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Word comes from Politico that after 17 years of trying, “Republicans for Environmental Protection” is 86’ing the concept and changing its name to some kind of focus-group-tested “ConservAmerica.” It’s not so much that conservatives have abandoned the environment and public health. Poll after poll shows broad support for most of the environmental agenda, and over the last 20 years some of the most successful projects Downwinders has pulled off have been with Republican office-holders as partners. It’s that a controlling faction of the Republican Party is increasing hostile to what has been an historical bi-partisan set of goals for their own sake, differing only in approaches. In 2012, the very value of having clean air is routinely questioned by that faction, as is the science behind any advance in knowledge that contradicts a worldview where corporations make all the decisions about our risks for us. So instead, the former RFEPs are hoping to attract conservatives in general. “We’re seeing more and more independents out there,” said David Jenkins,
the group’s vice president for governmental and political affairs.
“Messaging through a Republican frame doesn’t reach those people as well
as reaching them through a conservative frame.” They may be on to something. The most ardent conservative critics of pollution in North Texas are not state or federal Republican office-holders, but grassroots right-wingers like former DISH Mayor Calvin Tillman, who feels as though the GOP has let him down. It’s one more sign that the modern Republican Party is further isolating itself on an issue that really doesn’t give a flip about the politics of your lungs. 

Per our warning last week, industry representatives on the Dallas Gas Drilling Task Force, assisted by turncoat “resident representative” John McCall, will indeed be trying to rollback setback protections for homes, schools, and hospitals, as well as attempting to allow drilling in city parks at this afternoon’s meeting, beginning at 1:30 pm in room 6ES on the 6th floor of Dallas City Hall. Despite getting hundreds of e-mails from clean air supporters over the weekend, they may be successful, depending on which Task Force members show up and decide to switch their votes. At stake are the current recommendations that require a 1000 foot setback, or buffer zone, from the fence line of the drill site to the property line of any “protected use” which now includes homes, hospitals and schools, and the prohibition against any drilling in Dallas parks. Industry wants that 1000 foot distance cut to 600 feet and to go ahead and drill in parks anytime the city council votes to do so.  It’s obvious that industry has mapped out the number of locations afforded them under the current, democratically-approved recommendations and decide they can’t make enough money with them in place – so they’re seeking to revisit past votes and overturn them at the very last Task Force meeting. That’s their M.O. Will they succeed? We know more residents will be showing up to express their displeasure at the prospect. This could get very messy. Stay tuned.

