Lobby Watch: Fracking Industry Gave Lawmakers $5.5 Million

The energy industry is the state's most generous to political candidates. No wonder lawmakers are flocking around bills to block local government restrictions on fracking operations. One pro-fracking bill counts more than a third of the House as its sponsors! 

Sen. Troy Fraser leads his chamber in his dependency on fossil-fuel funds. Fraser authored a leading fracking-protection bill, as well as other key bills servicing oil-and-gas interests. 

Using hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, Lobby Watch tracks $5.5 million in recent legislative hydrocarbon contributions from wellhead to war chest.

Austin American-Statesman: Hazardous New York waste to go to West Texas

A project to bury tons of contaminated Hudson River bottom amid the rock of West Texas, seemingly biblical in its scope, could make the state one of the largest receptacles for hazardous waste in the country. As early as May, Waste Control Specialists, a politically connected company that owns a waste dump near Andrews, about 30 miles north of Odessa, will receive the first shipments of toxic Hudson River sediment from upstate New York. Read the article at the Austin American-Statesman

Hazardous New York waste to go to West Texas

State could become a top dump for dangerous material.

By Asher Price
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, February 08, 2009

A project to bury tons of contaminated Hudson River bottom amid the rock of West Texas, seemingly biblical in its scope, could make the state one of the largest receptacles for hazardous waste in the country.

As early as May, Waste Control Specialists, a politically connected company that owns a waste dump near Andrews, about 30 miles north of Odessa, will receive the first shipments of toxic Hudson River sediment from upstate New York.

Under an agreement with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, General Electric will scoop up miles of soil laced with PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls. The EPA says GE's plants discharged as much as 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson from 1947 to 1977. PCBs were banned in the late 1970s.

Starting in the late spring, an 81-car train laden with the soil will leave New York for West Texas once a week until November. GE and the EPA will then evaluate the operation, and it could continue, with a train leaving every 2½ days, week in and week out, with a break in winter months, from 2010 until 2015.

The EPA and GE will decide whether the first phase of cleanup operations met standards for how many PCBs can get kicked up by dredging, met expectations for how efficiently the PCBs are removed and met limits on how many PCBs are left on the river bottom, said David Kluesner, an EPA spokesman. They will also decide whether the project is meeting quality of life standards in upstate New York regarding lighting, odor and local economic impact.

The GE deal and another agreement to import radioactive waste from Ohio, both involving Waste Control Specialists, could make Texas one of the top hazardous waste importers in the nation. The state now ranks 10th, according to 2007 EPA data, the most recent available. Ohio, Idaho and Pennsylvania were the top three. But with its wide-open spaces and business-friendly climate, Texas appears set to catch up.

Neither Waste Control Specialists nor GE is saying how much the disposal deal is worth, but EPA spokeswoman Kris Skopeck estimates the entire cleanup will cost as much as $750 million.

The EPA specified in its 2002 cleanup plan that the sediment had to be disposed of outside the Hudson Valley in an approved, permitted facility designed to accept PCB materials. The agency also said the material had to be transported by rail or barge (no trucks).

"The PCB materials could have gone to any number of facilities as close as western New York state or to Texas or several other facilities around the country. It was not EPA's decision where to dispose," Kluesner said.

The agency could have disallowed the choice had the facility not been in compliance or not been an approved site, he said.

But it was GE that put the disposal out to bid and made the choice, based on a number of factors, including transportation methods and cost, he said.

Waste Control Specialists "was chosen based on its strong environmental and safety records, proximity to rail and cost-effectiveness," said Mark Behan, a company spokesman.

Neil Carman, the clean air director for the Lone Star chapter of the Sierra Club, said he is drafting a letter to ask the EPA to put together an environmental impact statement — a document describing environmental effects — about the shipment of the waste.

He said the EPA could order that the PCBs be cleaned up using other kinds of technology rather than shipping the sediment to Texas.

"They don't need to be moving this stuff across the country," he said. "One accident and they have a disaster to pick up."

A spokesman for Waste Control Specialists said rail transporters do not want to disclose the exact train route for security reasons. The material is not expected to travel through Austin.

When it was awarded the contract by GE in late 2007, Waste Control Specialists said it was the company's largest disposal contract since its West Texas facility opened in 1997. The company says it has room for the estimated 2.2 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment from the Hudson River. That's enough hazardous waste to cover a football field, including end zones, to a depth of 1,031.25 feet — or almost twice the height of the Frost Bank Tower.

The oil town of Andrews, smack-dab in the Permian Basin, has long pinned its fortunes on the oil and gas industry. Other top employers, which contribute to the tax base and a local education foundation, include Waste Control Specialists and the Kirby Vacuum Cleaner Co. Recent activity at Waste Control Specialists to ready the site for the PCB soil and other waste has added about 80 jobs, said Wesley Burnett, director of the Andrews Economic Development Corp., whose board is appointed by city officials.

Thorough groundwater and soil tests around the disposal site, about 30 miles from Andrews, have led the town to "be very comfortable with it," he said. "We don't feel threatened."

Ted Dracos, a journalist who lives in Concan, about 20 miles north of Uvalde, and whose book about PCBs, "Biocidal," will be published next year by the University of California Press, said that they are "nasty, nasty critters" and worried that they could taint the Ogallala Aquifer, which stretches through the area, with "irreversible toxic contamination."

But regulators have said the site passes groundwater contamination tests.

Waste Control Specialists is owned by investor Harold Simmons, who was the third-largest single contributor to Gov. Rick Perry during the 2006 election cycle, donating $315,000, according to Texans for Public Justice, a nonprofit that tracks money in politics. Since 2001, Simmons' contributions to Perry have totaled more than $500,000.

Last year the company got the go-ahead from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, whose members are appointed by the governor, to take radioactive waste at its dump site.

A low-level radioactive waste dump in South Carolina closed to most states in 2008, opening the way for Texas to get a share of the lucrative market. (Transport and disposal of the PCB waste falls largely under federal jurisdiction.)

Meanwhile, Veolia Environmental Services, a French company, has asked the EPA for permission to import 40 million pounds of waste from Mexico for incineration at Port Arthur. Among the pollutants are PCBs.

Texas companies generated 13,272,307 tons of hazardous waste in 2007, much of it associated with the Gulf Coast's petrochemical industry. Most of the waste is disposed of in Texas by, among other methods, deep underground injection or incineration, but it is also shipped to other states.

asherprice@statesman.com; 445-3643

Austin American-Statesman: Do businesses pay for pollution?

By its own reckoning, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality conceives of the penalties it levies against polluters as a kind of schoolmarmish scold. All the commissioners were appointed by Gov. Rick Perry, who has cast himself as pro-business and has said that government regulations on emissions will lead to fewer jobs. In the 2006 election cycle, the last one for which complete numbers are available, Perry received $2.9 million from the mining, electric power, oil and gas, chemical, and waste management industries, according to an analysis by Texans for Public Justice, a group that tracks spending in politics. Read the article at the Austin American-Statesman

ENVIRONMENT

Do businesses pay for pollution?

Five years after being told to do more, Texas regulators still seen as lenient toward polluters.

By Asher Price
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, January 18, 2009

Five years after a state auditor determined that the state's main environmental regulatory and permitting office did little to penalize polluters, critics say shortcomings remain in making violators pay.

Even as they have toughened some rules and policies, the office's commissioners have bickered about others, leaving fundamental questions unanswered about how strictly the state should punish the pollution violations.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality still caps penalties on polluters at $10,000 for each violation per day, regardless of its severity. And it still hasn't decided whether a history of violations should warrant harsher penalties.

By its own reckoning, the commission conceives of the penalties it levies against polluters as a kind of schoolmarmish scold.

