license application.” (more…)
News from Envirnonmental Organizations around the State – April 6
Posted in Toxics, Uncategorized, tagged alliance for a clean texas, City of Houston, clean air, earth day, earth day 5k, environmental education, farmers market, galveston-houston association for smog prevention, ghasp, growth, hb 3265, hb 3428, hill country, hill country alliance, house county affairs, houston, houston earth day, mothers for clean air, Texas, water on April 6, 2009 |
Happy Monday everybody! Check out the latest from our friends at Alliance for a Clean Texas. Original post can be found here.
This week, ACT is happy to bring reports from two organizations doing great work on behalf of their local communities. In Houston, the Galveston-Houston Association for Smog Prevention (GHASP) is presenting Houston Earth Day – the City of Houston’s official Earth Day celebration – this Saturday, April 11th. This FREE day-long festival focuses on green-living and features hands-on activities for everyone. There will be an Earth Zone (highlighting air, land, water and renewable energy), an Environmental Education Zone, Kids Energy Zone, and Farmers’ Market. Additional information about Houston Earth Day and Mothers for Clean Air’s Earth Day 5k is available here.
The Hill Country Alliance reports that they support HB 3265 which will be heard in House County Affairs on Monday April 6. This bill represents the culmination of 18 months of collaboration between 15 rural Hill Country counties; it provides this sensitive area with a set of tools to handle growth – particularly the stress placed on water resources.
Hey, let’s destabilize a nuclear power because of global warming!
Posted in Global Warming, tagged Afghanistan, China, environmental justice, environmental refugees, Global Warming, Himalayan glacier melt, India, Nuclear, Pakistan, terrorism, Texas, water, water wars on December 30, 2008 |
A truly frightening article from The International News and their Karachi (Pakistan) bureau:
Global warming and the ongoing thinning of Tibetan glaciers will result in as many as 15 million ‘environmental refugees’ in South Asia in the near future, said Chairperson Hisaar Foundation and member of Stockholm-based Global Water Partnership Technical Committee, Simi Kamal.
Full article can be found here.
Besides Pakistan (who we obviously do not want to destabilize), other major powers who get their water from the Himalayan glaciers include India, China, and other trouble spots like Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Thailand and Burma.
Emissions in Texas affect the climate worldwide, and as we all have painfully learned, what happens in other countries can end up right back on our doorstep. We need to start cooling it, especially considering that if Texas were its own country we would be the 7th largest polluter of greenhouse gases in the world. Thankfully, we also lead in renewable energy potential and can start saving money today by investing in energy efficiency.
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