Forrest for the Trees

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State Rep. Lon Burnam (D-Fort Worth)

When I called state Rep. Lon Burnam (D-Fort Worth) a week after his narrow loss in the Democratic primary, he wanted me to promise one thing.

“I want you to make it clear that above all things that in my obituary I want it to say not just ‘leading liberal,’ not just ‘avid environmentalist,’ but ‘probably the only pacifist to serve 18 years in the Texas Legislature.’” Because being a liberal and an environmentalist in the Lege isn’t tough enough.

For the almost two decades he’s served in the Legislature, Burnam has been the patron saint of lost causes, the unyielding liberal, the Quaker, the director of the Dallas Peace Center who believes it’s “always bad public policy to start a war.”

First elected in 1996, Burnam’s background was in community organizing and the anti-nuclear movement. At the time, Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Bud Kennedy hailed him as a “loud, obnoxious liberal.”

There are typically two types of politicians—the pragmatists and the true believers, those who work inside the system and those who work outside it. Burnam is undeniably the latter. He never passed many bills, but he always stood up for issues he thought were important, no matter how unpopular.

Burnam waged battles few other Texas Democrats would even bother with: abolishing the death penalty, legalizing same-sex marriage, instituting a state income tax, doing something, anything, about climate change. Every session he filed these bills and every session they were dead on arrival. That’s Lon, for better or worse—bound to principle and bound to lose, usually.

Burnam’s most famous losing cause was his vote against electing Midland Republican Tom Craddick as speaker of the House in 2003. Burnam was the lone “no” vote—a move that got him exiled to the House Agriculture and Livestock Committee. Plenty of Democrats (and some Republicans) didn’t want to see Craddick made speaker, but they went along with the winning side. Burnam says it was more than a protest vote. “I think we needed to begin immediately the resistance to his reign as speaker,” Burnam says.

But perhaps no moment better illustrates Burnam’s time in the Lege than a scene on the floor of the Texas House on April 2, 2003. Those were the early days of the Iraq war, and the House wanted to pass a jingoistic resolution blessing the war on terror and praising President Bush’s “patience, leadership, and will.”

Burnam was one of just three Democrats to oppose the resolution. As he argued from the back microphone that the Iraq war was illegal and immoral, dozens of legislators gathered at the front mic in a show of force in support of the motion. The dissent was a lost cause—the resolution passed 136-3—but Burnam felt it was the right thing to do. “People are just chickenshit,” Burnam says. “I can’t tell you how many of my Democratic colleagues said, ‘I wish I had the guts to do that.’”

Being right doesn’t count for much in politics, though let’s give credit: the Iraq war was a disaster and many conservatives would come to regard aspects of the war on terror as another manifestation of government overreach. Craddick lasted just three sessions and then was overthrown by a coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats.

Still, Burnam’s insistence on sticking to principle cost him the ability to pass many bills. “The last 10 years since then has kind of been like the French resistance against occupation,” he says.

Instead, Burnam says, he embraced his outsider status to do the dirty work his colleagues couldn’t—his version, perhaps, of realpolitik. “One of the things people will miss about me is my willingness to kill a bill on principle,” he says. “It’s a role that fell to me.”

In the March primary, Burnam lost to his opponent, Ramon Romero Jr., by 111 votes—a victim, he says, of Republican redistricting and “identity politics.” He’s filed suit to try to overturn the election, arguing that Romero signed people up to vote by mail using illegal means. The lawsuit is a long shot at best… which is, of course, fitting for Burnam.

When I talked to him in March, before he’d filed the lawsuit, there was a tinge of bitterness to his post-primary analysis. “It’s a different constituency, and I couldn’t make the transition fast enough because in part I couldn’t become Hispanic,” he says.

Burnam won’t rule out running for office again, and if his lawsuit doesn’t pan out he plans to return to the Capitol as an activist.

“I started out trying to save the world, but it’s real clear to me the world doesn’t want to be saved,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop trying.”

Patrick Michels

Gov. Rick Perry attends the National Day of Prayer breakfast in Austin, Tex.

If there was any lingering doubt that Gov. Rick Perry’s Texas Enterprise Fund functions more as a corporate cookie jar than a “deal-closing” job machine, it should surely be put to rest with today’s news. Earlier this week, Perry announced that Toyota would receive $40 million to move its North American headquarters from California to Plano and bring with it 4,000 jobs. In a press release, Perry crowed, “Toyota understands that Texas’ employer-friendly combination of low taxes, fair courts, smart regulations and world-class workforce can help businesses of any size succeed and thrive.”

The press release went on to claim that Toyota had “cited a number of factors in choosing” Plano, including the Texas Enterprise Fund investment.

But today, the Los Angeles Times reports that that’s so much horse hockey.

