Kay Bailey HutchisonSen. Kay Bailey Hutchison sent the following letter to Grist reader Blanca Estela in early October, responding to questions about the senator’s stance on climate legislation.  Hutchison says she opposes a cap-and-trade system, arguing that it would raise energy prices for average Americans and cause economic hardship.  She says she does want to invest in alternative energy.

Dear Friend:

Thank you for contacting me regarding the American Clean Energy and Security Act. I welcome your thoughts and comments.

In our effort to reduce emissions, I believe we must invest in alternative sources of energy. Wind, solar, nuclear, and biomass are clean, safe and effective sources of power. Their increased use would create thousands of jobs and allow us to produce energy for Americans, by Americans.

Some Members of Congress have expressed their intent to mandate a cap-and-trade policy to be imposed on all Americans. I believe that cap-and-trade would increase energy prices. In 2008, Peter Orszag, who then served as the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, and who now serves as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, testified before the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Finance on the implications of a cap-and-trade regime. In his testimony, Director Orszag stated, “Under a cap-and-trade program, firms would not ultimately bear most of the costs of the allowances but instead would pass them along to their customers in the form of higher prices.”

For this reason, I believe that a cap-and-trade approach to address climate change would be onerous and would adversely impact the economy. It could create economic hardship for farmers, ranchers, workers and small businesses, in addition to consumers. The last thing our nation needs during this time of economic hardship is higher energy prices and higher levels of unemployment due to a federal mandate passed down from Washington.

Track the climate debate and take actionAs cap-and-trade legislation comes before the Senate, I will keep your comments in mind. I appreciate hearing from you, and I hope you will not hesitate to keep in touch on any issue that is important to you.

Sincerely,
Kay Bailey Hutchison
United States Senator

Do you know what your senators think about climate legislation?  Ask them, then tell us what you find out.

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‘Once-in-a-century' drought sending campers indoors and stunting crops

North Texas has had average rainfall this year, and three "cool" days this week felt like Christmas in July. But don't tell your friends in Central and South Texas, because they are feeling hot, parched and bothered. A "once-in-a-century" drought is baking a big swath of Texas, says John Nielsen-Gammon, state climatologist and a professor at Texas A&M University. The drought is "zeroing out" crops and forcing ranchers to liquidate their herds....

The river is flowing at 10 cubic feet per second, Lyons said Wednesday. "Normal for this time of the year is 100 to 200 cfs," he said. "We used to think 100 was low, but the last two years have changed our perspective."

People are comparing the conditions to the epic drought of the 1950s, he said. "It's been so dry it's even killing cedar trees, so you know it's dry."

Drought twice as likely to lead to mental health problems

If you live in a drought-affected area, you're twice as likely to suffer a mental health problem, according to a new study.

The details of the study are here [big PDF].  Here's another story on it:

The long, long dry: less drink, more drugs

Australia's extended drought is having a severe impact on the mental health of farmers and their partners - but they are not turning to alcohol to drown their sorrows. A new study shows that men and women in drought-affected areas are drinking less alcohol than those in areas unaffected by the long dry spell. But they are much more likely to be swallowing antidepressants. "People might think drought is part of life in Australia and that farmers become resilient, but this sustained drought is having a severe impact on farmers' mental health," said Matthew Gray, deputy director of the Australian Institute of Family Studies, and a co-author of the study. The 2007 survey was based on a sample of 8000 people in regional and rural Australia, 60 per cent of whom were in drought-affected areas. It reveals that 17 per cent of farmers in these areas were suffering from mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression, compared with 8 per cent of farmers in non-drought areas.

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In a bit of good news for the environment, work got underway this week to clean up hazardous PCB pollution that General Electric dumped into New York's Upper Hudson River.

But there's also some bad news -- which is that the toxic waste is being sent to a landfill that sits atop the Ogallala Aquifer, a key drinking-water source for West Texas.

"This is like a shell game, moving hazardous toxic PCBs from one sensitive location to another," said Dr. Neil Carman, a chemist with Sierra Club's Lone Star chapter. "We are concerned about contamination of the Ogallala Aquifer and other aquifers in this dry region of Texas that needs to protect and conserve water for drinking and agricultural uses."

The company that operates the landfill also recently won approval to dump radioactive waste there, intensifying the controversy surrounding the facility.

