Example Number Too Many to Count of why you just can't trust the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to be the watchdog they're supposed to be. Last year the state agency awarded a permit to the $3 billion Las Brisas coal-fired power plant in Corpus Christi last year over the objections of the EPA, AND two of its own Administrative Law Judges. When that happened, the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense sued. Yesterday they won when a District Court Judge issued a ruling that will send the plant back to TCEQ for an new air quality review. "Here, the worst-case scenarios factually and legally were not modeled,"   the Judge wrote.The opinion letter concludes by stating that the ruling may require an additional hearing or briefing to determine whether a permit reversal, or reversal and remand is appropriate. It's not surprising the TCEQ gave the plant a permit. They'll give a permit to just about anyone or thing that asks for it. But they usually don't get slapped down for it these days. Good for Sierra and EDF to call them out and win.   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

In one of those bureaucratic pieces of writing that contains whole novels between the lines, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality issued a short release yesterday saying that the planned submission of a revised clean-up plan, otherwise known as a State Implementation Plan, or "SIP" for the Exide lead smelter in Frisco had been postponed from this winter to next Spring: "In order to address comments from the public and the EPA on the proposed Collin County Lead Attainment Demonstration SIP revision, the TCEQ has determined that additional time is needed to ensure that the technical demonstration of attainment used in the proposal is as thorough as possible. Therefore, the TCEQ is postponing consideration of adoption of the SIP revision and the associated Agreed Order with Exide Technologies, Inc. from December 7, 2011 to spring 2012. The attainment demonstration SIP is due to the EPA by June 30, 2012. The commission is committed to meeting that deadline." This might seem like bad news to the uninitiated, but in this case, delay is good. What you have to know is that the first TCEQ try at writing this plan back in August failed miserably and was rejected the very first day by EPA, which must approve any such plan. Among other faults, TCEQ assumed Frisco had zero background lead after 50 years of hosting a lead-emitting facility, didn't use the correct emission rates for the smelter smokestacks, and didn't require the very best technology that's already being used on similar smelters elsewhere in the U.S. In addition, Frisco residents organized as the group Frisco Unleaded met with EPA in early October and brought up these and additional concerns, like the fact that the boundary lines for DFW's second non-attainment area were based on the same faulty assumption of no background lead as the TCEQ clean-up plan. Yesterday's formal delay might be a sign that some of the group's concerns are getting folded into the process and the EPA might be holding TCEQ to a higher standard of competency the second time around.   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

 DMN headline: "Perry banks on pro-drilling energy plan," including stopping all new regulation of fracking, which of course was pretty much unregulated before EPA began playing catch-up.   Read More

Non-partisan FactCheck.org takes on Rick Perry's claim that he's cleaned the air in Texas without those stinkin' EPA regulations he's always railing against. The results are predictable.  Read More

As some of you know, Superman's Birzarro World is the polar opposite of our world. Even the shape of the planet is different. Good people in our world are villains in Bizarro World, and visa versa. Every once in a while out worlds collide and large mix-ups ensue. Evidence has reached us today of such a collision.  Read More