“Taxes, regulations and business climate appear to have had nothing to do with Toyota’s move,” the paper reported. And that’s coming from a top executive.

“It may seem like a juicy story to have this confrontation between California and Texas, but that was not the case,” said Jim Lentz, Toyota’s North American chief executive.

Toyota left California to move its company’s brainpower, now divided among offices in three states, into one headquarters close to the company’s manufacturing base, primarily in the South.

“It doesn’t make sense to have oversight of manufacturing 2,000 miles away from where the cars were made,” Lentz said. “Geography is the reason not to have our headquarters in California.”

Oops.

So what did Texas taxpayers get for their $40 million? If you take Lentz at his word, basically nothing. Toyota was coming to Texas with or without the Enterprise Fund money. An incentives program like the Enterprise Fund is premised on the idea of being a “deal-closer.” You have to ask the “but-for” question: But for this incentive, would X company move to Texas? If the answer is, “Yes, the company would move anyway,” then there is no reason to offer the incentive.

What’s remarkable in the Toyota case is that an executive is admitting as much. You can’t blame Toyota—a for-profit company responsible to its shareholders—for taking the $40 million, but you have to wonder if the state of Texas shouldn’t now ask for its money back.

And what did Perry get? Bragging rights, the ability to lay claim to the “job creator” mantle, another notch in his belt for the silly zero-sum California vs. Texas pissing match and associating himself with a popular brand of Texas-made trucks. (Full disclosure: I own a Toyota Tacoma.)

Of course, this isn’t the first time that the true nature of the Enterprise Fund, which has paid out $558 million since its inception in 2003, has been made apparent. Last year, the governor offered Chevron $12 million for an office tower it was already planning to build in downtown Houston and the company’s own application made scant reference to other sites it was considering. Chevron also noted that it planned to use the money to lavish employees with moving benefits and perks.

If there is a “Texas miracle,” Perry’s Enterprise Fund doesn’t seem to have much to do with it.

Patrick Michels

Gov. Rick Perry attends the National Day of Prayer breakfast in Austin, Tex.

Is it too early to consider Rick Perry’s legacy? Some state lawmakers already are, at least indirectly.

Legislators are considering what to do with some of the guv’s signature programs, the big corporate subsidy funds that have been plagued by charges of cronyism and inefficiency since their inception. Funding for the Texas Enterprise Fund and the Texas Emerging Technology Fund, in particular, is dwindling due to lawmakers’ reluctance to keep pouring dollars into what some critics consider Perry’s corporate welfare accounts. The Observer, for example, reported on a $12 million Texas Enterprise Fund grant to Chevron for a Houston office tower that the company had announced years before. Chevron, in fact,  planned to spend the money not to create new jobs, which were already in the works, but on generous moving costs for its employees.

Overall, the Texas Enterprise Fund alone has doled out more than $500 million in grants since the Legislature created it a decade ago. In 2010, the Observer found—in a story appropriately titled “Slush Fun“—that 20 of the 55 Enterprise Fund companies had either given money directly to Perry’s campaign or donated to the Republican Governors Association, a Washington, D.C.-based group that Perry presided over in 2008.

All of that is on Rick Perry. But it’s up to the Legislature and the next governor—either Wendy Davis or, more likely, Greg Abbott—whether to shut down the funds, or modify them.

Today, a House committee heard from a parade of economic development types, including governor’s office personnel overseeing the funds, who argued that the programs are a key ingredient in the supposed “Texas miracle economy.”

“Don’t screw up the basics,” said Jonathan Taylor, Perry’s economic development director. “But also recognize that all those incentives are must-haves now.”

The timing of the hearing was perfect. Perry is on one of his frequent job-hunting trips, this time in New York, where he’s been repeating his challenge to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to debate, as he put it on Twitter today, “creating jobs and free marketing [sic] policies.”

Indeed, the message from business interests and the governor’s people at today’s hearing was that the programs were too burdensome for applicants—though, of course, that was dressed up as needing more “flexibility.” Taylor urged the Legislature, citing competition from other states, to consider shrinking the turnaround for Enterprise Fund grants from 90 days to two weeks.

Prompted by questions from lawmakers, Taylor and his counterpart at the Emerging Technology Fund, Terry Hazell, also cautioned the Legislature not to move control of the funds out of the governor’s office.

“You get in front of the people who actually make the decisions,” Taylor said, of why companies like working with the governor’s office. “You get to talk to the decision-makers.”

Of course that goes straight to one of the core criticism of the Enterprise Fund, the Emerging Tech Fund, the Cancer Research and Prevention Institute of Texas and all the other big pools of money that flow through the guv to big and powerful interests—that they’re not so much technocratically managed job-creating programs as political slush-funds that haven’t proven claims about job creation.

Hazell said today that the Emerging Tech Fund didn’t track return on investments for individual companies and that the overall return was “modest.”