(Dallas)—-Kansas City-based Ash Grove Cement Company has submitted a permit amendment to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality that seeks permission to convert its Midlothian plant from three wet process kilns operation to a single dry process kiln by 2014. In a cover letter to the TCEQ dated January 13^th, Trinity Consultants’ Kasi Dubbs writes that, “With this permit amendment application, Ash Grove is proposing to modify Permit Number 1 to decommission two kilns at the plant, and reconstruct that third kiln from a wet process kiln to a preheater, precalciner kiln system.” According to the permit amendment application, total plant manufacturing capacity will decrease by 230, 000 tons a year, from a maximum of 1,182,000 tons of cement to 949,000 tons. Ash Grove claims that this decrease in capacity combined with cleaner dry process kiln technology will reduce pollution from its Midlothian operations by almost 105,000 tons of air pollution a year, including 98,000 tons of CO2, 6,000 tons of Sulfur Dioxide, and 560 tons of smog-forming Nitrogen Oxides. Ash Grove’s decision means that in two years, Texas will no longer host any obsolete wet cement kilns that were the industry standard throughout the 20^th Century but whose energy inefficiency and pollution made them disadvantageous in the 21^st. As recently as 2008, Midlothian had almost a fifth of the nation’s total wet kilns. Wet kilns depend on massive quantities of water to mix the ingredients of cement and then uses equally massive amounts of energy to evaporate the water out of the cement through exposure to extreme heat. They began to fall out of favor after the second Arab oil embargo of the 1980’s when energy prices climbed significantly. Their numbers have been steadily declining for decades. In 2010, TXI Cement announced they were closing their four wet kilns in Midlothian, almost a decade after operating side-by-side with its huge new dry “Kiln #5”. With Ash Grove’s conversion, there will be only a handful of wet kilns left in the entire U.S. Citizens who had spent years campaigning to close the Midlothian wet kilns were celebrating. “This is truly an end to an era. These kilns have been operating since 1965. They were the dirtiest cement kilns in Texas. They inspired a grassroots rebellion in DFW that forced Ash Grove to court. Their closure is one more step in bringing all of the Midlothian cement plants into the modern era,” said Jim Schermbeck, Director of Downwinders at Risk, the local clean air group founded almost 20 years ago to oppose the burning of hazardous waste in the Midlothian kilns. It was Downwinders who broke the story on January 4^th that Ash Grove was finally considering dry conversion in Midlothian, while also being the target of a national EPA enforcement action. The group encouraged it supporters to launch waves of e-mail blasts to both the company’s headquarters and EPA administrators urging Ash Grove to commit to dry conversion, while also seeking to include the switch as part of the agency’s list of demands in any national settlement. Nine days later, Ash Grove submitted its permit amendment to the TCEQ. Regulators admitted that the publicity probably accelerated the final corporate decision in Kansas City. In 2006, Downwinders successfully pushed for inclusion of a recommendation in that year’s DFW smog plan that urged local governments to buy cement exclusively from the state’s dry kilns to provide an incentive for wet kiln operators to modernize. Schermbeck and the group then began their “green cement campaign” that methodically collected agreements from city and county governments that cut Ash Grove off as a potential cement supplier for municipal and county projects. Dallas passed the nation’s first green cement policy in May of 2007 during the last days of Mayor Laura Miller’s term. Over the next two years, Ft. Worth, Arlington, Plano, Denton and the Dallas County School District passed green cement policies – all unanimously. When Tarrant County passed a green cement policy by a vote of 5-0 in November 2008 Ash Grove decided it couldn’t afford to lose any more customers and took the County and all the rest of the green cement cities to court. Last January, when it looked like Dallas and Arlington might be forced to give up their policies as part of a settlement with Ash Grove, Downwinders stepped in and was praised for reaching a compromise that saved the policies’ intent to force modernization, but removed the threat of Ash Grove legal action. Meanwhile, in the 2007 and 2009 state legislatures, green cement bills garnered a bi-partisan group of sponsors including former State Senator Kim Brimer, his successor, State Senator Wendy Davis, and Tarrant County State Representative Vickie Truett. Schermbeck noted that the green cement campaign had been of the few grassroots environmental success stories during the tenure of Governor Rick Perry. Ash Grove’s decision was also just the latest victory in a string of wins by citizens that have transformed each of the three Midlothian cement plants into more modern facilities. In 2005, Holcim Cement reached a settlement with Downwinders that resulted in the first use of a specific pollution control technology that is now standard equipment on new kilns. In 2008, TXI Cement suspended operation and then closed its four wet kilns, and stopped burning hazardous waste. Now Ash Grove is converting the last wet kilns in Texas. Comparing the emissions generated by all of the Midlothian cement plants before and after the changes sought by Downwinders over the last two decades, there’ll be at least 23,000 tons less air pollution when the new Ash Grove kiln goes online in 2014 than at the peak of the bad old days in the late 1990’s and early part of the 21^st Century at all three plants – not including the reduction of an estimated hundreds of thousands of tons of greenhouse gases like CO2 that weren’t even officially counted until recently.“I think anyone will be hard pressed to find a more successful grassroots group in the state of Texas over the last 10 years than Downwinders at Risk,” said Schermbeck. “It’s hard work to win even one of these concessions from industry. To be able to reduce this amount of air pollution from all three plants is an accomplishment that will be hard to duplicate. But that doesn’t mean we won’t be trying.”Schermbeck noted that the group has been busy pressing for the adoption of advanced pollution controls at the cement plants that have been used for a decade in Europe but have yet to reach the U.S.  He expects to see those controls included in the next DFW clean air plan. “We’re not stopping until every cement plant in North Texas is a state-of-the-art facility.”

“….genetic factors and brain changes triggered by man-made chemicals in the
environment are equally to blame for the development of autism in young
children,” according to panelists at a recent American Association for the Advancement of Science panel in Vancover as reported in the Irish Times last Monday. Professor Scott Selleck of Penn State is quoted as saying “A number of genetic alterations have emerged as important in autistic
disorders but persistent chemicals in the environment including flame
retardants and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were also important. The balance of genetic and environmental contributors is about equal.
It is 50/50.”  Dr. Janine LaSalle of the University of California, Davis talked about her research on “how exposure to persistent chemicals such as flame retardants could
cause long-lived changes in how collections of genes were expressed, for
example the genes associated with building neurological networks.” She referred to this phenomena as “epigenetics”. That’s when the genes themselves are not mutated but they way the genes express themselves is changed. And it can be caused or made worse “by low-level environmental chemicals.” LaSalle
“exposed mouse models to the flame retardant PBE-47 and polychlorinated
biphenyl MECP-2 at minute levels that matched human exposures. It affected both sociability of these mice and also their learning behavior.” The article ends by noting that “There were now upwards of 80,000 non-natural chemicals in the
environment produced by industrial processes and other sources. Few had been tested for their neurotoxicity despite human
exposures to these substances.”  Autism now affects more American children than
childhood cancer, diabetes and AIDS combined. In the last decade, the
number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum has grown significantly.
The Centers for Disease Control now puts the rate at one in 110.

