Comments from the Chair
Alamo Group's 50th birthday party postponed
The Alamo Group of the Sierra Club was founded in 1968. We are planning a 50th Anniversary celebration but postponements have been required twice, May 19th because of a schedule conflict for our hostess Olivia Eisenhauer; and June 2nd, because of extreme heat predicted. We are now looking at having the event at an indoor location in July.
Please be alert for upcoming notices about this event. And please extend your thanks to join mine in appreciation to Jerry Morrisey, Loretta van Coppenolle, Olivia and Gay Wright for working hard on party arrangements. The postponements have been unavoidable.
Speaking of extreme heat
One hundred degree temperatures in May are probably becoming the new normal here. The San Antonio Climate Action & Adaptation Plan (CAAP) is trying to address these coming extremes of heat, drought, flooding etc. The issue is becoming urgent.
Atmospheric CO2 is now over 410ppm, compared to 315ppm in 1958, and previous hopes of maintaining “350.org". This new level is the highest, and most rapidly reached in at least 800,000 years. It is now expected levels may reach 500ppm by mid-century.
Previous plans (including the Paris Agreement) were based on slower CO2 rises and more rapid human action to reduce fossil fuel emissions. Our own Texas Tech Climate Scientist Katharine Hayhoe is quoted as saying: “ we are continuing full speed ahead with an unprecedented experiment with our planet, the only home we have.” Our Congressman Lamar Smith can retire knowing his decades of climate obstructionism have been instrumental in keeping us on this disastrous course.
Time to rally behind climate plan
We will continue to work with our San Antonio government in its CAAP process. Please check out our work with the city, and our Climate Action SA Coalition. This is our best chance to change the direction of our city from its decades long rush to imitate Houston and Dallas.
Those cities are moving to develop much more transit, encourage infill development and support more urban amenities, while we continue to sprawl out in every direction, with desperately inadequate transit options, poor pedestrian and bike options, and higher single vehicle occupancy travel rates than even found in Dallas and Houston. The current COSA government is serious about changing this trajectory, and we need to rally all our forces to support their efforts to change our urban future to one of smart streets, viable transit, infill development, heat island mitigation, clean renewable energy, energy and water conservation, low impact development, zero net waste, food policy provisions for urban farming, and all with environmental justice to those who have borne the brunt of many of these deleterious changes so far.
It is also vital we regionalize these efforts to our indwelling and surrounding communities and counties. San Antonio can’t change our future alone, and there is a lot of skepticism in our surrounding areas that we need to work hard to overcome.
Speak up for renewable energy
CPS Board Members will hold a "Public Input Session” June 13th, 5 - 8:30 pm, Villita Assembly Building, 401 Villita St.(complimentary parking at Navarro St Garage, 126 Navarro). All are urged to attend and speak out for renewable energy, greater energy efficiency, and early retirement of the Spruce 1 and Spruce 2 coal plants.
This public outreach from the Board of Trustees appears to be a new effort in response to our “environmental stakeholder group” meetings with CPS leaders Cris Eugster, Paula Gold Williams and others, where we have lobbied over the last year for more public access to the Board. We have asked for meeting minutes, meeting opportunities for Citizens to be Heard, input into Board member selection, access to their “Citizens Advisory Panel” etc.
I am not confident that this meeting June 13th will fulfill our needs, but it is a start and I hope we can all use this time constructively to improve CPS transparency and accountability as a public utility.
Expecting endorsements
Our Political Committee will begin evaluating candidates now that the primaries and runoffs are over. We expect to make endorsements in several races of local importance, and to work hard in the fall for those candidates. Please get involved in our efforts to elect public officials more friendly to our environment.
For your summer reading
I urge you to read The Sierra Club and the Jemez Principles by Heather Moyer. Some members do not understand or accept the importance of environmental justice to our Sierra Club efforts. This article may help further your understanding and appreciation of the critical role environmental justice must play in current Sierra Club efforts on behalf of the environment.