Lingering over the discussion today was the question of what Wendy Davis and Greg Abbott think about these programs. Neither has said anything definitive.

Abbott has been particularly cagey. In July, when asked directly, he told the Houston Chronicle:

“If we can create the appropriate tax structure, that’s going to be the strongest incentive any business needs, whether it be businesses thinking about relocating from California or businesses already here.”

Davis, for her part, has said she supports the premise of a job-creating program like the Texas Enterprise Fund but has pushed for more accountability and transparency. In 2013, she co-authored legislation requiring the state auditor to take a closer look at whether the Enterprise Fund was following the law.

Amazon.com

"Jesus Christ on Killing" by Sgt. Charlie Eipper

We’ve found it, the mother of all WTF. We have found Peak WTF. After this one, we may have to retire WTF Friday, just hang it up in recognition that nothing will ever top this.

But, first, let’s look at the runner-ups this week.

The Texas Nationalist Movement—”The state’s leading independence organization”—had themselves a meetin’ down in San Antonio and resolved to redouble their minority outreach. But first, they had to run Kanye West out of town.

“We are defending our culture because some rap singer from Los Angeles wanted to show his video on the walls of The Alamo, and a bunch of blue shirts (Texas Nationalists) showed up and said, ‘Nuh-uh!’” Belmore said.

That is a kind of charming image: A bunch of heavily armed far-right secessionists chasing off an extremely wealthy and successful rapper by going, “Nuh-uh!” (And Kanye retreats, with echoes of “na-na, na-na, boo-boo/stick your head in doo-doo” ringing in his diamond-encrusted ears.)

Oh, and “blueshirts”? Guys, if you’re rebranding to appeal to a more mainstream audience, perhaps it’s best not to refer to yourself with the same term used for multiple fascist causes around the globe.

Anyway, Texas’ leading independence organization is trying to bring more minorities into the cause.

“I’m not talking about pandering, let the other side do that,” he said. “We have much more in common with minorities than they (liberals) do.”

Suggested slogans: “Secession: It’s Not Just for Slave-Owners Anymore” or “This Ain’t Your Grandaddy’s Secession Movement” or “Secession: Second Time’s the Charm.”

If and when Texas does secede, I know who could be head of the FBI, or maybe poet laureate: Sgt. Charlie Eipper of the Wichita Falls Police Department. Eipper once killed a man in the line of duty. Then he was troubled that the indiscriminate killing in Rambo IV would give Christians the wrong idea… that there’s anything wrong with a high body count. As he told the Wichita Falls Times Record:

“[Rambo] didn’t want to, but finally did. Their boat got taken over by river pirates. He had to kill them to save everybody,” Eipper recalls. “When Rambo was dropping the missionaries off at their destination, the lead missionary was stepping off the boat and turned to Rambo. ‘I know you think what you did is right,’ the missionary said, ‘but it’s never right to take a life.’”

Eipper cringed. “I thought, ‘What if there’s a young believer in Christ watching this? What if it’s somebody who is in the Marine Corps? Or an officer? They’re going to be so confused. They’ll think, ‘Surely this guy is speaking on authority of Scripture.’”

So, he wrote a book—self-published on Amazon.com—called Jesus Christ on Killing. Which is only a slightly-less disturbing title than Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Christ, IMHO. Eipper’s book contains chapters such as “Thou Shall Not Kill?” and “Jesus the Man of War.” As the Times Record describes it, “he is articulate on the subject of Jesus Christ and killing.”

“The Scriptures are clear that God condones the use of deadly force in killing whenever we are threatened,” Eipper said.

Stand your ground, boys. That’s what Jesus would do.

Turns out that Jesus is coming back and boy is he pissed. Says Eipper:

“When Jesus comes back, he will be the man of war. When he comes back, there will be a whole lot of killing going on.”

Happy Good Friday, everyone!

David R. Tribble/WikiCommons

Barnett Shale rig

New research suggests that pollution from fracking contributes a much larger share of Dallas-Fort Worth’s smog problem than state officials have said. The study, conducted by Mahdi Ahmadi, a graduate student at the University of North Texas, was presented at a clean-air meeting this morning in Arlington. The Observer received a copy of the presentation.

Ahmadi analyzed data from 16 air-quality monitors in the Metroplex going back to 1997, looking for a connection between oil and gas production and ozone. Seven of the sites were east of Denton, outside of the Barnett Shale, and nine were located in the shale area, close to oil and gas activity.

Ahmadi’s twist is that he adjusted for meteorological conditions, including air temperature, wind speed and sunlight—key ingredients in ozone formation. Backing natural factors out of the data allowed Ahmadi to better pinpoint human factors, including the link between fracking and ozone formation.