The $750 million Hudson River dredging project aims to scrape up almost 250,000 pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, chemicals once used in electrical equipment that are known to build up in the body and cause cancer, damage the immune system and lead to reproductive disorders. The cleanup is being overseen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"The start of Hudson River dredging is a symbol of victory for the environment and for its river communities," said acting EPA Regional Administrator George Pavlou. "Dredging will help restore the health of the river, and will one day allow people to eat fish that are caught between Fort Edward and Albany. This is an historic day for an historic river."

The sediment scraped up from the bottom of the Hudson will be carried by barge to a facility in Fort Edward, N.Y., where the water will be removed and treated. The contaminated soil will then be loaded onto a train and shipped some 2,000 miles to the Waste Control Specialists (WCS) landfill in Andrews County, along the Texas border with New Mexico.

While WCS officials have insisted that the landfill does not sit atop the Ogallala Aquifer, an investigation by TV news station KCBD confirmed that it actually does. Also known as the High Plains Aquifer, the Ogallala is one of the largest aquifers in the world, underlying about 174,000 square miles of land in eight states. It provides drinking water for many communities in West Texas, including the city of Lubbock.

The placement of the WCS dump on the Andrews County site has proven controversial. In fact, Glen Lewis -- a longtime official with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality who was involved in the investigation for the WCS facility -- was one of at least three TCEQ employees who quit their jobs after the agency granted the company permits to dump low-level radioactive waste there earlier this year, KCBD reports:

"All of our time has been wasted. We've all been played for suckers, we've all been pointless impediments to a process that resulted in issuing this license from the first day," Lewis explains.

Low-level radioactive waste is everything radioactive in a nuclear power plant except for the highly radioactive fuel. It includes pipes that carry radioactive water and even the entire reactor itself when it's dismantled, and contains the same radioactive elements present in high-level waste but at lower concentrations. The WCS facility is also licensed to take highly radioactive waste from weapons facilities, according to Sierra's Lone Star chapter.

Lewis found that that runoff from the dump drains into two groundwater sources, including the Ogallala. While WCS claims that hundreds of feet of red clay as well as man-made barriers sit between the dump and the water, Lewis maintains that the groundwater may in fact be as close as 14 feet from the bottom of the proposed dump. And as we reported recently in another story about landfills, the EPA has acknowledged that man-made barriers eventually fail.

Adding to the controversy over the dump, WCS will be using public money for its construction. This month the voters of Andrews County approved a $75 million bond to finance the dump. The bond issue passed by a mere three votes, with 642 people in favor of the project and 639 against it, a margin confirmed last week in a recount. The special election was paid for by WCS.

Among the groups opposing the deal was No Bonds for Billionaires, which points out that WCS is a subsidiary of Valhi Inc., a diversified Dallas-based company owned by billionaire businessman Harold Simmons. The grassroots group's website says:

...Simmons can’t find any investors. So, instead of reaching into his own pocket to finance his project, he wants to reach into yours for the $75 million he needs. This amount averages out to about $16,000 per Andrews County household.

That averages out to about $16,000 per Andrews County household -- slightly more than the county's per capita income of $15,916, according to the most recent census data. More than 46% of Andrews County's population is Latino, and more than 15% of its residents live in poverty.

In a 2006 interview with the Dallas Business Journal, Simmons discussed the hurdles he had to surmount to get the radioactive waste dump deal:

It took us six years to get legislation on this passed in Austin, but now we've got it all passed. We first had to change the law to where a private company can own a license (to handle radioactive waste), and we did that. Then we got another law passed that said they can only issue one license. Of course, we were the only ones that applied.

Speaking earlier this year at a press conference in Andrews County organized by environmental groups, Nuclear Information and Resource Service chemist Diane D'Arrigo warned of the dump's long-term risks to the community.

"Texas' waste dump in Andrews County calls for a private company to manage a low-level dump, but the company would only be licensed to operate it for 15 years," she said. "They could then renew their license or decide to close the dump and walk away, leaving a toxic mess to the state of Texas. This could also happen if the company just folds up and vanishes into the night."

And Valhi has been having its share of financial troubles lately. Earlier this year, for example, Standard & Poor's lowered its corporate credit ratings on the company from a B to a B- and placed the ratings on CreditWatch with negative implications.

Valhi recently reported a net loss of $20 million for the first quarter of 2009 along with a drop in sales for its waste management division. But it pointed to the approval of the radioactive waste dump in Andrews County as one way it hopes to cut the division's operating losses.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South, the online magazine of the Institute for Southern Studies.)

