Via the Texas Tribune, we see where former Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Chairman Buddy Garcia has been appointed by Governor Perry to fill the seat on the misnomered Railroad Commission vacated by Eizabeth Ames Jones, who's running for a state Senate seat in South Texas. In his time with TCEQ Garcia distinguished himself by, well, let's see, how did he stand out? He didn't. He's one of a series of inter-changable Rick Perry clones that have inhabited TCEQ Commissioner positions over the last decade and voted in lockstep with whatever their mentor wanted. Now that's he's been reassigned to the RRC, Garcia has access to the kind of Oil and Gas money helpful for running for whatever it is that Garcia will be running for after his stint at the candy counter is over. He prepared tirelessly for the job by being a salesman for various energy industry front groups, like "Balanced Energy for Texas," which you might not be surprised to learn actually is quite heavily lopsided towards oil, gas and coal. Perhaps because its sponsors include Peabody Coal, Luminant Energy, and American Electric Power. among others. Congratulations Commissioner Garcia. We know you'll like this position much better than your last government job. It's all about drilling and much, much less concerned about environmental quality.    Read More

Whew. There's quite a story from today's Guardian involving the British Government, the Environmental Defense Fund, and right-wing Texas elected officials. The year was 2009. Her Majesty's Foreign and Commonwealth Office gave 13,673 Pounds (about $21,000) to Texas EDF to "influence climate security policy and legislation in Texas." How did EDF use this money to accomplish that goal? By organizing voters in key Texas districts? No. By arranging the elected officials to meet Texas victims of climate change? Nope. "The money was used to fly two Texan state politicians, including the climate sceptic Republican Troy Fraser, to the UK to receive a briefing with climate scientists and government officials. A Conference was also held in Austin in which a video of Prince Charles personally addressing Texan politicians on the subject of climate change was shown." The article doesn't say so, but it's obvious what the strategy at work here was. Unable to persuade Texas lawmakers of the righteousness of their cause with only local speakers of the Queen's English to do the work, EDF was at a loss. If only we could impress the importance of global warming on Fraiser and Co. by using people with authoritative British accents to explain it to them. Brilliant! And it would have worked too, except no one could understand what the Prince was actually saying on that video. Of course, when Governor Perry found out about all this, he was rightfully indignant, taking the position that the English had no business interfering with his plan to devolve state government into a a giant polluter oligarchy. That's what the EPA is for. There was some other stuff too about how Texas has a great (cough) record of clean air accomplishments (cough) and how global warming is really just a vast left-wing conspiracy, yada, yada, yada. But you expect that from the Guv. What's EDF's excuse? EDF's Texas Director Jim Marston explained that "There are people in Texas, including Governor Perry, who are uneducated [on this subject]. This was the period leading up to the Copenhagen climate summit. We wanted to get it away from the theoretical and move it to a country where the Kyoto [protocol] had already been ratified. We wanted them to hear it from the best scientists from the UK, a country that Texans tend to respect." See, British accents make everything infinitely more respectable. And how grateful was Senator Troy Frasier after his London Homesick Blues junket? Marston says "he came back very enthused. Sadly, his enthusiasm has decreased since, partly because the issue [of climate change] has become so politicized."  That, plus the power of an English accent tends to wane when it's not constantly reinforced. As Texas grassroots environmental activists, should we be more disappointed in the British for being so condescending about our environmental fights when they're building breeder reactors and stopping wind turbine farms that ruin Donald Trump's view of the ocean, or EDF for being so wasteful and naive? We report. You decide.    Read More

If you had to name all the academic or professional credentials you'd want the person running the second largest environmental agency on Planet Earth to have, you might go through a long list of disciplines - toxicologist, biologist, engineer, chemist, physician, political scientist, even lawyer -  before you got to Poultry Science.  And yet, here in Texas we're blessed not only with an A&M Poultry Science expert as Chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Bryan Shaw, but now we also have an A&M Poultry Science expert as Executive Director of TCEQ as well, newly-appointed Zac Covar. Based on these numbers, you might think that Texas' most imposing environmental challenges all involve feathers. What is it about the study of Gallus domesticus that makes you a perfect candidate to oversee environmental policy on Texas? It helps if you're a Rick Perry Aggie protege that spent time as the hatchet man for Rep. Dennis Bonnen, three years as the Governor's environmental advisor (we bet you thought that job had been outsourced to Chesapeake), and then almost three more years as Bryan Shaw's assistant. Isn't that just adorably circular? The 36-year-old political operative is replacing a 25-year civil servant veteran, further politicizing the Commission and ensuring it remains an anteroom of the Governor's office. If you were hopeful that things might be getting better in Austin, this move should shoot, dismember, and wood chip that hope. Expect....pollution most foul.  Read More

Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Executive Director and figurehead Mark Vickery announced his retirement from government yesterday. He'll be departing in May to "write a new chapter" in his life. The smart money is betting that the title of this new chapter is, "Using My Government Service to Benefit the Polluters I Supposedly Regulated, or, How I let Taxpayers Fund my REAL Retirement Plan." Is there a state agency that has had more of its former Directors end up as industry handpuppets? If so, we can't think of any off hand. The position is seen as a lucrative jumping-off point into the world of very high dollar Austin corporate lobbying. Start you own office pool now as to when Vickery will resurface as a Hillco employee, or a Chesapeake lobbyist. And while Executive Directors at TCEQ come and go, Governor Perry remains running the show through his mini-me Commissioner appointees. After so long a time in office, no agency reflects Perry's personality as much as TCEQ. Currently the Chair of the second largest environmental agency in he world is a Poultry expert who thinks smog isn't bad for you and doesn't believe in global warming. As long as these folks are in charge, expecting anything from this agency in the way of science-based coherent environmental policy is a gas pipe dream.   Read More

Texas Monthly has Paul Burka's mulling over the future of Governor Perry now that his campaign for President is over. Inside of this piece is the best short summary we've seen of a fundamental civics lesson that affects everyone impacted by industrial pollution in the state. Perry's longevity has allowed him to recast every state agency into an extension of his own personality. In the case of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, that's meant pursuing a policy of "nullification" toward the enforcement of federal and state environmental laws. When your state's environmental agency is designed by the Seven Sisters oil oligarchy, it's not like you start with a lot of advantages and there's never been a time, whether a Republican or Democrat was sitting in the Governor's office, that the state has not been in the service of the industries it was supposed to be regulating. But because there was a mix of appointees there was also a mix of self-interests and perspectives. Now it's just one big monochromatic monolith. Explains Burka: "The governorship of Texas was created to be a weak office, a reaction to the much-loathed Reconstruction-era regime of Republican governor E. J. Davis, who imposed on the public such indignities as a state police force. The real power is supposed to reside with the legislative branch, which explains why some of Texas’s most successful and highly regarded officials have been lieutenant governors—Bob Bullock and Bill Hobby, for example—rather than governors. The framers of the state constitution wanted the Legislature, the branch of government that is closest to the people, to have the lion’s share of the power. They designed a fragmented executive branch, in which power is shared by five elected officials—the governor, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, the land commissioner, and the comptroller. (At one time there was also a treasurer.) It was intended to keep anyone from getting too big for his britches. The Perry era, however, has been defined by consolidation of power within the governor’s office. This is a function of his unprecedented longevity. With a few exceptions, state government in Texas is run by boards and commissions of executive agencies, seats on which are appointed by the governor (in recent years, a few key agencies—the Texas Education Agency, the Health and Human Services Commission—have been headed by individual commissioners chosen by the governor). Most appointees serve six-year terms, and before Perry, no Texas governor had served more than seven and a half consecutive years (and most served fewer). This meant that most governors inherited and had to work with appointees picked by their predecessors, ensuring some diversity of viewpoints. Not anymore. Every slot at every state agency is now filled by a Perry appointee, and many have been expected to support the governor and his policies or resign (as was the fate of a Texas Tech regent who introduced Hutchison at a campaign event when she was running against Perry). In effect, Perry created a strong executive office with what amounted to a Cabinet form of government in a state whose constitution was intended to create a weak executive branch."  Read More