He found that while smog levels have dropped overall since the late 1990s, ozone levels in fracking areas have been increasing steadily and rising at a much higher rate than in areas without oil and gas activity.

“This is a small but important victory for real science in this process, as opposed to the completely politicized approach by TCEQ to prevent the imposition of new controls of any kind,” said Jim Schermbeck, director of North Texas clean-air group Downwinders at Risk.

Since 2008, meteorologically-adjusted ozone in the fracking region has increased 12 percent while in the non-fracking region ozone rose just 4 percent.

The trend during the winter was “even more striking,” said Dr. Kuruvilla John, the UNT engineering professor who oversaw the study. During winter months, the fracking region saw a 21-percent increase in ozone, while in the non-fracking area it went up 5 percent.

That’s significant because ozone season has traditionally been confined to the summer months. Moreover, EPA’s smog standards have become increasingly stringent over time, as scientists find more evidence for health problems at lower levels. If the EPA were to lower the ozone standard to 60 or 65 parts per billion—it currently sits at 75 ppb—the Dallas-Fort Worth region could find itself out of compliance even during winter months.

Regardless, Ahmadi’s research directly challenges the message from Gov. Rick Perry and Texas’ top environmental officials, who routinely dismiss links between smog, and oil and gas activity. On its website, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality claims that because the wind “blows emissions from the Barnett Shale away from the DFW area,” those emissions from fracking are “not expected to significantly affect ozone in the DFW area.”

The new UNT research isn’t the only recent study suggesting that the state’s scientific understanding of ozone is shaky. A study conducted for the Alamo Area Council of Governments, released earlier this month, found that fracking activity in South Texas’ Eagle Ford Shale would drive large increases in the two main ozone ingredients and imperil San Antonio’s compliance with federal smog rules.

Apparently, the group’s public probing of the fracking-smog links didn’t sit too well with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The Austin American-Statesman reported on Monday:

“The Texas environmental agency has frozen funding for a San Antonio area governmental coalition’s air quality improvement work after an official there publicly shared modeling results that suggested fracking contributed pollution to the city.

“Last summer the Alamo Area Council of Governments made public a report that found that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in the Eagle Ford shale field endangers air quality in the San Antonio area – and, to a milder extent, the Austin area.

“The Alamo group, composed of officials representing local governments over a 12-county area, did not share the report’s data beforehand with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which had paid for its collection.

“So when it came time last fall to dole out money to councils of government from across the state – including the council from the Austin area – all but the Alamo area council were rewarded with a roughly 30 percent uptick in Legislature-appropriated money to carry out air quality monitoring and planning work.”

KETKNBC.com

KETK's Neal Barton

Sometimes it’s baffling that the United States, unlike most of the world, continues to have a persistently large population of climate change deniers. But, then, you see something like this—a preposterously misleading commentary on climate change that ran on KETK, the NBC affiliate in Tyler—and you begin to understand why. The two-minute segment, which ran on Friday, was billed as “Global Warming, Laughable” and featured the commentary of KETK News Director Neal Barton. The piece is riddled with factual errors, bizarre assertions and it cites an obscure scientist and a committee of the United Kingdom House of Commons. Oh, and it’s also plagiarized from a British newspaper. Basically, Barton read portions of a story from the Yorkshire Evening Post on his “POV” segment, passing the views off as his own.

The story (or in this case, a text version of what aired) opens innocently enough:

Recently, a UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its first report in seven years on the now widely accepted phenomenon known as “climate change.”

For the record, the IPCC is the global authority on climate science, consisting of hundreds of climate authorities from dozens of countries. The panel’s recent findings call climate change “unequivocal” and warn of dire effects from sea-level rise, wildfires, flood and drought.

But then, Barton’s POV takes an abrupt (far-right) turn away from the broad scientific mainstream into a kind-of false-balance upside-down world.

But, one teacher says it’s all bunk and you won’t hear this on the mainstream media. So I’m glad to serve equal time.

The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee published a report, damning the media for confusing ‘fact’ with opinion and pushing the message that, in terms of freak weather, ‘the worst is yet to come.’

Yeah, sure it is.

Barton doesn’t mention that the House of Commons is a British institution. But more important, he gets the committee’s report completely wrong. The report, in fact, laments  that the public is misinformed on what scientists know about climate change, and criticizes the media in the UK—the BBC in particular—for scientific inaccuracy and relying on “experts” with an agenda. Which is precisely what Barton does. So he says in his commentary:

Emeritus Professor Les Woodcock goes against the grain and when a reporter asks the former NASA scientist about “climate change” and “global warming,” he laughs.

He says the term “climate change” is meaningless. The Earth’s climate has been changing since the Earth was formed 1,000 million years ago. The theory of “man-made climate change” is an unsubstantiated hypothesis [about] our climate [which says it] has been adversely affected by the burning of fossil fuels in the last 100 years, causing the average temperature on the Earth’s surface to increase very slightly, but with disastrous environmental consequences..