Global climate change is impacting people and wildlife everywhere. Our global economy and its overuse and maldistribution of resources, including fossil fuels, plays a crucial role in the climate crisis we are facing.
All over the world, poor people of color are bearing a major part of the negative effects of climate change, while still among the last to see any life improvements from the positive aspects of economic advancements. Massive loss of life (as just reported in a Harvard study about Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico), population migrations, devastations from resource extractions worldwide, assassinations of environmental advocates around the world--Sierra Club cannot be successful at this time in our history by concentrating only on our traditional concerns of parks and habitat, endangered species protections etc.
Sierra Club, and we right here in San Antonio, must lead the way in addressing the full spectrum of environmental crisis that we face. This crisis cannot be resolved without the involvement and equity considerations of all parts of our community.
Time for Pruitt and Zinke to go
Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke are doing their best to destroy the environmental protections that Sierra Club and other Americans have worked for over 100 years to develop, while behaving in highly unethical ways. Please join the Sierra Club and others in speaking out against their actions and calling for their impeachment.
by Terry Burns, M.D., Alamo Group Chair
Tioga Road: Yosemite National Park but not Yosemite Valley
Yosemite Valley is what many people think of when considering visiting this national park. Views of El Capitan and Half Dome. Lots of trails around the Valley with views of various falls. Spectacular scenery everywhere, just turn around and look up. But it is very busy much of the year and camping reservations can be hard to come by. Here's the park website and maps page.
Tioga Road
There is also Tioga Road which goes across the north side of the park west-east. Lots of hiking and camping opportunities and far less busy than the Valley. When I arrived here in September 2014 a fire in the Valley resulted in redoing all my plans (see the picture above). So I focused on what could be seen from Tioga Road.
Tioga Road usually opens in May due to snow accumulation, though in 2017 not till June 29; and usually closes in November (here's the open/close history). Here's an article on the road with a list of hikes.
Some good hikes
There is a nice loop trail around Lukens Lake, east of White Wolf campground 14 miles east from the Crane Flat junction. The view of Yosemite Valley to the southwest from Olmsted Point in the picture above is 28 miles to the east of the junction.
The trailheads for North Dome and Clouds Rest, which have great views of the Valley, are at 23 and 29 miles east respectively. Just east of the latter is Tenaya Lake, right beside the road. The development at Toulumne Meadows is 38 mi east. The Mono Pass trailhead is at 44 miles east (picture below). Tioga Pass, just short of 10,000' and the main reason why the road closes winters, is at 45 miles east. The intersection with US 385 is at 56 miles east.
The Pacific Crest and John Muir Trails go through Toulumne Meadows. The burgers at Toulumne Meadows Grill are legendary. Yep, pretty darn good, but some opinions may have been influenced by calorie deprivation incurred on the PCT and JMT.
There is a campground at Toulumne Meadows, and the trail to Elizabeth Lake leaves from the back of the campground (picture below). Also from Toulumne Meadows are hikes up and around Lembert Dome, to Cathedral Lakes and Cathedral Pass, and north on the PCT to Toulumne Falls and Glen Aulin. Here is the trails descriptions page.
We still aren't done with Tioga Road and Yosemite Valley. There are also the road to Glacier Point to the south, Wawona at the southwest corner, and Hetch Hetchy to the northwest. And those are just the areas accessible by road. Here is the park's info about the PCT and JMT, and the wilderness permits page.
by Kevin Hartley, Alamo Group Outings leader
No Such Thing as a Climate Plan with a Coal Plant
With ‘Dirty’ Deely’s retirement nearing, San Antonio’s CPS Energy hosting a hearing on keeping Spruce burning past 2040.
Lumbering through the Earth Day throngs at Woodlawn Lake in April, the soot-stained “coal monster” pleaded his case. Here were booths about solar energy, tables with native plants, and eager promoters of meat-free diets. CPS Energy, owner-operator of the City’s two coal plants, was even everywhere handing out trinkets and brochures.
But — in spite of the fact that the CPS Energy’s coal burning is responsible for sick families at home and public health crises worldwide thanks to climate disruption — no one was talking about coal. Except the shaggy coal monster, that is.
