Texas cities fall in EPA ranking
for energy-efficient buildings
March 24, 2010
Four Texas cities declined from 2008 to 2009 in federal rankings of cities with the most energy-efficient commercial buildings earning the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star label.
The four – Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin and San Antonio – all appeared on the EPA’s initial annual ranking of the 25 cities with the most commercial buildings receiving the Energy Star in 2008. That list was released last March.
On Tuesday, the EPA issued its city rankings for Energy Star designations of commercial buildings in 2009. Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin all were lower on the new list than they were on the 2008 list. San Antonio was not among the 25 cities on the 2009 list.
Houston had the sixth-largest number of commercial buildings getting the Energy Star in 2009. It was No. 3 on the 2008 list.
Dallas-Fort Worth was No. 8 in 2009 and No. 5 in 2008.
Austin fell to No. 18 in 2009 from No. 13 in 2008.
San Antonio, not on the 2009 list, was No. 16 in 2008. More►
More petitions, health care law
complicate climate policy outlook
March 23, 2010
New legal petitions by states and others, combined with Democrats’ historic congressional victory Sunday night on health care reform, are further complicating the multifaceted struggle over federal climate policy.
Texas was one of three states (Virginia and Alabama were the other two) filing legal challenges last month against possible regulation of greenhouse gases by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act. Sixteen states and New York City had previously sided with the EPA in favor of regulation.
By last week’s deadline for filing motions, 14 more states (including Texas neighbors Louisiana and Oklahoma) were also formally challenging the EPA, while two others asked court permission to side with the agency in the legal battle, the Greenwire news service reported.
Meanwhile, Greenwire reported that 22 industry and business organizations had filed motions in support of the anti-regulation petitioners. A Virginia-based wetlands protection group asked court permission to support the EPA and another environmental advocacy group, the Union of Concerned Scientists, asked to be granted advisory, friend-of-the-court status in the dispute.
The Obama administration has indicated that it will move ahead with the EPA’s proposed regulation of carbon dioxide and other atmosphere-warming pollutants under the existing Clean Air Act unless Congress passes a new law to do that. More►
Evidence of climate change grows
as public concerns continue to decline
March 11, 2010
Last week, the Met Office – Britain’s National Weather Service – released a review of more than 100 scientific studies since the last major U.N.-sponsored overview of global warming research in 2007.
The review was produced by scientists from the U.K., Canada, Australia and South Africa. It assessed recent research findings on subjects including rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, warming oceans and declining Arctic sea-ice.
There is only an “increasingly remote possibility” that greenhouse-gas emissions from human activity are not the major reason for climate change detected in the dozens of studies, the authors concluded.
That appraisal was so resolutely unsurprising to the staff of the blog at the prestigious scientific journal Nature that it was reported there under this ironic headline: “Mankind ‘responsible for climate change’ shocker.”
Paralleling the accumulating scientific evidence of global warming, however, are growing indications that fewer Americans accept it. The latest such sign came Thursday, when the Gallup organization released its annual update on attitudes toward the environment. More►
"Science of climate change is strong,"
experts at four Texas universities say
March 8, 2010
Scientists at Texas A&M University immediately took issue when top state officials cast doubt on scientific findings about climate change last month in their formal effort to block regulation of atmosphere-warming pollutants.
Now, climate experts from A&M, Texas Tech University, the University of Texas and Rice University have teamed up to write a newspaper column for the Houston Chronicle, declaring that "the science of climate change is strong," even if the state of Texas is challenging that science in administrative and court petitions. The column was published Sunday.
Andrew Dessler, a professor in A&M's Department of Atmospheric Sciences, told Texas Climate News that he and the other scientists were motivated to write the column by the state's legal challenge of a federal finding that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are dangerous to human health and the environment.