"Just as a teacher in a classroom uses many tools to enable students to learn, the TCEQ uses a broad range of tools to enable and require businesses and governments, large and small, to comply," reads its 2008 Enforcement Report.

Matt Baker, until recently head of enforcement at the state environmental office, said the commissioners continue to grapple with their enforcement role.

"The penalty policy we have today is not broken," Baker says. "The commissioners have the same goals in mind, and that's a clean environment. It's the approach you take to get there, and there are philosophical differences in how you get there. It's a balancing act, and how much enforcement you have, how big a penalty you have. It's really a philosophical question."

In some respects, changes to the state's enforcement policy have reaped results: Last year the state issued 1,624 penalties, the most since the mid-1980s, and assessed $16.9 million in fines. About $2 million was written off by Texas for prompt payment of penalties. The state actually will collect $10.1 million from violators, and the rest will be channeled by them into state-regulated environmental projects.

In California, which has among the toughest environmental laws in the nation, the Air Resources Board, one arm of the state's environmental agency, collected $29.85 million in penalties in 2007, according to the most recent available information. Louisiana collected nearly $4.1 million in fines in 2007 and directed polluters to pay nearly $5.9 million into environmental projects.

In Texas, which has the largest petrochemical complex in the world, 49 percent of penalties were directed to small businesses and 38 percent to large ones, according to the environmental commission's latest enforcement report.

A Texas example

The recent pollution history of prominent Texas company Exxon Mobil Corp. helps put the numbers in perspective.

On a January day nearly three years ago, the three-member Texas Commission on Environmental Quality told Exxon Mobil that it owed $8,662 for a single pollution episode. Investigators had found that the company had failed to obtain permits and to record unauthorized emissions, according to state records.

Despite the fines, Exxon Mobil's Harris County chemical plants violated pollution rules at least nine times over the rest of 2006, belching into the air tons of carbon monoxide, smog-related chemicals and carcinogens. One of the emissions violations, according to state records, ran 201 hours.

The total bill for those penalties came to $146,450.

But the violations kept occurring. In 2007 the firm was fined 10 separate times to the tune of $247,066 — an incidental cost, critics say, for a corporation that had $11.66 billion of profit in the final three months of that year, or $264,000 every three minutes.

"You hope that you hold a company accountable for violating the law with a certain threat of a high penalty that will deter the company from violating the law in the first place, or deter them from doing it again," said Tom McGarity , an environmental law professor at the University of Texas. "But you figure they have written the penalty into the cost of doing business. It costs more to do something about it, to remedy the problem."

In a statement, Russ Roberts, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, said: "We have made significant improvements on environmental performance and remain committed to continuing to reduce emissions. At the same time, we see an increase in TCEQ enforcement activities toward the same end. We look forward to continuing our cooperative relationship with the agency as we accomplish our environmental goals."

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has long functioned as a paradox.

On the one hand, it sports a staff of 2,900, many of them experts in fields as far-ranging as nuclear waste disposal and hydrogeology, and a budget of $566 million.

On the other hand, its mission statement explicitly ties environmental interests to business ones: "The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality strives to protect our state's human and natural resources consistent with sustainable economic development," the statement says.

Its top leaders have left the agency to lobby for some of the very industries it regulates, and commissioners have not followed recommendations by administrative law judges and its own office of public interest counsel to halt coal-fired power plants. (Critics say their emissions are harmful.)

Environmentalists have long felt the agency was too cozy with the businesses it was meant to oversee; state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso , calls it a "lapdog for industry."

"Politicians represent their districts and do what they have to do," commission Chairman H.S. Buddy Garcia responded. "We follow the law and try to be as straightforward as possible, using common sense and science."

At least one of the commissioners has voiced skepticism about issues such as mankind's role in global warming.

Easy on businesses?

All the commissioners were appointed by Gov. Rick Perry, who has cast himself as pro-business and has said that government regulations on emissions will lead to fewer jobs.

In the 2006 election cycle, the last one for which complete numbers are available, Perry received $2.9 million from the mining, electric power, oil and gas, chemical, and waste management industries, according to an analysis by Texans for Public Justice, a group that tracks spending in politics.

Most of that money, nearly $2 million, came from oil and gas interests.

The business-friendly commission was pushed to act after a damning December 2003 report in which the state auditor found that the agency had been slow to collect fines and was not hard enough on polluters, focusing too much on voluntary compliance instead of enforcement.

The auditor's office got involved shortly after the national environmental advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund released a report with similar conclusions.

In the five years since the audit, the environmental commission has revamped its enforcement process.

Baker says collection rates are at 90 percent, the state works faster than ever to penalize polluters (down to 226 days from 329 days for cases not litigated) and, starting in 2007, the agency started adding private economic benefit realized by the violator into its penalty calculations.

"It's a big wake-up call," Baker said. "People are realizing a significant amount of dollars are being pulled from their back pocket."

In 2006, concerned about the amount of penalty money that had been unpaid — an estimated $5 million of the $135 million invoiced by the agency in fiscal year 2005 was still outstanding in 2006 — the environmental agency said it would not renew permits, registrations, certifications or licenses to individuals with a delinquent penalty or fee.

But the agency has yet to decide how to punish inveterate polluters, companies like Exxon Mobil and other chemical companies that operate on the Gulf Coast, one of the most polluted regions in the U.S..

"Some states are more likely to negotiate a settlement (with polluters), or give them more time to come into compliance, and protect them from citizen suits, and that fairly typifies" the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said Victor Flatt, a professor of law at the University of Houston who studies how states punish polluters.

High fines and tough enforcement can be a moneymaker for the state, Flatt said.

"A lot of agencies get money from their enforcement fines," he said. "It pays for itself, or can pay for itself. Texas is missing out on that."

"Higher per capita spending by states on environmental enforcement programs," write Flatt and other authors in a draft of an article titled "Environmental Enforcement in Dire Straits," "is strongly associated with better program compliance, and thus, presumably better environmental results."

The issues were thrown into relief at a work session in May, when Commissioners Larry Soward and Bryan Shaw butted heads over the stiffness of penalties. Currently, polluters pay up to $10,000 per violation per day.

"That's a business decision, and it's cheaper to violate than to comply," Soward said at the work session. "Our penalties should mean something."

"If you got a company that discharges lead, mercury, arsenic, carbon monoxide and particulate matter, and you say we're going to lump all those together and only pay a $10,000 fine, that's an easy decision for that company to say, 'I'll pay that fine instead of pay for all of those.' "

Shaw took a different tack: "We don't need to be suggesting the industry is polluting and spewing on purpose. We need to find ways to encourage them to be proactive."

It had been the sixth time the commissioners discussed the issue, but unable to make a decision they decided to schedule at least one more work session in 2008 to revisit the policy. Emblematic of the slog to punish polluters, the meeting was eventually rescheduled for this year.

Ways to reduce fines

Fines by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, levied against everyone from the corner dry-cleaning business to Exxon Mobil, led to the elimination or reduction of 8.3 million pounds of pollution at a cost of $521 million to violators for things like the retrofitting of plants with new equipment, according to the agency's 2008 Enforcement Report.

But not all the $16.9 million in penalties will end up in state coffers.

Exxon Mobil, like many other companies that violate state environmental laws — Texas Petrochemicals, for one, racked up nine citations worth $101,818 during the first eight months of 2008 — can earn a 20 percent break on penalties if the case is settled without a contest.

The environmental commission, which says it does not give the penalty reduction to its worst violators, says the strategy is intended to save the state the cost and hassle of slogging through the court system. The policy applies to companies large and small.

Polluters can also pay up to half their penalties with cleanups of abandoned illegal dump sites; asbestos abatement; erosion control; plugging abandoned wells; provision of drinking water for colonias; placement of ozone monitoring equipment in schools; or provision of emergency equipment in communities. (Nonprofits and local governments can pay entire penalties in these sorts of cleanups.)