A personified ‘Dirty’ Deely read an official press statement:
To overheat the planet, I belch out 2.7 million tons of carbon dioxide and 74 tons of methane every year. To give you the asthma and heart attacks your medical community has come to rely on, my old parts belch out 4,175 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides and 19,844 tons sulfur dioxide each year. Then there’s that my dirty little secret: 256 kg of airborne lead (just a tiny spec can mess with your baby’s brain). In other words: I'm doing my job, I'm a coal plant!
When CPS Energy shifted to heavy reliance on coal power in the 1970s, it also began to flood the air with dark soot, heavy metals, and serious greenhouse pollution — the latter of which has been destabilizing of the planet’s life-supporting climate system while driving sickness at home.
It’s all in a day’s work, the monster insisted.
Yet, in spite of Deely’s reliable foulness, CPS Energy has promised to shutter the 40 year-old creature by year’s end. The utility, led then by Doyle Beneby, got a lot of favorable press out of the announcement.
“CPS Energy, the nation’s largest city-owned utility supplying both natural gas and electricity, wants to reduce its reliance on fossil-fueled generation and boost its use of renewable resources, such as wind and solar power, to 20 percent, or 1,500 megawatts, by 2020,” Inside Climate News wrote at the time.
Yet the push into renewable territory has slowed in recent years as the once rising star in clean energy has slacked off under its current leadership. Beneby spoke of $3 billion saved in neglected Deely retrofits that would be invested in solar and wind. But the utility has yet to raise its commitment to clean energy from its 20 percent goal a decade ago.
The coal monster was at Earth Day to cry foul over even that meager commitment.
Some got the joke that day. Others were more dubious. A man with an asthma inhaler ran up for a photo op and asked the man in the hairy, sooty gillie suit to pretend to strangle him.
The creature readily obliged. With 40 years of experience, choking folks is just muscle memory.
Monster in the closet
The effort by Climate Action SA, a climate justice coalition of dozens of members, was a guerrilla education campaign.
It was intended to place the burning question of coal power at the center of the City’s public climate action conversation. Since San Antonio Mayor Nirenberg announced in June 2017 that the the nation’s seventh largest city was at last prepared to tackle its first climate action and adaptation plan, the question of coal has been virtually MIA.
Even within the Climate Action & Adaptation Plan process, the significance of coal has also been underemphasized. Charts from the existing SA Sustainability Plan, displayed during the initial round of working meetings with the San Antonio Sustainability Office and frequent CPS Energy contractor Navigant Consulting, portrayed the chief carbon offenders as transportation and buildings. It was only the small print at the bottom of one slide that offered a “by the way”: half of the city’s full climate pollution is from CPS Energy.
Conversations across the various technical working groups have also failed to put coal and gas at the front of their work. (What would charge all those electric vehicles? It matters.)
To correct that oversight, Climate Action SA members will gather at City Hall on June 5th to release their goals for the San Antonio Climate Action & Adaptation Plan, goals that are intended meet the challenge of limiting global temperature rise to limit the extremity of climate chaos.
“This will be the first public discussion about what San Antonio’s greenhouse gas reduction goals should be,” said Public Citizen’s Kaiba White. “Significant and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are needed to preserve a livable climate. The easiest way to do that is to stop burning coal as soon as possible.”
Climate Goals Press Conference
Tuesday, June 5th
11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
San Antonio City Hall
100 Military Plaza, San Antonio, Texas 78205
The ambition of the international Paris Agreement that San Antonio is struggling to meet, two degrees or less of global warming, may seem small. Yet even this represents disaster for large parts of the globe.
And averting this will be extraordinarily difficult given the current deregulatory frenzy taking place in Washington, D.C., and Trump’s decision to pull the second-most-prolific climate polluter (i.e. us, now the only nation walking back on Paris) out of the deal.
Still the urgency of the situation demands moving beyond the paralysis that can come with despair. It demands a sober and aggressive response. Expect, as part of Climate Action SA’s recommendations, a call for the prioritization of investing in local communities that are most vulnerable to the acceleration of extreme weather already underway. Violence, we know with certainty, will only grow in the coming years.