Notably, Professor Woodcock gets the age of Earth wrong. it’s not 1 billion years old, it’s about 4.54 billion. But, then, why is Barton quoting a British professor when the U.S. has most of the world’s prominent climate denialists? I emailed Barton yesterday to ask about some of his claims and he sent me a link to a news article in the Yorkshire Evening Post, one of the leading newspapers of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. Which is kind of a weird thing to do because, as it turns out, nearly every word of Barton’s commentary is lifted verbatim from the Yorkshire Evening Post story, which ran in February, including the quote from Woodcock. The only difference is that Barton noticeably pauses over the word “reproducible” twice, and then skips over it. He also adds a few choice interjections (“Amen sir”).

I asked Barton in an email about his apparent plagiarism.

“We’ve only been keeping records for 100 years,” he responded. “I was told this when I did tv weather 30-years ago. That’s was before I went through 40 hours of college meteorology. I was told this by meteorologist who trained me. They were absolutely right then—and now. The Evening Post was right on it.”

I asked him if it was appropriate to plagiarize in a commentary.

He responded (spacing in the original):

I attributed right from the article.

I said where I got it from.

Plagiarism is just saying here is what I think and never mentioned where you found it.

I cite articles all the time.

Of course it’s ok in a commentary.

It’s the basis many times for the commentary.

That’s where you start.

You agree or sometimes disagree.

This is not the first time Barton, or KETK, has run into controversy. In 2010, Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Bud Kennedy criticized the station for its cheerleading of a tea party event in Tyler that featured Glenn Beck and Rick Perry. The reporter responsible for that report explained to StinkyJournalism.com, “The TV station I work for, and I don’t necessarily agree, has taken a right-wing approach.”

But Barton explained that KETK is “right on track with our coverage of the Tea Party.”

Patrick Michels

Texas Gov. Rick Perry's prayer rally, The Response, at Reliant Stadium in Houston.

The companies angling to build a facility for high-level nuclear waste in Texas have found a high-level cheerleader: Rick Perry. This week the governor sent a letter to Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and speaker of the House Joe Straus, urging the Legislature “to develop a Texas solution for the long-term resolution of [high-level waste] currently residing inside our borders.”

Perry’s boosterish letter follows Straus’ January directive to a House committee to study storage and disposal options for high-level nuclear waste.

The use of the phrase “Texas solution” in Perry’s letter is interesting. Go to texassolution.com and you will find a slick site for Waste Control Specialists, the radioactive waste company developed by the late Harold Simmons. Waste Control’s Andrews County dump was predicated on the notion that it would only take low-level radioactive waste, but just this week, the company began accepting—for temporary storage—transuranic waste from New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Project following a radiation leak at that facility.

In February, I asked Waste Control spokesman Chuck McDonald if the company was considering high-level waste.

“It is something we are open to the possibility of,” McDonald said. “We would obviously have conversations with the community in Andrews. … There is a new recognition that something may need to be done and interim storage may be something where we can provide a solution for the state and others if it comes to that. It’s very early in this process.”

Perry doesn’t mention Waste Control specifically and, indeed, there are other interests floating proposals for storing high-level waste in West Texas. Austin-based AFCI Texas, for example, has been sniffing around Big Spring for a while. AFCI is co-owned by a Perry crony—Bill Jones, who the governor appointed to serve on the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department board.

Officials in Loving County, which is the smallest county by population in the nation, have also expressed interest in hosting spent nuclear fuel.

Perry told a West Texas TV station yesterday that he believes there is a “legitimate site in West Texas.”

“Sure. I think there are a couple of sites in the State of Texas that the local communities actively are pursuing that possibility,” Perry told KCBD during a stop in Lubbock.

Along with his letter, Perry included a 49-page report drafted by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which lays out the options for storing high-level nuclear waste in Texas. Currently, the spent nuclear fuel from the nation’s 100 or so nuclear reactors has no permanent home. The federal government’s preferred option—burying the waste deep underground in the Nevadan desert at Yucca Mountain—has been more or less scuttled. In January 2012, a blue ribbon commission (are all commissions adorned with blue ribbons?) appointed by Obama recommended that work begin in earnest to develop one or more centralized storage facilities along with one or more deep geologic burial sites. The idea is that the waste would be shipped from the nuclear reactors to be stored temporarily for decades, until (or if) it could then be buried somewhere.

The report takes quite a bit of editorial license and seems to be particularly concerned with how to make a public-private storage option work. “The lack of an alternative to onsite indefinite storage is hindering nuclear energy from being fairly considered as an energy option and is an embarrassment to this country’s reputation for its capability to handle its waste.