Violators facing large fines almost always opt to participate in cleanups.

In a client advisory report last summer, lawyers for corporate law firm Frost Brown Todd wrote that the projects save polluters the cost of trial, earn them credit with regulators for projects they might have done anyway, improve a company's compliance status and reduce the risk of future enforcement actions.

"It always turns out to be cheaper for the company, or they wouldn't do it," said McGarity, the UT law professor.

Penalty policy has long been a complicated issue for the agency, said state Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, who once served on the Air Control Board, a predecessor to the environmental commission.

"The history has been the agency has barked far more than it has ever bitten," he said.

asherprice@statesman.com;
445-3643

Health, Consumer & Safety Advocates Cite Dangers If 'Entergy' Ruling Stands

Leaders from Texas consumer, labor, worker-safety and corporate-accountability organizations warned of dangerous consequences for Texas’ workers and communities if the Texas Supreme Court’s reckless ‘Entergy’ ruling is not reversed by either the Court or the Legislature. Under growing pressure from safety advocates, editorial writers, and legislators who insist the Texas Supreme Court overstepped its bounds in its 2007 ruling in Entergy v Summers, the court held a rare rehearing today in Dallas.

Health, Consumer & Safety Advocates
Cite Dangers If 'Entergy' Ruling Stands

Groups Renew Call for Legislative Action If High Court Fails to Restore Accountability

For Immediate Release:	For More Information Contact:
October 16, 2008 Download PDF	Ed Sills, AFL-CIO, 512-477-6195 Alex Winslow, Texas Watch, 512-381-1111 Glenn Smith, Texas Progress Council, 512-322-0700 Craig McDonald, Texans for Public Justice, 512-472-9770

Dallas: Leaders from Texas consumer, labor, worker-safety and corporate-accountability organizations warned of dangerous consequences for Texas’ workers and communities if the Texas Supreme Court’s reckless ‘Entergy’ ruling is not reversed by either the Court or the Legislature. Under growing pressure from safety advocates, editorial writers, and legislators who insist the Texas Supreme Court overstepped its bounds in its 2007 ruling in Entergy v Summers, the court held a rare rehearing today in Dallas.

Texas safety advocates contend the Entergy ruling harms Texas communities and workers by shielding the owners of large industrial plants from accountability for injuries to contract workers employed at dangerous workplaces. Under the Entergy ruling, for example, the families of workers killed or injured in the 2005 BP explosion in Texas City would have been barred from pursuing legal claims in Texas courts. Those claims exposed unsafe plant practices, prompted new safety procedures and compensated victims of a preventable disaster. Absent such courtroom accountability, workers and communities will not be safe.

“The Texas Supreme Court’s do-over in the Entergy v. Summers case will have a direct impact on worker safety,” Texas AFL-CIO President Becky Moeller said. “Continuing the legal principle that has served Texas well for years will encourage companies to emphasize safety in dangerous workplaces. Reverting to the result reached in the first Entergy opinion would ‘fix’ what’s not broken and encourage companies to make new calculations of the cost of safety v. the risk of injury or death. As we have seen so many times, it is both cheaper and better business practice to place worker safety first, rather than game the system in a way that compromises safety.”

“Ignoring the law, legal precedent and the intent of the Legislature in the Entergy case, the Texas Supreme Court made the workplace in Texas even more dangerous,” said Glenn Smith, co-founder of the Texas Progress Council. “The ruling destroyed all notions of accountability, a Texas value if ever there was one. When no one is accountable, no one is safe. Let's hope the court restores accountability by reversing its earlier opinion."

“The Texas Supreme Court, once again, got it wrong in the Entergy decision on the facts and on the law,” said Alex Winslow, Executive Director of Texas Watch. “The ruling eliminates accountability and leaves us all more vulnerable. If the court doesn’t reverse this ruling, the legislature will be left to clean up the mess.”

“The court’s unanimous Entergy ruling is a reckless deregulation of Texas workplaces,” said Craig McDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice. “It will result in more accidents, more injuries and more preventable deaths. This is the ultimate example of an activist court legislating from the bench. The high court rewrote the law to benefit the oil, gas and chemical giants that will no longer be accountable to the public or to Texas courts.”

Link to Press Release from Rep. Craig Eiland, Sens. Jeff Wentworth & Rodney Ellis

Link to TPJ Fact Sheet on contributions to Supreme Court from Energy & Chemical Industry Donors

The Texas Observer: Laura Miller's Carbon Admission

In a bizarre turn of the revolving door, a power company with a right-wing pedigree has hired former Dallas Mayor Laura Miller to promote its bid to build a coal-gasification plant in Texas. Last January, Summit Power Group Inc.-headed by a lion of the Christian right best known for opposing environmental regulation-started paying Miller to promote "clean" coal. In 2006 then-Mayor Miller led the charge against TXU Corp.'s plans to build 11 new dirty-coal plants in Texas. The role reversal is a story that Miller herself might have relished in her former life as a muckraking reporter. Read the article at the Texas Observer

Laura Miller's Carbon Admission

by Andrew Wheat|June 13, 2008
TEXAS OBSERVER

In a bizarre turn of the revolving door, a power company with a right-wing pedigree has hired former Dallas Mayor Laura Miller to promote its bid to build a coal-gasification plant in Texas. Last January, Summit Power Group Inc.-headed by a lion of the Christian right best known for opposing environmental regulation-started paying Miller to promote "clean" coal. In 2006 then-Mayor Miller led the charge against TXU Corp.'s plans to build 11 new dirty-coal plants in Texas. The role reversal is a story that Miller herself might have relished in her former life as a muckraking reporter.

Miller's new boss at Summit Power is an unlikely prophet of "clean coal." Summit Chairman Donald Paul Hodel did stints as President Ronald Reagan's energy secretary and interior secretary. He is perhaps best known for opposing a ban on aerosol chlorofluorocarbons to protect the Earth's ozone layer. At the time, the Washington Post reported that Hodel urged people to don hats, sunscreen and dark glasses instead. Despite Hodel's insistence that he never said any such thing, the apocryphal quote has dogged him for decades.

Now Hodel seeks to build a coal-gasification plant that would remove half of the global-warming emissions it produces. Oddly, the Arizona-based Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change lists Hodel as a science adviser. The center, a think tank, touts the planetary advantages of warmer climates, and questions alleged links between CO2 emissions and global warming. It has received funding from oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. Hodel has been president of James Dobson's Focus on the Family and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition. His wife, Barbara, sits on the board of Virginia-based Patrick Henry College, which caters to home-schooled evangelicals (and is unrivaled at placing interns in the current White House). Another member of Patrick Henry's board is Texas Christian-right godfather James Leininger, who has spent millions of dollars in Austin promoting school vouchers, protecting fetuses, and battling with plaintiff attorneys over liability laws.

By contrast, Miller's spouse, Steve Wolens, is a former state lawmaker and plaintiffs' attorney who is often mentioned as a Democratic candidate for statewide office. During his last legislative session in 2003, this liberal Democrat scored a lowly 19 percent on key conservative votes tabulated by the Dallas-based Heritage Alliance. His wife seemed to cement her liberal bona fides in 2006, when she co-founded the Texas Clean Air Cities Coalition. Back then, Miller warned communities surrounding the proposed coal plants that TXU was "purposely misleading the public in order to build old-technology coal plants the cheapest way possible." When investment firms KKR & Co. and TPG Capital (formerly Texas Pacific Group) successfully sought to take over TXU in early 2007, some environmental groups endorsed the buyers' pledge to cancel all but three of the proposed plants. Not so Miller, who stood her ground, pointing out that just two of the surviving plants would spew more mercury emissions than all of the canceled ones put together. "Environmental Defense blessed those two stacks when they don't have the authority to do that," she said at the time. (Environmental Defense Fund's Texas director, Jim Marston, chairs the nonprofit board that publishes the Observer.)