Also on June 5th, Climate Action SA will host a Clean Energy for All Community Workshop. The event is expected to be the beginning of a campaign meant to bring community solar and energy justice to long neglected sectors of the city.
Clean Energy for All Community Workshop
Tuesday, June 5th
6 – 8:30 p.m.
Brick at Blue Star Arts Complex
108 Blue Star, San Antonio, Texas 78204
Nail in the coffin?
While San Antonio’s coal fleet is retracting, it is hardly disappearing.
Nearly a decade ago, community activists pushed back against millions of dollars of planned upgrades for Deely. They wanted the plant closed instead. As a result, CPS Energy pledged to close the two-unit plant by 2018. That promise quickly changed to “in” 2018. Now it looks like the major regional polluter will be burning straight through the heat of summer, the wrath of ozone season, and all the way to the end of December.
Less clear is the fate of the younger two-unit Spruce.
While the coal plants have been throttled back slightly as the utility has begun to burn more natural gas, the four units (two at Deely, two at the younger Spruce) still belch out massive amounts of pollution.
Deely, Spruce, and Braunig, the city’s largest gas plant, huddle together on the shores of Calaveras Lake south of town. All told, the complex belches out nearly 10 million metric tons of CO2 every year.
Additionally, the complex pumps out 670 tons of methane, 86 times as potent as CO2 when it comes to trapping the sun’s heat. On top of that is the 814 tons of nitrous oxide (300 times more powerful than CO2).
The less-used Deely is to blame for 2.77 million tons of CO2 annually, as least as of 2016, the most recent year for which data is available.
The money-losing Spruce has replaced Deely as San Antonio’s biggest polluter. It is responsible for 5.54 million tons of greenhouse pollution annually. With increased use, VH Braunig grew from 700,000 metric tons to 1.4 million metric tons of CO2 between 2010 and 2016.
Outside this hot zone of hardcore climate offenders come the region’s cement plants and landfills (and other fossil fools).
Related: San Antonio's 15 worst polluters
With all of this nastiness in motion, it was a strange sight indeed to see CPS CEO Paula Gold-Williams in March pull out a “flexible” vision of future power generation showing an expansion of natural gas and at least one of the Spruce units still burning coal in 2042 and possibly beyond.
While CPS Energy’s proposal envisions renewable energy additions, those additions are modest and don’t appear in any seriousness until the 2030s.
As with Deely years back, community groups rallied to decry the continued reliance on Spruce.
“It’s absurd to think that we should have any coal in our energy mix anywhere close to 2042,” Terry Burns, MD, chair of the Alamo Group of the Sierra Club, said at the time. “If CPS is at all serious about addressing climate change and the impact air pollution has on public health, all coal should be phased out over the next decade.”
Here are a few other voices weighing in on the matter:
But CPS Energy isn’t done.
The “flex” plan, they now insist, was just a conversation starter. The threat of coal being served up to future generations is to be treated as an aperitif meant to stimulate a desire for … more gas, perhaps? It’s unclear what purpose the supposed opening gambit served.
In any event, CPS Energy is taking their show on the road. Or, at least, they are holding a public hearing to take in the public’s opinion of their plan. If this follows past patterns, expect one line for the various chambers of commerce and another one for the rest of us.
Considering the enormity of the climate crisis, attendance just may be mandatory.
Author's note: All data are from the U.S. EPA Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory and Toxic Release Inventory (2016).
by Greg Harman, Sierra Club San Antonio Clean Energy Organizer
Outings: The Call of the Wild
Visit the Alamo Sierra Club Outings page on Meetup for detailed information about all of our upcoming Sierra Club Outings.
The Alamo Sierran Newsletter
Richard Alles, Editor
Published by The Alamo Group of the Sierra Club, P.O. Box 6443, San Antonio, TX 78209, AlamoSierraClub.org.
The Alamo Group is one of 13 regional groups within the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club.
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