Late Friday EPA announced that it was recommending two more North Texas counties - Wise and Hood - join the current nine-county DFW "non-attainment" area for smog, or ozone pollution for purposes of trying to reach the new 75 parts per billion federal standard. In doing so, the EPA disagreed with the latest State of Texas plan to leave the non-attainment area boundaries unchanged. But as the Star-Telegram points out today, that wasn't the original position of the state. In 2008, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality suggested both Wise and Hood be included in DFW's smog zone. According to the documents submitted to EPA by TCEQ supporting this inclusion (accessible via a link in the S-T article), "Wise County produces significant stationary source emissions, ranking 2nd in the 13-county air quality planning area for NOx emissions in 2005. Hood County, the thirteenth county in the air quality planning area, has a design value of 84 parts per billion for 2005 through 2007, and a preliminary design value for 2006 through 2008 of 77 parts per billion."  But, as the S-T story points out, TCEQ commissioners requested that Wise be removed from the recommendation to the governor’s office in December of 2008 and Hood was cut out of the recommendation less than two months ago. Supposedly, these counties were removed by the state because ozone averages up to and including 2010 were lower than the ones in previous years. But that's only one criterion and since Wise doesn't have  monitor at all - because TCEQ is afraid of what it might find - that's not a legitimate argument for its absence on the TCEQ list to EPA. But wait there's more. In the documents EPA sent the state to justify both Wise and Hood Counties being included, it cites a number of different factors, including new emissions from Barnett Shale gas production. EPA used a national 2008 comprehensive emissions inventory to account for how much smog-producing Nitrogen Oxides (NOx) and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) were coming from each North Texas county. According to this data, Hood County had 5500 tons a year of NOx emissions, and 9500 tons a year of VOCs FROM ALL SOURCES, while Wise had 12,000 tons a year of NOx and 23,700 tons a year of VOCs. Those are big enough numbers to get noticed. And yet EPA notes that a year later, TCEQ did its own Barnett Shale emissions inventory and found even higher totals for some counties. For Hood, Shale production accounted for 7000 tons a year of NOx - or more than 1500 tons more a year than the EPA's inventory of all sources in Hood County combined. VOCs from gas pollution accounted for 2100 tons a year, or almost a quarter of the EPA inventory total. In Wise, TCEQ's shale inventory found 2500 tons of NOX, and 6000 tons of VOCs a year being emitted from gas production. In addition, EPA traced back where dirty air came from on high ozone days at selected Tarrant County and Parker County smog monitors. It concluded that these "back trajectories" for the Eagle Mountain Lake and Parker County monitors "further support that air that is transported from Hood and Wise Counties ends up in the area when ozone exceedences are observed." As we noted on Friday, this is the first time in the two decade battle over DFW air quality that gas industry air pollution has been a reason for including a county in the DFW non-attainment area. That's what makes this latest announcement such a milestone, and worthy of more discussion in places like the Dallas and Denton gas drilling task forces that are charged with re-writing those cities gas mining ordinances.   Read More

With the Star-Telegram abandoning the idea of having an environmental reporter all together, and the de facto abandonment of environmental beat coverage at the Dallas Morning News, DFW residents are having to rely on the alternative weeklies to provide the kind of coverage they used to get in the dailies. This week, the Ft. Worth Weekly provides another example of this trend with an excellent retrospective of where DFW air quality stands after the worst ozone season since 2007. Kudos to Weekly editor Gayle Reaves for taking up the slack and committing journalism in the name of public interest.   Read More

An Onion staffer couldn't make up the statements that now routinely issue forth from a completely "Perryized "Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The latest involves the TCEQ's defense of its censoring science out of a review of the health of Galveston Bay. After the Commissions staff scientists initially OK's a research paper that referenced sea level changes and climate change, the upper level non-scientists at TCEQ decided they didn't want to even admit that there might be a little itsty bitsy bit of science to suppotr the fact that climate change is actually happening. So they ripped out all references to such in the paper, rendering it useless. All the scientists assoctiated with the work have asked that their names be removed form the publication. Now comes the TCEQ's poor SOB of a spokesperson to try and explain its actions:  Read More

The so-called "budget crisis" in Austin this last legislative session gave industry and their favorite presidential candidate the opportunity to slash the budget of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. One thing they cut were the programs that offer incentives to get your older, dirtier car fixed or buy a new cleaner one. You may recall that the idea of "fleet turnover" among DFW residents was the one and only way TCEQ was suggesting North Texas could escape its chronic smog problem. That's worked so well this summer that we're seeing the worst ozone levels since 2006. But the point is that it's the very strategy the TCEQ is promoting in DFW as a clean air solution has gotten gutted in Austin. So even if you were a true believer in TCEQ's fleet turnover shell game, you'd be hard-pressed to defend the efficacy of that approach now that it's been mortally wounded in the budget process. All they have now is a big box of nothing.   Read More