A year after Miller lambasted TXU's outdated technology and told the company that "carbon dioxide is a huge, huge issue for us," Summit hired the ex-mayor to promote a proposed coal-gasification plant that will sequester at most 60 percent of its CO2 emissions. Asked about coal-gasification technologies that target 90 percent of CO2 emissions, Miller told the Observer, "You can't capture more than 60 percent and have it be [economically] viable."

A Florida-based consulting engineer who has worked for power companies and environmentalists concurred. While technology exists to remove 90 percent of a plant's CO2, said Richard Furman, 60 percent is "becoming the consensus of what is cost effective." Thereafter, the cost of removing CO2 escalates to the point that you would be better off spending the additional money on plants with no CO2 controls, Furman said. Some of Miller's allies in the TXU fight feel betrayed. "No project should move forward right now that adds fuel to the global-warming fire," said Karen Hadden, who heads the Austin-based Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition. Hadden advocates solar and wind power as more cost-effective alternatives.

"The best way to fight dirty coal plants is to build clean ones," Miller said. She signed on as Summit's Texas projects director because the company was willing to privately finance a coal-gasification plant with carbon sequestration. Once that is demonstrated, Miller said, the next challenge will be achieving higher rates of CO2 sequestration. Asked why a man who appears to question the link between CO2 and global warming would build a CO2 sequestering plant, Miller said Hodel "is a true believer in the United States not being dependent on other countries for energy." Asked if she ever discusses fetuses with the former Christian Coalition president, Miller said, "We talk about coal."

In a written statement to the Observer, Hodel acknowledged opposing the 1980s ban on chlorfluorocarbons based on cost-benefit analyses that "I thought were totally speculative." He said the Washington Post relied on anonymous sources to falsely attribute the apocryphal sunscreen quote to him. Although he said he was unaware that the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change claims him as a science adviser, Hodel said the group does "interesting work" on "some of the benefits of having increased CO2 in the atmosphere." He added, "Coal gasification is a vastly cleaner use of coal than burning it, whether you capture the carbon or not. Whether global warming is caused by human activity is not the issue. What matters is that an increasing number of very influential people around the globe believe this to be a fact."

Summit, based in Poulsbo, Washington, announced its coal-gasification plans at a crucial time. Texas Gov. Rick Perry put up $21 million in cash and $240 million in tax credits last year to lure to Texas an experimental coal-gasification plant that would screen out toxic emissions and global-warming gases. The U.S. Department of Energy pledged to finance most of the $2 billion plant, with additional funding from the so-called FutureGen Alliance of coal and power companies (including TXU successor Luminant Energy Co.). Texas promoted two potential DOE sites: one between Waco and Lufkin, and the other outside Odessa. Then DOE scrapped these plans early this year, arguing that it is more efficient to fund carbon-dioxide removal at coal-gasification plants being pursued by private companies across the country.

When Summit subsequently announced its intent to build a coal-gasification plant in Texas, Midland-Odessa officials promoted their area as an ideal site. Part of their pitch is that the carbon dioxide stripped from the coal can be sold to local energy companies, which use CO2 gas to force more oil and gas out of wells. Summit said its gasification plant will generate five times more energy than the one DOE planned to build. It also will do a poorer job of controlling CO2 (removing 50 to 60 percent of the gas, compared with DOE's target of 90 percent). Summit builds power plants but does not operate them. Miller declined to identify the client behind this project, which she said would open in 2013 at the earliest.

One Summit co-founder already boasts West Texas business connections. Earl Gjelde-a top Hodel aide in the Reagan years-sat on the board of Didax Inc. during the 1990s. Former CIA technology chief William Bowers founded this evangelical Internet company in Virginia in 1993. After dotcoms bombed, Texas oil fortunes invested in the remains. The Texans remade the company in their own image in 2002. They sold its core Internet assets to evangelical radio company Salem Communications Corp. (where Hodel is a director), transplanted the company to Midland, and renamed it Amen Properties Inc. Amen invests in commercial properties and energy wells, and founded electricity retailer W Power & Light (see, "Low Wattage Regulators," page 4). Despite this radical makeover, Amen retained Didax's evangelical bylaws, which require employees and directors to believe in such things as Jesus' virgin birth and the Bible as God's infallible revelation.

Now Earl Gjelde and Donald Hodel are paying Laura Miller to promote a coal-gasification plant. While it would mark a huge improvement over Texas' existing dirty-coal plants, the proposed plant falls short of the best possible technology to counter global warming. Looks like those hats, shades, and sunscreen could come in handy after all.

Award-winning Observer columnist Andrew Wheat is research director for Texans for Public Justice.

Fort Worth Weekly: Hear No Evil, Smell No Evil

TXU's influence with state government is strong, thanks to a massive long-term lobbying effort. In early 2007, for example, TXU spent more on lobbying than any company in Texas except AT&T, according to the political watchdog group Texans for Public Justice. Their political influence, activists say, affects not only the state's treatment of emissions, but actions like approval of the recent sale of TXU to new owners, construction of the new coal plants, and--just as seriously--the levels of pollution that continue to be permitted from some of TXU's older plants. Read the article at the Fort Worth Weekly

Hear No Evil, Smell No Evil

State regulators don't seem worried about TXU's lapses in reporting power plant pollution.
By JOAQUIN SAPIEN, Data analysis by Ben Welsh
FORT WORTH WEEKLY

Rusk County - A gentle twilight pink stretches across the sky, touching the waters of Martin Creek Lake. The still air, smelling only of East Texas pines, brings the faint sounds of wildlife in the surrounding woods. Smog and traffic seem much farther away than the 145-mile drive to Dallas.

But like so many still-idyllic scenes in Texas in the 21st century, this one is pristine only from a certain camera angle and maybe only when the wind blows a certain way. Turn to the west, and three enormous smokestacks loom up, towering over jet-black pyramids of coal, products of the strip-mining that TXU helps facilitate throughout the state.

The draglines and smokestacks serve the Martin Lake Steam Electric Station, one of four coal-fired power plants operated by TXU, the vast utility that is the leading energy producer in the leading energy-using state in the country.

One night in October 2003, in the space of three hours, while the 94,000-plus inhabitants of Tyler slept nearby, the Martin Lake plant pumped more than 150,000 pounds of sulfur dioxide into the East Texas air. The pollution was more than eight times the plant's hourly emissions limit under federal regulations. Sulfur dioxide air pollution, as environmentalists, regulators, and TXU officials have known for many years, helps trigger asthma attacks and other respiratory diseases.

Like many power plants, the Martin Lake plant is fitted with electronic sensors that monitor smokestack emissions, including sulfur dioxide, and send hourly measurements to the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Although the EPA keeps records, it relies on state agencies to enforce federal air pollution standards. In Texas, state law requires companies to file deviation reports to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality when a power plant exceeds federal emissions limits.

After the October 2003 event, TXU reported the excess emissions to TCEQ. But a comparison between EPA and TCEQ records shows that the company gave a far lower emissions figure to state officials than the smokestack monitor registered. Until reporters started raising questions nearly a year ago, TCEQ officials said they had no idea of the extent of TXU's emissions.

If the October 2003 sulfur release were an isolated incident, perhaps Texas' air-breathing citizens downwind of Martin Lake and TXU's other plants might not have that much to worry about. But a three-month review of federal and state records by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit journalism organization, suggests otherwise. The review, encompassing 25 million data entries spanning 10 years, shows that between 1997 and 2006, TXU's coal-fired plants exceeded federal emission limits nearly 650 times, spewing more than 1.3 million pounds of excess sulfur dioxide into the Texas air.