Basically, the report suggests that the U.S. Department of Energy should own a centralized storage facility in Texas, where the spent fuel from nuclear power plants can be sent and held for decades, while it works on a deep geological disposal site. A private company, the report recommends, could operate the facility. The reason for the public-private arrangement is that the federal government would have title to the waste in case something goes wrong. Otherwise, building such a facility “may be too uncertain for a private company to attempt.” And we wouldn’t want that.

The authors stress the importance of finding a community that embraces radioactive waste, specifically citing the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in New Mexico and Waste Control’s dump in Andrews. “Finding a site that has local and state support would greatly enhance the chance of a private centralized interim storage site being successfully sited and constructed,” the report concludes.

The legal, political and technical hurdles involved in establishing even an interim storage site, much less a Yucca Mountain-style disposal site, are obviously significant. Just for starters, Congress would have to change the law to allow for the arrangement TCEQ/Perry is proposing. There’s also the teensy issue of transportation. Moving all the nuclear waste to a single central storage unit would take 20 years and up to 10,700 shipments by rail or 53,000 by truck. The radioactive waste would inevitably pass through thousands of communities, many of which might not like the idea of serving as  corridor for a private company to profit from nuclear waste.

To my mind there are echoes of Rick Perry’s other splashy proposals: Think Trans-Texas Corridor or the mandatory HPV vaccine mandates—cronyism posing as bold public policy. Notably, both Trans-Texas Corridor and the HPV mandate were high-profile flops that nearly cost him his political career. Perry is not known as a Big Idea man or a policy wonk, despite his recent makeover with those MSNBC glasses and his appearance at Davos. Merits aside, his policy proposals have typically been the product of close allies and business interests pushing an agenda and using Perry as a pitchman. And they’ve not been popular with the conservative grassroots.

Perry’s executive order requiring Texas girls to get vaccinated for HPV caused an uproar on the religious right, who thought the state should have no business inoculating girls against a sexually-transmitted disease. Others were repelled by the crony capitalism angle: Perry’s former chief of staff, Mike Toomey, was a lobbyist for Merck, the company that sold the HPV vaccine Gardasil. Perry was forced to scrap the mandate and it haunted him when he ran for president in 2011-2012.

The Trans-Texas Corridor had something for everyone to hate: Rural Texans took exception to the use of eminent domain to seize land for a private company; environmentalists loathed the notion of building a vast new fossil fuel-driven infrastructure; and tea party types (before they were called that) saw the making of a vast intercontinental conspiracy at the heart of the Corridor.

It’s not clear whether there is a larger plan to the high-level waste deal, or this is just the governor’s usual business cheerleading. But the extensive TCEQ report, commissioned by Perry, suggests that there is some long-term effort at work. The question is whether the conservative grassroots takes any interest in the issue. There is not an obvious bugaboo as with Trans-Texas corridor or the HPV vaccine.

If the private interests can lock down local support perhaps any widespread opposition can be blunted from the get-go.

DonHuffines.com

Don Huffines approaches Peak Dallas

And now on this day, gathered WTF faithful, let us turn to our brother, the late great Bill Hicks, for a few words on Creationists:

But get this, I actually asked one of these guys, “Ok, dinosaur fossils—how does that fit into your scheme of life?” 

He said: “Dinosaur fossils? God put those here to test our faith.”
“I think God put you here to test my faith.”

Sady, Hicks didn’t live long enough to have his faith tested by Don Huffines, a Dallas multi-millionaire tea partier opposed to taxes and government (unless it’s taxes and government he can control and profit from, natch)—and the next state senator from white, whiter, whitest Dallas. Huffines, who looks a bit like Dan Quayle’s brother from another mother, may have finally achieved Peak Dallas (Exhibit A: this family portrait/J. Crew catalog). But, more to the point, Huffines is an out-and-proud creationist. He wants Texas public school-kids to be taught creationism, dammit. As he told KERA this week:

“I certainly think all students should be aware of creationism. They should be aware of that, absolutely. Teaching it as a science, it should be taught on equal footing.”

Speaking of creationism, there must be something in the water down in Glen Rose. The town of 2,000 is home to the Creation Evidence Museum, a nuclear power plant (coincidence) and at least one local pol with some interesting ideas. Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Bud Kennedy flagged a letter in the local paper this week penned by one Eric Bolanger, former candidate for Glen Rose mayor. Now in the political food chain, a failed small-town mayoral candidate probably ranks somewhere around phytoplankton—but Belanger has some sound advice for remaking the “dinosaur just waiting to die” that is the Texas GOP. Key message: Don’t be like the Marxist-Democrats with their minority outreach!

Until the GOP understands this fact: our modern day immigrants are not the same as our past and that they do not hold the same values, the GOP has condemned themselves to history.