Seems like just the other day we were commiserating with some fellow activists about the lack of infrastructure in the DFW environmental community. Here we are in the nation’s fifth-largest metropolitan area and yet the amount of staff and resources and institutions doing or supporting basic environmental work is still the same as it was 20 years ago. It doesn’t feel like the movement has grown up here the way it might in Houston or Austin. So we’re looking forward to attending the first annual Green Source Environmental Leadership Awards being held at Dallas new “Eco-op” space near White Rock Lake from 5:30 to 7pm Tuesday. After over a month of online balloting, the top three vote-getters in each of three categories are now in contention for top honors and a nice cash prize of $500. It’s about time DFW had this kind of community-building, cross-denominational annual rite of recognition for green good works. And the nominees are…in the Grassroots Group/organization category, In-Sync Exotics Wildlife Rescue, your own Downwinders at Risk, and the Plano International Festival. In the Volunteer category are Josephine Keeney , Katie Jensen, and Downwinders’ board member and Arlington Conservation Council activist Grace Darling. In the Entrepreneur category it’s Bonnie Bradshaw with 911 Wildlife LLC, our good friend  Thomas Kemper of Dolphin Blue paper products, and Heather Rinaldi of the Texas Worm Ranch. Finally in the For Profit / Business Professional category, there’s Tom Bazzone with Green Living, Grier Raggio of We Consume Too Much, and Mitch Fine of Earth NT. It only costs $25 bucks to attend and it benefits a local group that’s trying to build a network that wasn’t here before. In our book, local folks have already won.

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.

If gas industry representatives get their way during the final Gas Drilling Task Force meeting next Tuesday, fracking will be allowed much closer to homes and schools, and even inside Dallas parks, a reversal of previous positions. What’s ironic is that the President of the Dallas Parks and Recreation, Joan Walne, may facilitate these efforts. Walne has been voting with industry throughout the course of the Task Force meetings, participating in votes this week that removed protections already agreed to for flood plain drilling. In the past, she’s had no problem with the idea of sacrificing city parks to drilling rigs. She’s expected to be a key vote next Tuesday. “As it turns out, putting Joan Walne in charge of protecting Dallas public parks from the gas industry on this Task Force was like putting John Dillinger in charge of protecting the city’s bank account,” said Downwinders at Risk Director Jim Schermbeck. Besides allowing rigs and giant compressors in parks, the Task Force is also expected to be asked by industry representatives to “revisit” the current recommendation requiring a 1000 foot setback from all homes, schools, churches and hospitals. They want it rolled back to between 500 and 700 feet, similar to how drilling is handled in Fort Worth. “After already agreeing to inadequate 1000-foot buffer zones weeks ago for these ‘protected uses,’ industry now wants to go back and have another try at drilling right in our back yards,” warned Zac Trahan of the Texas Campaign for the Environment. “They want to put a well pad as close as 500 feet from a school, hospital or home – and as close as 300 feet from an office building, retail store or restaurant. A well pad could mean as many as 24 wells, a battery of storage tanks, and a large compressor that generates thousands of tons of air pollution a year. That’s unacceptable to us, and we think, most Dallas residents.” Waln, as well as Texas Business for Clean Air Director Margaret Keliher, and Dallas attorney John McCall are expected to be key votes on the setbacks issue. Keliher had led the effort to disregard the current ordinance and allow drilling in the Trinity River floodplain, while McCall is supporting rigs as close as 300 feet to commercial pieces of property like office building, restaurant or other place of business. Both Schermbeck and Trahan urged Dallas residents to e-mail the Task Force member and express their concern at the upcoming votes. “With only 11 members, and previous protections hanging on lots of 6-5 votes, an absence or change of heart has large ramifications,” said Schermbeck.  “We need Dallas residents to wake up and realize their fate is hanging on only a couple of votes from people they didn’t elect.” E-Mail Addresses of Dallas Gas Task Force members: joniwalne@aol.com loisgfinkelman@sbcglobal.net  john@attorneymccall.com   RAlvarez@edf.org biegler@southcrossenergy.com  cherelle.blazer@gmail.com   bbullock@mail.cox.smu.edu  margaret@margaretkeliher.com   pshaw@woodshawlaw.com  David.Sterling@unthsc.edu  twelch@bhlaw.net