A TCEQ spokesman called TXU's action "inaccurate reporting." Contacted about the reports, TXU representatives declined to explain, saying the company prefers to let its submissions to state and federal agencies stand on their own merits.

But the company insisted that its environmental record is a good one. TXU spokesman Tom Kleckner said coal-fired power plants sometimes exceed standard emissions levels when a unit is shutting down, starting up, or is in an "upset condition" caused by maintenance. "At times the plants can also experience an exceedance in the course of providing safe working conditions for the workers repairing equipment. While these examples are exceedances, they are not compliance issues," he wrote in an e-mail.

If companies knowingly provide false reports, they could potentially face costly fines under the federal Clean Air Act. "If TXU deliberately misled the agency, that is criminal, really," said Eric Schaeffer, former head of the EPA's Office of Civil Enforcement, who now runs the watchdog Environmental Integrity Project in Washington, D.C.

Equally important, Schaeffer said, if the state was aware that TXU was exceeding emission limits, it could have forced the utility to install improved pollution control technology at its plants.

But here is what really happened as a result of the company's inaccurate reporting: Nothing. In the first place, TCEQ allowed utilities to "self-report" such emission violations and has no system for checking the EPA emission logs, though they are readily available. And when TXU did accurately report its emission overages from coal-fired plants to the state agency, it was never fined, despite the fact that some plants went over the line hundreds of times.

In fact, over the past 10 years, while North Texas governments wrestled with increasingly serious air pollution and the prospect of EPA sanctions, TXU was penalized only once for an air quality violation--a single fine of $720, according to TCEQ's penalty-enforcement records.

Faced with some of the dirtiest air in the country and with what critics say is lax enforcement by the state, Texas has become a place where key air pollution controls in many cases have come only as a result of lobbying and lawsuits filed by citizen groups. Major business leaders and big-city mayors in recent years have joined forces to try to convince the state to enforce clean air laws. And a broad coalition of Texas citizens who have grown increasingly skeptical of coal-based power and the state's ability to protect their health are appealing the state permits granted to two planned TXU coal-burners.

They have a formidable opponent: TXU's influence with state government is strong, thanks to a massive long-term lobbying effort. In early 2007, for example, TXU spent more on lobbying than any company in Texas except AT&T, according to the political watchdog group Texans for Public Justice. Their political influence, activists say, affects not only the state's treatment of emissions, but actions like approval of the recent sale of TXU to new owners, construction of the new coal plants, and--just as seriously--the levels of pollution that continue to be permitted from some of TXU's older plants.

While environmentalists and utility officials fight over emission levels and economic impacts, the personal toll of air pollution is brought home every day to families like Robert and Carol Taylor of Freestone County, who live just downwind of a TXU coal-burner and whose grandson Jesse Hanson suffers from asthma so serious that he has become a well-known figure in the local hospital emergency room.

"There are days when the pollution is so bad that it blocks out the sun," Carol Taylor said. And that's why she and her family members have joined the fight to change things in Texas.

The living room table in the Taylors' double-wide trailer is covered with medical equipment's prescription bottles, a shoebox-sized breathing machine called a nebulizer, the ever-present handheld plastic inhaler that Jesse carries at all times. A 3-foot-tall steel oxygen tank and mask stand nearby, for jumpstarting his breathing if the other equipment can't do the job.

There are times when even the oxygen tank isn't enough to deal with his asthma. "I have had to carry him out of school to take him to the emergency room dozens of times," said Robert. He knows many local police officers by name because of all the times he's called to warn them that he will be speeding down the highway to get his grandson to the nearest hospital, 35 miles away in Palestine. "During the drive he is panting, sweating, and gasping for air, because he just cannot breathe," Robert said.

The Taylors are convinced that 10-year-old Jesse's severe asthma is closely linked to power plant emissions. When the pollution from the TXU plant 15 miles away is at its worst, "I close the windows and lock the doors so that it doesn't get into the house," Carol Taylor said. The Taylors say that Jesse's asthma attacks become more frequent and more intense when the power plant emissions are heaviest and that many other kids in his class also have breathing problems. "In the winter time you can see the smoke wafting right over our house," Carol said.

Volumes of scientific evidence show that sulfur dioxide and other air pollutants released by power plants are closely linked to a variety of respiratory ailments. When particulate matter, or soot, which includes sulfur dioxide, becomes lodged in the lungs, it constricts breathing, triggers asthma attacks, and can exacerbate respiratory disease.

Prominent doctors in the east Texas medical community are concerned that TCEQ may have failed to force TXU to adhere to its federal emissions limits. "The tools I have to help people suffering from chest disease and respiratory ailments are fairly limited, and if they [TCEQ] are letting polluters exceed their limits, then they are counteracting whatwe are trying do here, as physicians," said Dr. David Coultas, a pulmonologist at the University of Texas Health Center at Tyler, one of the nation's most prestigious lung and chest disease research institutions, located about 25 miles west of Martin Lake. He said many of his patients complain that their symptoms are intensified on days when air pollution is particularly bad.

Childhood asthma affected about 3 percent of the population in the 1960s, but that figure has climbed above 9 percent, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control. In Fort Worth, a 2003 city health department survey found that asthma rates here were more than double the statewide average and even higher for children ("Ill Winds," June 8, 2005, Fort Worth Weekly).

The facility that plays such an unpleasant role in the life of the Taylor household-- and in Fort Worth's pollution rates and ozone alert days--is Big Brown, a TXU power plant that was making news in Texas long before its Thoroughbred namesake won the first two legs of the Triple Crown this spring. Located just off I-45 about 120 miles southeast of Fort Worth, Big Brown shares with Martin Lake the dubious distinction of having been named by the Environmental Integrity Project as one of the worst-polluting coal-fired plants in the country, not just for sulfur dioxide, but also for carbon, which affects global warming, and nitrogen oxide, which contributes to smog, one of the most serious air pollution problems in North Texas.

In the late 1960s, TXU lobbied successfully to get permits for the Big Brown plant approved just under the wire before passage of the Clean Air Act raised the standards on power plant emissions. Because it was grandfathered under the old rules, Big Brown is allowed to emit sulfur dioxide at more than twice the rate of its newer counterparts. Mostly, it stays within those emissions limits. But if it were subjected to the same rules that govern Martin Lake's pollution, Big Brown would be breaking the rules virtually all year long.

In all, 19 coal-fired power plants currently operate in Texas, including the four owned by TXU. Texas has more plants on the list of top carbon dioxide polluters than any other state, and three of the five plants on the list are owned by TXU. According to 2005 figures from the federal government, Texas emits more carbon dioxide than any other state in the country -- 70 percent more than California, the next highest state.

It's those kinds of facts and figures, along with the suffering of kids like Jesse Hanson, that convinced a coalition of environmental groups to appeal the granting of permits for two TXU coal-burning plants at a site called Oak Grove in Robertson County, which stands to threaten air quality in Austin and the Metroplex, and to fight Gov. Rick Perry's fast-tracking of the TXU plant permits.

Neil Carman, air program director for the Texas chapter of the Sierra Club, worked as a TCEQ investigator for 12 years. He believes the Center's findings--the discrepancies in TXU's excess emission reports and the lack of enforcement by TCEQ-- provide a missing piece of TXU's environmental record and should be considered during the citizen appeal against Oak Grove.

Schaeffer, the former EPA official, said the findings show the need for TCEQ--and the legislature--to rethink whether TCEQ's self-reporting system actually works.

As the battle between TXU and the environmental community over proposed new power plants wore on, the Center for Public Integrity was filing dozens of requests under state and federal public information laws, for hourly emissions records and enforcement reports in Texas.