Equality and diversity have been sponsored by the Democrats and are not the way to victory, but defeat.

Mainstream Republicans like John McCain just talk about “building the dang fence.” Bolanger wants to do it—and he’s got a plan.

We the people of Texas MUST form a 501c3 trust whose goal is to build a huge private cement wall on private land – from Brownsville to El Paso. Government will NOT stop our nation from becoming a Guatemala. Only “We the People” can.

Meanwhile, back in Dallas, the liberty-loving folks can hear the distant footsteps of fascism coming in the form of a proposed fee on single-use plastic bags, which are better known at WTF HQ as #freedombags. According to Dallas City Councilman Rick Callahan:

“Let’s just ban everything. That what this sounds like.”

“Ban Everything”: Someone please put that up as a bumper-sticker on CafePress.

And, finally, let’s end with the poetic Twitter musings of state Rep. Bill Zedler (R-Arlington). First, he got those two Castro brothers—Julian and what’s his name—mixed up in defending Buc-ee’s from the boycott that ensued after the chain’s owners announced their support for Sen. Dan Patrick’s lieutenant governor bid. It was Joaquin the congressman, not Julian the mayor, who called on people to boycott Buc-ee’s, or as Zedler calls it, Bucks-ee’s.

The mayor of San Antonio urged us to boycott Bucks-ee’s- so I made sure to go in there fill it up with gas and buy something

— Bill Zedler (@Bill_Zedler) March 21, 2014

Also: Is it such a good idea to fill a store up with gasoline while you’re buying beef jerky? Maybe banning everything isn’t such a bad idea.

Solar Austin

Austin Energy's solar farm in Webberville

One of the most inexorable and (buzzword coming…) disruptive trends in the energy world has, for some time, been the precipitous decline in the cost of solar. Like other renewable energy technologies, solar power has obvious environmental and climate benefits but hasn’t necessarily been competitive, in strict market terms, with fossil fuels. That’s changing very rapidly—even in Texas.

Two recently announced solar projects in West Texas show how solar is becoming more than just a niche source of energy.

First, there’s Austin Energy’s brewing deal with SunEdison for a 150-megawatt solar project in West Texas. The size of the project is significant. It’s enough to power 14,000 homes and represents the second-largest solar project in Texas, following a 400 MW installation commissioned by CPS Energy, San Antonio’s city-owned utility. But the more salient fact is the price. Although the exact figure has not been released, it’s somewhere around 5 cents per kilowatt-hour—perhaps the cheapest price in the U.S. ever. A nickel per kilowatt-hour is impressively low.

For comparison’s sake, Austin Energy’s 30-megawatt solar farm just east of Austin in Webberville priced in at 16.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. That was just a few years ago. The typical residential customer in Austin currently pays about 10-11 cents per kilowatt-hour and it’s thought that the SunEdison project will slightly lower electricity rates for Austinites. Finally, and perhaps most important, the solar project is cheaper than building a new natural gas plant, when considering the costs of each over the life of the facilities.

Austin Energy received “a substantial number of bids” totaling 1 gigawatt all under 5.5 cents per kilowatt hour, said Michael Osborne, one of the gurus of the renewable energy industry in Texas and, until recently, a special assistant at Austin Energy.

“If you can aggressively price solar below [5 cents per kilowatt-hour] that is going to be a revolution,” Osborne said at a recent Solar Austin gathering. “Solar at that price is going to beat natural gas anytime.”

Osborne attributes cheap solar prices, in part, to the maturation of the market. “Solar is the new wind,” he says. Texas, of course, is a global leader in wind power but in the early years the Texas wind industry was buffeted by engineering problems, timid investors and questions about how to fit wind—with its fickle nature—into the grid. Similarly, solar developers now enjoy more sophisticated financing options, cheaper construction costs and just the general benefits of experience. “The same thing happened in the wind business: It’s a sign of the market maturing.”

The other first-of-its-kind project to be announced this year is FirstSolar’s Barilla Solar Project, a 22-MW array in Pecos County. To date, virtually all of the solar deals in Texas have been driven by the renewable energy goals of city-owned utilities. FirstSolar’s Barilla project is different; it’s a “merchant” plant that will have to compete in the open market. The developer will build the plant without a firm deal in place and then try to sell the power to an array of customers.

“The merchant plant is a really big deal,” said Stan Pipkin, CEO of Austin-based Lighthouse Solar. “It’s price-based and market-based.”

Osborne projects that 200 to 300 megawatts of merchant solar will be built in the next year or so.

Still, some in the renewable energy business think solar still has a ways to go to close the gap. In the utility world, the concept is “grid parity”—the almost-talismanic threshold at which a budding energy source can produce power equal to or cheaper than what’s coming off the grid.

Or, in layman’s terms, it’s when solar (or wind or geothermal, etc) officially kick coal, nuclear and natural gas’ ass.

