CEC Notes
Solar Panels Decorate CEC’s Home
Construction is almost complete on a solar power system atop the Upper Kirby District Center at 3015 Richmond, home of the Houston Environmental Center and the CEC office. The project is part of Green Mountain Energy Company’s Big Texas Sun Club, through which their residential customers contribute to the development of new solar facilities in Texas. Project partners include the Upper Kirby District; Nuon, a Dutch energy company; and BP Solar.

The 440 individual panels will add up to approximately a 43 kilowatt (kW) system, according to Green Mountain officials. Although that is not nearly enough to power the building, the project will be the second largest solar facility in Houston.

The University of Texas Health Science Center (UTHSC) has 55 kW on one of its buildings. UTHSC’s system supplies about 80,000 kilowatt hours of power per year – around 6 to 7 percent of the building’s energy needs.

EcoNotes
New Air Quality Standards to Affect Houston
On March 26, the U.S. Court of Appeals sided with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), saying the agency was allowed to implement 1997 air quality standards for ground-level ozone and fine particulate matter. The trucking industry and other business groups fought for five years against the new standards, claiming they were enacted arbitrarily.

The Houston-Galveston region – already out of attainment for the 1-hour standard for ozone – will also not meet the new 8-hour standard, according to Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission data. Preliminary monitoring suggests that the area is on the borderline between attaining and not attaining the new fine particulate standard.

Although the EPA has not fully developed strategies for implementing the new standards, it is expected that once the eight-county area meets the 1-hour ozone standard, required by the EPA by 2007, it will have to create a State Implementation Plan (SIP) to meet the 8-hour standard. If the region is officially deemed out of attainment for the fine particulate standard, a SIP for that pollutant must be developed as well.

Instead of waiting until 2007 to determine what needs to be done, John Wilson, Executive Director of the Galveston-Houston Association for Smog Prevention (GHASP), would like to see action on the new standards sooner. Wilson suggests that, at least, the impacts of the control methods in the current SIP for 1-hour ozone should be modeled in terms of the new standards, in order to determine where exactly the region will be in 2007. “Right now, we can’t say whether the current clean air plan for Houston’s ozone problem will bring us into compliance with the existing federal health standards or the new standards,” he explains. “The state is currently reexamining what is needed to get us into compliance with existing standards - GHASP thinks they should also examine whether their plans will achieve the new standards as part of those studies.”

Fighting Factory Farming

Photo courtesy of Farm Sanctuary

Some rural U.S. cities and counties are fighting large-scale, corporate agriculture, citing associated human health and environmental problems, according to a recent Associated Press article. Five cities in Pennsylvania have banned large corporations from owning farmland or operating farms. A Missouri county recently ordered a company out after a serious hog waste spill. Two Iowa counties have passed unprecedented bans on large livestock farms.

In Texas, so-called factory farms are beginning to dominate, explains Animal Factories: Pollution and Health Threats to Rural Texas, a 2000 report from the Consumers Union. For example, although 65 percent of cattle operations have fewer than 50 animals on site, this type of farm only produces 12 percent of the cattle in the state. Just 5 percent of feedlots host more than 500 animals and produce about half of the state’s cattle. Large cattle, hog, and poultry operations are also extremely concentrated in the Panhandle region, resulting in an enormous amount of waste for one area to handle.

Texas ranks number one among animal waste producing states, according to www.scorecard.org. Farms in the Lone Star State create about 220 billion pounds of animal waste annually – twice what the second ranking state, California, produces. All this waste threatens water supplies and air quality, and ultimately compromises human health, the Consumers Union report explains. To download the entire report and for more on factory farming in Texas, visit www.factoryfarm.org/state-tx.html.

Another Regulatory Agency?
Creating an international environmental organization and court would help structure the more than 500 environmental agreements and government agencies that currently operate around the globe, according to a report released from the Tokyo-based U.N. University. Although it is uncertain whether individual countries would allow such an organization decision making powers, the report argues that setting up a judicial settlement system “would bring a much greater level of predictability to international environmental governance by ending serious violations of international environmental law regardless of the perpetrator.” Plus, the report says, certain problems such as global warming simply transcend national interests. (Reuters 4/2/02)