In the summer of 2005, TXU had originally proposed to build a whopping 11 new coal-fired power plant units across Texas. The proposal caused an uproar, with citizens ranging from ranchers to businesspeople turning out to voice their objections in hearings and demonstrations. Some were so vehemently opposed to the plan that they took part in a hunger strike in front of the Texas statehouse. But Gov. Perry, a major recipient of TXU political support, moved to put the permits on a fast track, shortening the period for hearings and other public input.

The battle took a surprising turn in February 2007 when two private equity groups, the Texas Pacific Group and Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts, bought out TXU and announced plans to reduce the construction agenda from 11 to three new plants. The change was hailed by many in the Texas environmental community as a victory, but some remain concerned about the pollution potential of the three remaining plants.

State administrative law judges recommended that TXU's permit applications for two of the three remaining plants, both located at Oak Grove, be denied because the company had failed to prove that its proposed emission controls would work properly.

The TCEQ board, however, overrode that recommendation in June 2007 and approved the two permits. Although the Oak Grove permits are being appealed in court, the plants are now under construction.

In making that decision, the TCEQ commissioners cited the agency's ability to enforce federal emissions limits. "I think the permits are strong. And to the applicants, if you can't meet these limits, then you can't operate," said TCEQ Commissioner Buddy Garcia after the approval. But the records obtained by the Center raise questions about both TXU's environmental record and TCEQ's own enforcement record--questions not addressed in the hearings process.

In an e-mail, TCEQ spokeswoman Daphne McMurrer wrote that the agency challenges a report submitted by a power plant operator only if conflicting information is presented to TCEQ staff. And staffers themselves do not check the hourly emission records against what the company reports to TCEQ, even though the records are easily accessible on the EPA web site.

And so, in 2003, when TXU reported to the state agency that its Martin Lake plant had released twice as much sulfur dioxide on Oct. 20 as allowed, TCEQ failed to look at the EPA records and find out that the actual release was more than eight times the legal limit. And TCEQ levied no fines or other penalties against TXU for what it did report.

In her e-mail, McMurrer attributed the disparity between what TXU reported for that date and what is in their own records to "inaccurate reporting by the company." She expressed confidence that the potential penalties associated with inaccurate reporting provide enough incentive to keep polluters honest, but she acknowledged that TXU was never subjected to such a penalty for its underreporting.

Dr. Jeffrey Levin, an occupational health expert based at the UT Health Center at Tyler, said that the new data on the company's emissions should be incorporated into any further review of TXU that may result as part of the appeal against construction of the plants at Oak Grove. "If you [TXU] are one to exceed what your permit says you are able to do and you do that without particular concern, then I think as a society we should look at that in the future and decide whether or not we want to grant that authority again," said Levin.

The discrepancies between TXU's state and federal emission reports also skew the record on the utility's compliance history, say activists, as do time limits on a company's record. TCEQ rules dictate that only the last five years of a company's pollution record can be considered in the permitting process. "It's pretty outrageous that a company's environmental record can be wiped clean after five years," said Carman, of the Sierra Club.

Although TXU filed reports that the state now calls inaccurate, it is questionable whether the company would have been fined if TCEQ had known the truth about its pollution levels. When TXU did tell TCEQ it had surpassed its permitted limits, the state agency used a controversial loophole in Texas state law--since declared illegal by the EPA--that allowed for increased levels of pollutants under certain circumstances.

In March 2003, environmental groups lodged a series of complaints in the Federal Register, one of which claimed that the loophole was illegal and allowed TCEQ to avoid proper enforcement of the federal Clean Air Act. EPA agreed with the environmental groups and gave TCEQ a deadline by which the state agency either had to revise the rule or allow it to expire. TCEQ never revised the rule, and it expired in 2006.

During the 10 years before the loophole expired, TXU put more than 1.3 million pounds of excess sulfur dioxide into the Texas atmosphere with no regulatory repercussions. More than 1 million pounds of it came from one plant--Martin Lake. Most of the time, the excess would have been marginal, but not on days like Oct. 20, 2003.

Short-term exposures to such spikes in air pollution can be harmful to human health, says former EPA enforcement chief Schaeffer. "Its like being pulled over for driving 150 miles per hour in a school zone, and you say to a cop that 99 percent of the time you are within the speed limit. You would be handcuffed, and the cop would laugh."

Perhaps more importantly, TCEQ's failure to act may have denied Texans a chance to force utility officials to clean up their act long-term, Schaeffer said. The excess emissions and threats of fines could have been used to induce TXU to install better air-scrubbing equipment on its dirtiest plants, he noted.

Carman blames TXU's record on lax enforcement by state authorities. "They are trying to pass the buck on to TXU, and I think that is bogus," the Sierra Club official said. When he was a TCEQ employee, he said, he was trained to make sure that polluters accurately reported their emissions. "These people are on the front lines of air enforcement," he said. "What the heck are they doing?"

TCEQ's McMurrer, in her e-mail, also pointed out that citizens can register complaints about air pollution through the TCEQ hotline and web site and that citizens can also challenge the accuracy of utility air pollution reports. But environmentalists counter that it's irresponsible for TCEQ to say it will question a utility's emission report only if someone in the general public--rather than TCEQ's own staff--presents evidence to challenge company reports.

Environmentalists said average citizens stand little chance of being able to determine whether a power plant is exceeding its pollution permit or to evaluate reports submitted by power plant operators. "It's a dereliction of duty for TCEQ to rely on citizens to do their dirty work," said Ilan Levin, a Texas-based environmental lawyer who works for Schaeffer's Environmental Integrity Project.

TXU was by no means the only polluter given a free pass by TCEQ. The records gathered by the Center show that, again and again in Texas, air quality enforcement came at the point of a citizen lawsuit, not from the agency.

The Texas chapter of the Sierra Club and Public Citizen, for example, sued the American Electric Power company for a federal permit violation--releasing more carbon monoxide and soot than it is allowed, at a plant not far from Martin Lake. The lawsuit was later settled.

And in fact, the worst single polluter, in terms of excess sulfur dioxide emissions during the period of the Center's analysis, was a power co-operative based in the small South Texas town of Christine. The San Miguel Electric Cooperative was the only plant penalized--$57,200 for emissions of sulfur dioxide and other pollutants--and had the most emission violations, more than 10,000 over a 10-year period.

But even that penalty, stiff by TCEQ standards, seemed to have little effect and didn't even address some of the utility's worst overages. San Miguel also continued to exceed its sulfur dioxide limit even after the penalty was assessed in 2000.

Company officials say the plant is in compliance today. "Since we were penalized, we have reduced emissions, and addressed the problem that caused the excess SO2 emissions," said Joe Eutizi, engineering manager of the San Miguel co-op.

Then there are Texas' oil refineries. In January, the Sierra Club and Environment Texas filed a lawsuit against Shell Oil Company claiming the company exceeded its permitted limits on several air pollutants, including benzene, a toxin that causes cancer. The environmental groups allege that Shell self-reported excess emissions to TCEQ that amount to 1,000 separate violations stemming from unauthorized bursts of air pollution caused by maintenance and refinery malfunctions.

In an e-mail, Shell spokesman Dave McKinney wrote, "The figure of 1,000 violations is greatly overstated and occurred over a period of five years. Many of the reported emissions cited in the lawsuit were authorized or within our permit limits. In some cases single emission events were reported by Shell several times as part of the reporting process." He went on to say that 12 percent of the total emissions overages occurring between 2003 and 2007 were related to Hurricane Katrina.

Overall, according to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project, during 2004 more than 45 million extra pounds of pollution were released by 28 Texas oil refineries due to these spikes, which TCEQ calls "emissions events." As with power companies, TCEQ has not challenged the oil companies' explanations for these events and rarely imposes any kind of penalty or enforcement action.