Shalini Ramanathan, vice president for origination with RES Americas, points to wholesale prices in ERCOT, which hover around 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, a fair sight lower than the levelized cost (5 cents/kWh) for even the cheapest solar.

“My sense is that solar is getting closer than ever to grid parity but it’s not quite there yet,” she said.

But that gap is deceptively large. For one, notoriously volatile natural gas is the prime driver of wholesale electricity prices in ERCOT. If the fracking bonanza fizzles or natural gas exports overseas pushes the commodity price of natural gas higher, electricity prices will rise too. Renewables on the other hand provide price certainty decades into the future.

“Uncertainty in the ERCOT market could be part of the appeal of solar and wind,” Ramanathan said. “It’s so obvious that sometimes developers don’t pitch it this way: But once you build it, the fuel is free. It can provide a really good hedge against power prices from fossil sources increasing in the future.”

Wind power received a huge boost from Texas government when the Texas Legislature passed and Gov. George W. Bush (that hippie!) signed legislation establishing mandates for utilities to purchase green energy. No such concession has been made for solar in Texas, even though the resource offers the same environmental and economic benefits and is arguably the most obvious solution to the specter of brownouts on the ERCOT grid. The tea party’s anti-government grip has made public policy of this sort a non-starter. Still, if solar can assert itself in the market, the industry may have a sunny future in Texas.

State Sen. John Carona (R-Dallas)

At the current rate, there may be a day in the not-so-distant future when every Austin lawmaker and staffer goes to work for the payday loan industry, leaving no one, at last, to pretend to care about usurious rates, the cycle of debt and criminalization of borrowers.

I exaggerate, of course, but only slightly. The list of legislators and their staff who have moved, sometimes overnight, from the Capitol to the industry is impressively long. As Texans for Public Justice found last year, 10 percent of the lobbyists employed by lending interests at the Legislature were former lawmakers. Among them was Rep. Vicki Truitt, the Southlake Republican who carried the “reform” bills in 2011 and chaired the House committee that oversees the industry. And it’s bipartisan, too: the former chief of staff to Sen. Kirk Watson (D-Austin), Trent Townsend, is a lobbyist for Cash America, EZCorp and First Cash Financial.

Perhaps we need to retire the “revolving door” metaphor and just think of the industry, the lobby and the state government as different chambers in a giant shark tank, like a high-dollar Sea World for predators.

I raise the issue now because of a rather astonishing letter to the editor published this weekend in the Galveston Daily News. It’s penned by one Adam Burklund, the former general counsel for state Sen. John Carona. Remember Carona? He’s the (recently defeated) Dallas Republican who carried a payday loan reform bill in the last session so weak that it split consumer advocates and faith groups into two camps. He’s also the guy who accused his fellow Republican senators of being “shills” for payday loan lobbyists and then complained that he “just want[ed] to go home and feed [his] cat.” Anyway, Burklund used to work for him as general counsel before peeling off to go work for—clutch your pearls now—the main payday loan industry group, the Consumer Service Alliance of Texas—the good people who helped write said legislation carried by Burklund’s boss last year.

Burklund was reacting to an op-ed co-authored by three Democratic state legislators who made the rather anodyne observation, “During the last legislative session, industry lobbyists blocked the reform bill we tried to pass.”

Burklund seems sincerely outraged at that assertion, lashing out, in turn, at the three Democrats, Houston trial lawyer Steve Mostyn, Wendy Davis and what he calls “disingenuous special interest groups.”

Every time the industry pushes for a compromise, some of the special interest groups immediately characterize that compromise as an “industry proposal” — and oppose it, hoping to push the industry further.

Such devious behavior on the part of special interests does nothing to help consumers, nor does it advance the debate over a problem that is desperately in need of a solution. It only serves to widen the rift between consumer groups, the industry and anyone else seeking to score political points.

Who are these “devious,” all-powerful “special interest groups” capable of thwarting the good, reform-minded payday loan industry with its 82 lobbyists, $4 million in campaign contributions and allies in government? Burklund never quite spells it out but we can only guess that he’s referring to consumer advocacy groups like Texas Appleseed and faith groups like the Texas Baptist Life Commission. In fact, some of the religious groups were the most adamantly opposed to Carona’s compromise because they viewed it as not just a compromise, but fundamentally compromised, ceding far too much ground to the lenders. I guess having God on your side might make you a “special interest” but unless you’ve got the cash too, you’re in for an uphill fight at the Lege.

At least give credit to Carona for acknowledging how money had limited the options: “You have to get the most you can get with the political support that you have,” Carona said in March 2013. “This industry is in business and this industry has amassed enormous political support at the Capitol.”

At the Capitol, it’s not so much about what the lobby gets as what it prevents others from getting.