The finding by the Environmental Protection Agency is a necessary prerequisite for proposed federal regulation of the gases, which Texas is trying to stop. The state's challenge, filed by Attorney General Greg Abbott with the support of Gov. Rick Perry and other top officials, was largely based on claims that the leading international science body on climate change is not "objective or trustworthy." More►
Transitional turmoil: Gas vs. wind
March 4, 2010
No one ever said a transition to lower-carbon forms of energy would be without turmoil. And sometimes it comes in novel forms, several of which have been in the news lately.
For years, producers of natural gas (with the lowest carbon dioxide emissions of the main fossil fuels) have been promoting it as an environmentally superior alternative to coal (with the highest CO2 emissions) for generating electricity.
Now, the Wall Street Journal relates in an article datelined from the Texas town of Taft near Corpus Christi, natural gas is squaring off against the wind industry, which promotes itself as an essentially zero-CO2 form of electricity production.
Noting that the wind industry has grown from "bit player" status just four years ago to generating "a significant share" of Texas' electricity today, the Journal's Russell Gold reported this week that "the growth of wind power has attracted powerful critics: the owners of natural-gas power plants." More►
A&M scientists back EPA finding
on dangers of greenhouse gases
February 24, 2010
After Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott formally challenged the federal conclusion that greenhouse gases are harmful pollutants, the Houston Chronicle’s Eric Berger asked if he had consulted with any of Texas’ own “eminent climate scientists” before filing petitions that dismiss scientific conclusions about global warming as the product of “colluding and scheming.”
Abbott replied that he had not done so: “Not yet and here’s why. At this stage we’re not focused on, nor need we be focused on, needing to prove anything from a scientific basis ourselves.”
Actually, it seems highly doubtful that the attorney general will want to consult members of Texas A&M University’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences – a respected academic body in the field of climate science – if he’s looking for Texans with the appropriate scientific expertise to help him make his legal case.
After Abbott filed Texas’ petitions against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding” regarding carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, key members of the A&M department’s faculty told the Washington-based Wonk Room blog that the department as a whole stands by the EPA’s conclusion about greenhouse gases and by the principal conclusions of the international scientific body on climate change that Gov. Rick Perry’s office, announcing Abbott’s petitions, said had been “discredited.”
Kenneth P. Bowman, who heads the A&M department, sent Wonk Room this statement:
“I believe that (the) EPA finding is based on good science, as do all of my colleagues in the Atmospheric Science Department here at Texas A&M.” More►
Broadening battleground over EPA finding
February 19, 2010
By the time that an official deadline passed this week, only two other states – Alabama and Virginia – had followed Texas in filing petitions challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's finding that climate-changing greenhouse gases threaten human health and the environment.
In terms of state petitioners, that meant there were three states against the EPA finding and 16 states (joined by New York City) siding with the EPA over the finding, which laid the legal groundwork for the agency to impose the first-ever federal regulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse pollutants.
Even so, other states still have a chance to weigh in on the issue. Houston attorney Richard Faulk, who backs the Texas position, told The Texas Tribune that others have 30 days to intervene on Texas' side in its challenge, and speculated that states with heavily resource-extractive economies may do so.
(Louisiana, for example, is already on the record asking the EPA to reconsider its greenhouse-gas finding, though so far in the form of letters from state department heads, who work for Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, and not a formal legal petition from Democratic Attorney General James D. "Buddy" Caldwell.)
Meanwhile, the nation's governors are now being asked to support a congressional effort, led by Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, to prevent the EPA from issuing regulations based on the greenhouse-gas finding. This development was revealed today by Frank O'Donnell, director of the Washington-based environmental group Clean Air Watch. More►
Warmer climate, heavier snow?
February 14, 2010
No matter how often scientists repeat that individual weather events and long-range climate trends are not the same thing, global warming skeptics like to cite extreme episodes of winter weather to argue that there isn't really much cause for concern.
Huge snowstorms that blanketed the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast this month have proved no exception, and Texas scientists have joined the ensuing public dialogue.