Cleaning up emissions from electric utilities and refineries would cost those industries many millions of dollars. And environmentalists point out that, like the oil companies, which historically have been some of the biggest players on the Texas economic stage, TXU is a political powerhouse that has spent plenty of money over the years lobbying to make sure that Texas clean air laws and enforcement are weak.

As the largest energy provider in Texas, TXU has established an exceptional degree of influence in the Texas statehouse, through a network of high-profile lobbyists and political connections.

In spring 2007, when legislation to increase public oversight of the TXU buyout process was pending in the Senate, TXU and its buyers unleashed a lobbying team that included former state legislators Curtis Seidlits, Jr., Rudy Garza, Eddie Cavazos, Paul Sadler, and Stan Schlueter, and former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk.

According to Texans for Public Justice, TXU and two investor groups spent approximately $17 million during the 2007 Texas legislative session on lobbyists, advertising, food and beverages, entertainment, and gifts--including sending 2,400 tacos to legislators and their aides on the first day of the session.

TXU is never a slouch when it comes to lobbying. During the 2006 election cycle, according to another Texans for Public Justice report, TXU gave contributions to all but seven members of the Texas Legislature.

In October 2005, two years before the buyout of TXU was officially announced, Perry issued an executive order shortening the permitting process for TXU's proposed new coal-burners from 18 months to six. That same day, former TXU CEO Earl Nye cut a $2,000 check to the governor's campaign fund. And the year after Perry expedited TXU's permit, the company's political action committees and its executives contributed more than $100,000 to his campaign.

Environmentalists allege that part of the reason that TXU has made a full-court press in the last two years is the possibility that Congress might pass carbon-regulating legislation in the near future, which could stymie their plans to build more plants.

"It was clearly part of the plan to get the original 11 [new] plants permitted and under construction before carbon legislation passed the [U.S.] House," said Tom "Smitty" Smith of Public Citizen. "But when the Democrats took control of Congress in November 2006, their free ride quickly came to an end, and that might be the underlying reason why they scrapped plans to build all 11 plants."

Many observers see a direct parallel with a similar push the company made in the late 1960s and early 1970s. TXU, then a group of electric utilities under one corporate umbrella, fought to ensure that a few planned plants be approved ahead of the passage of the Clean Air Act, which occurred in 1970. Their effort was successful: The company's Martin Lake, Monticello, and Big Brown plants were all permitted and built in that era, and all of them are currently among the dirtiest plants in Texas.

As public awareness about air pollution--the effects of carbon dioxide on global warming, the heavy price that North Texas cities will have to pay economically if their air isn't cleaned up, the health effects of sulfur dioxide and other pollutants --Texas' status as a dirty-air state has become increasingly problematic. And the controversy over TXU's old plants and new ones and TCEQ's enforcement record continues to heat up.

Karen Hadden, executive director of the SEED Coalition, an Austin-based environmental group, is especially concerned about the expected mercury levels to come from two of the new plants to be built at Oak Grove, about 115 miles northeast of Austin. "This will be one of the largest mercury polluters in the nation," said Hadden. Studies have shown that exposure to mercury, a neurotoxin, can stunt mental development in children.

For its part, TXU says it is working to cut emissions by installing new technology. Kleckner says TXU has promised to cut coal plant emissions of nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide as well as mercury by 20 percent from 2005 levels. "We know of no other company that has made such as significant commitment," he wrote in an e-mail statement.

At UT-Tyler, Dr. James Stocks, head of the school's Texas Asthma Camp for Kids, said that the sheer volume of pollution the power plants are allowed to put out legally is more troubling to him than questions about over-the-limit emission incidents. "The fact that TCEQ hasn't penalized them doesn't bother me at all," Stocks said. "It's that we allow too much in the first place."

Families across Texas like the Taylors, who live in the shadow of enormous power plants with outdated pollution control technology, are growing increasingly skeptical of the state's assurances that their health and environment is protected.

So the Taylors take what precautions they can when the smoke from Big Brown rolls their way. They keep Jesse indoors, have his medication ready, and, if need be, are prepared to call the police to warn them that they will be speeding down the highway to take Jesse to the hospital--always worrying that each trip to the emergency room might be their last.

Chris Campbell contributed to this report, which is a project of the Center for Public Integrity.

Joaquin Sapien can be reached at jbsapien@gmail.com.

This story is being published concurrently by the Center for Public Integrity at http://www.publicintegrity.org/txu/default.htm

Gulf Coast Polluters Dominate School Tax Breaks (Part 2 in a 2 part series)

Texas school districts have awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in property tax breaks under a 2001 law. The law was ostensibly designed to lure businesses to develop in districts with low property tax revenue. In practice, the biggest tax breaks are going to oil refineries and petrochemical plants to expand existing facilities within property-rich districts on the north Gulf Coast.


Read the report

Lobby Watch:TXU’s Patronage Grid Plugs All But Seven Lawmakers

One overlooked barrier to TXU Corp’s unraveling scheme to build 11 new dirty-coal plants across Texas may have been the company’s failure in the 2006 election cycle to deliver campaign checks to seven current members of the Texas Legislature.
Read the Lobby Watch

Austin American-Statesman: Gas companies are big spenders on anti-coal ads

Masquerading as activists battling coal plants, Big Gas is squaring off against Big Coal in a polished campaign run by a Hollywood ad agency. Natural gas companies, calling themselves the Texas Clean Sky Coalition, have been fighting coal plant proposals with full-page advertisements in the state's major daily newspapers. Utilities have proposed at least 17 new coal-fired power plants in Texas, and environmentalists worried about the emissions have protested, usually with grass-roots tactics.

Gas companies are big spenders on anti-coal ads

Gas supplier tries to keep its role in new ad campaign quiet.

By Asher Price
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Masquerading as activists battling coal plants, Big Gas is squaring off against Big Coal in a polished campaign run by a Hollywood ad agency.

Natural gas companies, calling themselves the Texas Clean Sky Coalition, have been fighting coal plant proposals with full-page advertisements in the state's major daily newspapers.

Utilities have proposed at least 17 new coal-fired power plants in Texas, and environmentalists worried about the emissions have protested, usually with grass-roots tactics.

The new ad campaign features stony-eyed men and women with smudged faces juxtaposed with facts about coal plant emissions. A Web site, www.cleanskycoalition .com, includes these rhetorical questions: "Would you bathe your child in coal? Sprinkle arsenic, mercury and lead on your husband's cereal? Treat your friends to a big dose of radiation?"

The campaign has cost "north of a million dollars," according to Fred Davis III, the head of Hollywood agency Strategic Perception, which put the campaign together. The photos were shot in a Southern California studio, he said.

The sum is vastly more than other groups that have opposed the plants have spent. Environmental Defense said it expects to spend at least $400,000 for advertising.

"We were trying to make it a simple message and get people riled up about it," Davis said. "It's very nervy."

Lead and arsenic are found only in trace amounts in coal and are not major concerns, mercury emissions and the damage they cause are difficult to track, and naturally occurring radiation is more likely to be found in petroleum deposits, according to Dave Allen, a professor of chemical engineering and an air quality specialist at the University of Texas.

Jackson Williams, the executive director of the Texas Clean Sky Coalition, refused to reveal the source of money for his group.

"We've got car washes, real estate developers, restaurateurs, energy companies, retailers and individuals that have signed on to this effort," he said. "They're united on one thing: Nothing is worse than coal."

The Web site's domain name was registered to a company called Domains by Proxy, whose motto is "Your identity is nobody's business but ours."

On Monday, a spokesman for Chesapeake Energy Corp. acknowledged that it was at least partly responsible for funding the Texas Clean Sky Coalition. He said other natural gas companies were involved, too.

"We are primarily natural gas producers, and we think it's the cleanest-burning hydrocarbon," spokesman Tom Price Jr. said. "It's simply that we think reduced emissions is a good thing." He would not name the other companies and would not say how much Chesapeake had spent.