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Nearly two months after Hurricane Ike reared its head on the Texas and Louisiana coast, workers are still cleaning up what may be a record amount of debris. The wee bright side: only some 15 percent of the wreckage is headed to the landfill, while the rest is reused or recycled.

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Houston has received the dubious honor of becoming the second U.S. city to have a "severe" smog problem, as classified by the U.S. EPA. Los Angeles is its partner in grime. The downgrade from a "moderate" to "severe" smog problem gives Texas' largest city nine extra years to meet federal air-quality standards. Both Houston and L.A. have, however, taken recent steps to combat their unhealthy air quality. Houston Mayor Bill White has unveiled a plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 11 percent and smog 16 percent by 2010, through use of the usual suspects: renewable energy, hybrid cars, LED traffic lights, energy-efficient buildings, rooftop solar panels, and expanded transit. Los Angeles, for its part, on Wednesday launched a pollution-control program at its bustling port, banning the entry of diesel trucks built before 1989.

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Hurricane Ike caused plenty of problems for Gulf Coast humans, but now it looks like the storm has also messed with area wildlife. Ike's storm surge helped turn some freshwater wetlands as far as 20 miles inland into salty marshes hostile to many freshwater fish, as well as other wildlife. "[The salt infusion] exasperates everything that needs freshwater," said Jim Sutherlin, superintendent of a Gulf Coast wildlife area. "If we don't get a lot of rain soon, then it's gloom and doom for fish, insects, and some mammals." Algae blooms have also been a problem; caused by untreated sewage rushing into Galveston Bay after the storm, algae blooms have been sucking oxygen out of the water, leaving little available for marine life. Ike's high winds also shredded many mulberry trees that migrating birds depend on for fuel to cross the Gulf of Mexico. "This will have a huge impact on the birds," said Gina Donovan of the Houston Audubon Society. "Without the food to fatten them for a 600-mile journey, the birds will starve and perish."

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Hundreds of beach houses on the gulf coast of Texas may soon be declared illegal and seized under a state law that prohibits houses from being built (or remaining) between a beach's high and low tide marks. Hurricane Ike's 12-foot storm surge and 100-mile-per-hour winds severely eroded many Texas beaches and redrew the tide lines enough that even many beach houses that survived the hurricane intact could be seized by the state under the law and eventually be returned to beach. Texas officials said it would be about a year or more before they decide for sure which houses violate the law, but homeowners whose beachfront houses were damaged or completely destroyed said that the uncertainty of whether their house will be seized is already making them rethink expensive repairs. Experts say that simply repairing the beaches isn't possible; even if tons of sand were trucked in, it would all wash away in a year or so. "We're talking about damn fools that have built houses on the edge of the sea for as long as man could remember and against every advice anyone has given," said the former state senator who wrote the 1959 Texas Open Beaches Act.

source:

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Hurricane Ike left a big mess behind as it passed over Galveston, Texas, and other Gulf Coast areas, but the mess wasn't just from debris. Just as with Hurricane Katrina, the combination of destructive high winds and subsequent flooding have created a toxic soup that's potentially dangerous to residents, cleanup crews, and the environment. Floodwaters have mixed with gasoline, paints, household chemicals, and construction debris (some containing asbestos) to make an unpleasant, icky, potentially hazardous mess that could also cause respiratory problems when it dries into dust. The U.S. EPA will test floodwaters and sludge for contaminants later this week; however, if the levels are anything like Katrina left behind, residents should be wary of returning so soon. "Quite frankly, we are reaching a health crisis for those that are remaining on the island," said Galveston city manager Steve LeBlanc. "We're asking and strongly encouraging those that are here to leave, and we're certainly telling those that are away to stay away." Plenty of standing water has also led to a boom in mosquitoes and the county has been asked to spray the area to kill the larvae.

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Hurricane Dolly hit land in Texas Wednesday as a Category 2 storm. No deaths have been reported and the storm had a minimal impact on oil and gas operations; it largely missed offshore oil and gas facilities, but did cut production 10 to 20 percent at some refineries and by 5 to 8 percent overall. Oil futures hardly budged, and a collective sigh of relief went up from those who had feared Dolly would have a stronger impact on the shaky oil market. (The hurricane did have an impact on Sen. John McCain, who cited Dolly's presence in the Gulf as the reason for canceling a planned trip to New Orleans, during which he had planned to helicopter to an oil rig and talk up offshore drilling.) With hurricanes Bertha, Cristobal, and Dolly, July 2008 has already been the third-most active hurricane-season month on record, and meteorologists are expecting a continuing busy summer for storms. More frequent hurricanes are, of course, also in line with what scientists expect to see as the climate continues to change.

