The Lone Star Sierran - February 2014

The Texas election season is upon us. Check out the Texas Sierra Club PAC at TurnTexasGreen.org for our latest endorsements. Early voting ends this Friday. Make sure you bring your friends and go vote!

Trial began earlier this month in a Houston federal courtroom in a lawsuit filed by Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter and Environment Texas against ExxonMobil for massive and repeated violations of the Clean Air Act at the oil giant's Baytown manufacturing facility, the largest in the nation. The lawsuit accuses ExxonMobil under the Clean Air Act (CAA) of releasing 10 million pounds of pollutants in over 4000 upset emission events since 2005 from its refinery-chemical plant complex in Baytown, TX, endangering the health and safety of thousands of Houston-area residents.

I Live Here, I Give Hereis teaming-up with Austin-area non-profits to sponsor a 24-hour marathon at the end of March. This is an online give-a-thon, so anyone in the state can participate. Beginning at 6pm CST on March 20th, you can go to www.amplifyatx.org and give to your favorite non-profit.

Be sure to look for the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter! Every donation helps the Lone Star Chapter do its work in conservation and connecting people to the environment. Watch which nonprofits are in the lead online at the Leaderboard page of Amplify ATX. Prizes will be given to leading nonprofits, including four grand prizes and hourly bass booster prizes. Please join us!

This year is the 50th anniversary of the passage by President Johnson of the Wilderness Act – a law that preserves America's wilderness areas where, as Johnson stated, "the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, [and] where man himself is a visitor."

In celebration, the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter invites you to venture off to Big Bend National Park April 14th-18th to help us in our ongoing effort to restore grasslands damaged by ranching over a century ago. The park will provide lodging, equipment, seed and restoration supplies for the project. The participation fee is only $25. The Lone Star Chapter will organize car pooling from around the state that will pick-up volunteers along the way.

Spaces are limited, so please contact Lone Star Chapter Conservation Chair, Evelyn Merz, at elmerz@hal-pc.org or Roger Sigland at bakedlasaka2@bigbend.net if you are interested!

The Lonestar Chapter's own Neil Carman made an appearance in a Weather Channel documentary released last week, part of a series of reports by the Weather Channel, Inside Climate News and the Center for Public Integrity on natural gas drilling in the Eagleford Shale. In the documentary, Fracking the Eagle Ford Shale: Big Oil and Bad Air on the Texas Prairie,Carman discusses the high likelihood that health hazards can result from the combination of chemicals produced from a fracking well.

As an avid reader of the Lone Star Sierran, you are well aware that there are numerous environmental problems affecting our state in 2014. Texas' prolonged drought has many communities scrambling for water, while state leaders are hoping that setting aside $2 billion in special infrastructure fund (or praying for rain) will solve the state's woes. The explosion of oil and gas frack wells and the associated activities like injecting wastes underground across the state is wreaking havoc on air quality, affecting water supplies and in some instances may be causing localized earthquakes. Meanwhile, the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and the Railroad Commission maintain an industry-friendly approach to every aspect of environmental regulation. They seem to enable environmental degradation rather than prevent it.

San Antonio, like many Texas cities these days, is thirsty for more water. For the past three years, the San Antonio Water System (SAWS) has been seeking proposals to import 50,000 acre-feet of precious groundwater to San Antonio as part of a plan to meet the estimated future water demands of the city. Both the Lone Star Chapter and the Alamo Group of the Sierra Club have expressed concerns to the SAWS Board and staff that these groundwater-importation proposals could impact endangered species, provide a disincentive to water conservation, and unnecessarily raise water rights.

Water pricing can be one of the most effective methods to driving conservation and it is also the primary mechanism for recovering the revenue that a water utility needs to protect public health and the environment. The Environmental Finance Center at the University of North Carolina and the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter have written a report to help Texas water utilities use their water rates and financial policies to encourage customers to reduce their water use while maintaining the financial viability of the utility.

In January, the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter's Executive Committee elected a new board to govern the organization in 2014. Most notably, Margot Clarke of Austin, formerly the Vice-Chair of the committee, was appointed Chair of the Lone Star Chapter as its Chair.

Outgoing Chair, Hal Suter from the Coastal Bend Group (Corpus Christi, TX), will continue to serve on the Executive Committee as its International & Labor Relations Chair, as well as the Chair of Special Projects. As such, he will continue to represent the chapter in its ongoing collaboration with labor organizations through the BlueGreen Alliance. Dewayne Quertermous from the Ft. Worth Group is the new Vice-Chair.

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