The coal plant proposals jeopardize some natural gas plans, said Greg Platt, an executive at Cobisa, a small Houston company that develops natural gas plants.

"From our perspective, it's difficult to justify a gas plant if all of these coal plants get built," Platt said. "It's difficult for (financiers) to take the leap to open spigots on the money if they see these coal plants hanging out there."

With natural gas prices high, the operator of the state's electrical grid will run cheaper fuels such as nuclear and coal power before gas, Platt said.

The Clean Sky Coalition Web site includes newspaper stories about coal-fired power plants, informs readers about a rally against the coal plants on Sunday at the Capitol and points readers in the direction of Environmental Defense and the Sierra Club.

Neither group said it receives money from the Clean Sky Coalition or even knew what it is.

"Whether the money is coming from environmentalists, businessmen or competitors, we're glad they're fighting," said Tom "Smitty" Smith of the watchdog group Public Citizen. "Without help from everyone in the state, we won't be able to stop the coal plants."

The advertisements do not require disclosure because they don't talk about a specific piece of legislation, according to Craig MacDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice. "Ethically, we believe that advertisers like this should be straightforward and put a disclaimer about who paid for the ad."

TXU Corp., which has proposed 11 coal-fired plants, has a "monsters" campaign that will run through April in Dallas, Austin, Houston and Waco, emphasizing the good power can do (including light keeping monsters away from children), said Lisa Singleton, a spokeswoman.

She would not say how much the company, which has one of the largest lobbying rosters in the state, is spending.

"We're ready to be on the offensive and keep moving ahead with the path we laid out," she said.

NPR: Critics Blast Texas Plans for New 'Dirty' Coal Plants

Texas already has a sorry reputation for its dirty air. Houston vies with Los Angeles, trading back and forth the No. 1 spot on the list of cities most choked by smog. Now, Texas utility companies are proposing to build 17 new coal-burning power plants and one petroleum-coke power plant over the next four years. They have the support of the governor, but mayors in some of the state's largest cities are putting up a fight. Read the article at NPR

Critics Blast Texas Plans for New 'Dirty' Coal Plants

by Wade Goodwyn

All Things Considered, September 25, 2006 · Texas already has a sorry reputation for its dirty air. Houston vies with Los Angeles, trading back and forth the No. 1 spot on the list of cities most choked by smog. Now, Texas utility companies are proposing to build 17 new coal-burning power plants and one petroleum-coke power plant over the next four years. They have the support of the governor, but mayors in some of the state's largest cities are putting up a fight.

Gov. Rick Perry has issued an executive order fast-tracking state permits for the proposed plants. But a coalition of Texas mayors, newspaper editors and environmentalists are playing the tortoise in this Texas race, trying to stave off the coal plants by slowing the process down until more Democrats get elected in Washington, D.C.

"There's a national movement by the utility companies to build coal-burning plants," says Dallas Mayor Laura Miller. "And the reason is coal is plentiful, coal is cheap and, unfortunately, coal pollutes the air aggressively."

Miller and Houston's Mayor Bill White are leading the fight against the proposed coal-burning plants.

"I don't think people have any idea what it will be like if we have 18 power plants now, and they wake up in five years and we have twice as many then. I think you're going to see a significant change in the way our sky looks," Miller says.

Cleaner Technology, at a Higher Price

Miller wants the utility companies to utilize a rising star in coal plant technology. It's called "integrated gasification combined cycle," and this kind of coal plant is 70 percent to 90 percent cleaner than the plants proposed for Texas. But it's also more expensive. To Miller's extreme dissatisfaction, all of the proposed power plants in Texas plan to use traditional coal technology.

"I don't blame the utility companies for wanting to do it," Miller says, "but I think it's incumbent on elected officials to say, 'Wait a minute, that is old technology. There is new technology that is better, cleaner technology and we want you to consider that instead.'"

Seventeen other Texas mayors representing about one-third of the state's population have joined Miller in opposition to the current proposal. But the governor appointees will make the final decision.

Gov. Rick Perry declined to comment for this story. But in an op-ed piece to the Dallas Morning News, the governor wrote that he believed any delay in building the proposed plants would damage the state's economy. Perry dismissed the opposition's concerns over air quality, arguing they wanted to return Texas to the era of the horse and buggy. Perry emphasized that the utility companies would reduce some pollutants by 20 percent or more.

"These newer units are cleaner than the older units," says Eric Hendrickson, the state engineer who's reviewing plant permit applications. "And then there will be additional controls applied to the existing facilities, and these utilities are contemplating how they are going to control those emissions to get to those new levels."

The new coal plants will pollute the air with nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and mercury. But they will be much cleaner than existing plants. Yet, the old plants will continue running full bore; there are no plans to shut them down or replace them.

One emission the federal government does not regulate is carbon dioxide, the primary global-warming gas. The new power plants in Texas will emit the equivalent of 19 million automobiles' worth of carbon dioxide every year. When all the new plants are up and running, Texas will send nearly as much carbon dioxide up its stacks as California, New York and Florida combined.

Voluntary Cleanup

"The modern coal plant of today is quite a different power plant than 30 years ago," says Mike McCall, CEO of the utility company TXU's wholesale division. He says the emissions from their new plants will be nothing like Big Brown, a TXU utility whose two units burn 40,000 tons of coal every day. Massive haulers carrying 100 tons of coal work around the clock to feed the furnaces.

McCall says that TXU plans to spend $500 million to install some pollution devices on some of its older plants, too.

"We're going to come in and voluntarily make significant retrofits on our existing fleet," McCall says. "We're going to add 9,000 megawatts of power, but our emissions are going to be 20 percent less than our 2005 levels."

But TXU and the other utility companies say they're not going to use coal gasification for any of the plants in Texas.

"Coal gasification is a technology that we are very interested in," McCall says. "We have a team of engineers working on it, but it is not ready for Texas. The state needs power, we've got millions of people moving to the state. And we wanted to step up in a way that's comprehensive."

But the increasingly organized opposition refutes that there is an urgent need for 9,000 megawatts of additional capacity. They say the real urgency is political, that the utility companies are taking advantage of the fact that their allies still control all branches of government in Washington, D.C., and Austin.

"The relationship between the utility companies and Rick Perry has been a cozy one," says Craig McDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice, a political watchdog group which tracks Texas campaign contributions. "Texas has a pay-to-play government. It's not pretty, but that's the way it works down here."

McDonald says Perry has received $148,000 alone from Earle Nye, retired chairman of TXU.

"Nye gave the governor $2,000 on the day Perry signed the order to expedite TXU's coal-fired plants," McDonald says. "Last year, [TXU] employed 52 paid lobbyists to the tune of $3 million."

'Ring of Fire'

The governor's decision to speed up the permit process has drawn attention around the state. His executive order is especially not going over well with ranchers in central Texas, where many of the new power plants will be built.

"I think he's been bought off," says rancher Ruth Pilant. "TXU has given him money to fast-track these permits and give him enough money and he'll do most anything apparently."

Pilant's land is located inside what she calls "the ring of fire," surrounded by what will eventually be six major coal-burning power plants.

"Why don't these people see what they're doing to the state of Texas?" she asks. "Do we want to be known for the most coal-fired plants in the United States? That doesn't sound good to me. I want to see the stars in the sky, you know, that's what we're out here for, that's the reason we're in Texas."

Some 200 ranchers have formed a group they're calling T-Power -- Texans Protecting Water, Environment and Resources -- and are vowing to fight. The formal hearings on the power plant permits begin this fall in Austin. With the state government and the utility companies on one side of the aisle, and the ranchers, mayors and environmentalists on the other, the level of debate is predicted to be lively.