Texas Environmental News - Week 24

SMOG IN THE BIG BEND

Smog continues to creep into the Big Bend as Oil&Gas drilling in the Permian and Alpine High crank to record levels. Alpine, Texas had ozone levels higher or the same as Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Corpus Christi for five consecutive days this week according to figures obtained from government websites. Ozone is the atmospheric phenomena that creates smog through a combination of fossil-fuel derived gasses like nitrous oxide and volatile organic compounds including carcinogens toluene and benzene that when cooked with sunlight creates a serious respiratory health risk. On Tuesday, Midland-Odessa registered 119 on the ozone scale ranking 4^th nationally after Pahala, Hawaii, Ponce, Puerto Rico and the UTE Reservation in southern Colorado.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

In a follow the $ story, the hydrocarbon billionaire brothers of Koch Industries Inc. Bill and David, who have been accused of buying elections nationwide by donating billions of dollars to politicians who favor their practices, have acquired 20,052 shares in FirstEnergy Corp. this year according to E&E News. First Energy, the 58^th largest polluter in the USA, is a coal utility who is pleading with Donald Trump and former Texas governor Rick Perry, now Energy Secretary, to save the coal industry from clean energy by mandating electricity be bought by grid operators from coal fired plants. According to the Wall Street Journal Trump has told Perry to “Make it Happen.”

CONSUMPTION FUNCTION CHALLENGED

Breaking the link between work and consumption might be a potential vector for future human survival. With 8 billion cell phones, 2 billion cars, 5 billion heads of livestock including 12 million cows in Texas alone and enough concrete poured to cover the planet, a new way of living with a focus on environmental repair likely requires a disconnect from ever-increasing consumption. Two new systems according to The Guardian, are being energetically discussed by minds outside the military-industrial-capitalist complex. In a book called The Human Planet, by Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, Universal Basic Income or UBI, suggests that credits expended just above subsistence to every human on Earth could stabilize and reduce consumption by guaranteeing sufficient necessities to live while interrupting the work-consumption reward pattern established by consumer-based capitalism. The second system, called Half-Earth would dedicate half the planets land surface for the rectification of other species.

CARBON BARON'S FRIEND

The nation’s only felony-indicted state official, Ken Paxton, attorney general of Texas, issued a letter this week defending the carbon barons. He stated “It is absurd to place the blame for climate change on only a few energy companies in America when the root causes of climate change are complex and not fully understood.” Scientists on the other hand contend that burning 20 billion tons of fossil fuels annually in a finite space will assuredly cause climate change. A court case in New York City against Dallas-based Exxon-Mobil for damages caused by climate change will seek to determine when Exxon knew about their products affect on climate and whether they tried to cover it up. Former California Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stated they knew as far back as 1959. Other sources are pointing to an Exxon document produced in 1978. The Sierran editor Jason Mark wrote last month, “The Carbon Barons are guilty not only of fraud but also of reckless negligence, of failing to use their early knowledge about climate change risks to shift the direction of human affairs. You can decide not to indulge in luxury emissions like a trip to Europe, but such abstinence will do almost nothing to reduce global warming. The Carbon Barons are in a different position. When they learned that their products could be catastrophic, they had the ability to intervene in the course of history. They possessed the scientific awareness, the economic might, and the political influence to have avoided climate chaos. And they chose not to.”