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For more on Southwest cities see our full feature on sustainability initiatives underway in Phoenix.

Scan any list of "green U.S. cities" for winners from the Southwest, and you'll find a geographical void. Sure, a liberal-leaning place like Austin or Santa Fe or Boulder might sneak onto the list, but in general, there's a dearth of entries from this sun-drenched region. And that's troubling, as Southwest cities tend to be among the country's fastest-growing -- and thus in direst need of careful future planning.

While it's true that this hot corner of the country has traditionally been cool to sustainability -- due in part to a strong property-rights mentality -- some leaders are pushing for change. Here's a look at a few cities where green is on the rise.

Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chavez launches a new bus route in 2006.

Albuquerque, N.M. Like many Southwestern cities, Albuquerque suffers two major sustaina-woes: too much reliance on cars, and too little water to go around. But it's been making efforts to ameliorate those problems, if not exactly solve them. Thanks in large part to the leadership of Mayor Martin Chavez -- an early signatory to the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement -- the city has implemented a water conservation program and made greenhouse-gas reduction a priority. New bus routes and "bike and ride" incentives have seen public transit options increase, and city-funded construction projects must meet green-building standards; a longer-range plan aims to boost compact, mixed-use development and walkability. Chavez's fellow mayors named Albuquerque the "greenest city in the nation" last year, but that laurel came with controversy attached. And with a 20 percent increase in vehicle miles traveled since 1990, this motor-loving metro area still has a long way to go.

Dallas: Greening up its act?

Dallas, Texas When it comes to the Lone Star State, Austin usually hogs the smart-city spotlight. But its big brother to the north -- fingered as one of the worst sprawl offenders in the U.S. -- has quietly undertaken some eco-improvements of its own. Through a comprehensive planning process called Forward Dallas!, the city has tackled such thorny topics as land use, public transportation, housing, and urban design -- all with input from enthusiastic citizens -- and is now pursuing the creation of walkable streets; reuse of historic properties; development of affordable housing; and an increase in jobs and housing located near the city's network of 40 planned and existing light-rail stations. The city government has adopted a Green Dallas program whose steps include purchasing 40 percent of its energy from renewable sources this year, and this spring, the city council passed a green-building ordinance mandating improvements in energy efficiency.

The glitzy mixed-use CityCenter, under construction.

Photo: eflon

Las Vegas, Nev. Is Sin City ready to cash in on the sustainability trend? Er, not quite. In fact, it's often held up as the least redeemable of America's "desert oasis" cities -- and it doesn't show signs of stopping. As SustainLane puts it, "Las Vegas is undergoing a fast-forward version of the classic urban development pattern of exurban sprawl that has led other Sun Belt cities to complete dependence on the automobile." But just as the city has worked to make itself more family-friendly in recent years, it's also working to counter some of the questionable growth patterns of its past. (And we ain't talking about Frankie's hairstyles.) A 76-acre, $8 billion development called CityCenter is attempting -- in a glitzy, Vegas kind of way -- to bring a dash of mixed-use urban reality to the Strip, seeking LEED certification along the way. The city has implemented water and energy conservation measures, and pays residents to rip out artificial green lawns and replace them with desert landscaping. They may be small steps, but optimists are gambling that there's hope for Las Vegas yet.

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Has the U.S. push for biofuels contributed to rising global food prices? Well, yes, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Monday: "There has been apparently some effect, unintended consequence from the alternative fuels effort." But, she hastened to add, "biofuels continue to be an extremely important piece of the alternative energy picture" and "we think that it is not a large part of the problem." Unconvinced, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has suggested that 50 percent of the federal renewable-fuels mandate be waived for a year to take some pressure off of food prices and the Texas economy. But his critics argue that oil prices are more to blame, and thus eliminating all or part of the renewable-fuels standard would hike gasoline prices higher while having only a minimal impact on food prices. All that to say: If you need us, we'll be scrounging for pennies on the sidewalk.

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