Republican politicians and conservative commentators have been using recent snow-dumps to bolster their attack on the science behind human-caused warming and proposals to mitigate its climate-changing impacts.
For instance, Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, who has claimed that manmade warming is a "hoax," seized the moment to publicize an igloo bearing the sign "Al Gore's New Home," which members of Inhofe's family had built in Washington.
Fox News, not surprisingly, had some fun with that one – a correspondent introduced an interview with Inhofe on Thursday by declaring that the heavy snow in Washington and other locations had made it "a rough week for Al Gore and global warming alarmists everywhere."
An editorial in the conservative Washington Times on Thursday echoed Inhofe's "hoax" accusation: "Record snowfall illustrates the obvious: The global warming fraud is without equal in modern science."
Scientists have taken the opportunity provided by such rhetoric to explain that mammoth snowstorms are actually consistent with the effects that experts anticipate warming-instigated climate change will include.More►
Proud to be first with greenhouse-gas limits
February 5, 2010
Texas has no shortage of high-level complaints about possible regulations to fight manmade climate change, but you won’t hear them in the executive offices at Houston-based Calpine Corp.
The electricity producer proudly announced Thursday that it had just gotten approval from air quality regulators in California “to build the nation’s first power plant with a federal limit on greenhouse gas emissions – putting both the plant and the company at the forefront of the fight against global warming.”
The limit is in a federal permit, issued by a regional agency in the San Francisco Bay area, for a new, 600-megawatt plant that will burn natural gas. The plant, to be located on the southeast side of the bay at Hayward, Calif., will supply electricity to area, the company said.
Calpine said the permit places limits on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. It is “the most stringent” ever issued by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, that agency said [pdf] in a separate release.
Environmentalists were quick to praise the action as a possible precedent for the broader regulation of pollutants that scientists blame for causing global warming and climate change.
Whether the Calpine plant’s permit will be such a model is a question, however, that is clouded by gathering uncertainties about whether such regulations are coming – and if they are, what form they could take. More►
National poll confirms opinion shift
January 27, 2010
Yet another national poll shows recent slippage in public agreement that global warming is happening and manmade, as a huge majority of scientists believe.
This survey, conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, was released Wednesday.
A few key findings, reflecting changes in public opinion in the U.S. from 2008 to 2010:
- The percentage who "think that global warming is happening" has dropped from 71 to 57 percent.
- Of respondents who do think it is happening, the percentage who were "extremely" or "very" sure declined from a combined 72 to 61 percent, while the percentage saying "somewhat sure" increased from 24 to 37 percent.
- The percentage saying global warming, if happening, is "caused mostly by human activities" fell from 57 to 47 percent.
- There were also major changes in public perception of scientists' views. The percentage thinking that "most scientists think global warming is happening" went from 47 percent to 34 percent, while the percentage thinking there is "a lot of disagreement" among scientists on the subject rose from 33 to 40 percent. (A separate poll of scientists, released last summer by the Pew Research Center and American Academy for the Advancement of Science, found that 84 percent said "the earth is getting warmer because of human activity.") More►
Whole Foods chief: Climate change skeptic
January 6, 2010
Just because a company takes actions to reduce greenhouse gases – and talks about them explicitly in the context of manmade climate change – it doesn't necessarily follow that the company's top official thinks manmade climate change is a problem. Or that it even exists.
Consider Austin-based Whole Foods Market, the grocery chain specializing in "natural" and organic products, and its libertarian-minded co-founder and chief executive, John Mackey.
Whole Foods does a lot to reduce its carbon footprint – it ranked fourth in the U.S, Environmental Protection Agency's latest list of the 50 corporations and government entities that buy the most "green power."
Even so, Mackey was recently quoted expressing strong skepticism about the science underlying the conclusion that human activities are altering the earth's climate. His views on the subject were reported in a lengthy profile in the Jan. 4 issue of The New Yorker. More►