How to take advantage of #BadMedia (Houston Ecomentalist Edition)

Last week I touched on some poor reporting by Chron Transportation reporter Dug Begley surrounding a ruling for a temporary injunction in Wisconsin that didn't do exactly what transit activists were suggesting.  This fact hasn't stopped Houston Tomorrow from doubling down on the mis-characterization of the ruling, and even going one step further and using the lazy reporting as a mask for credibility by appealing to the authority of a story they, quite obviously, fed to Houston's former newspaper of record.

Federal judge says sprawl, transit, must factor in to highway building decisions. Matt Dietrichson, Houston Tomorrow

A Wisconsin court ruling may require planners across the country to publicly consider the effects on sprawl and transit before approving highway expansions, according to The Houston Chronicle:

Never mind that the ruling, in no way, states what they are suggesting (a fact that was clearly established by reading the request for a temporary injunction). The real problem here is that Houston Tomorrow is using the implied authority of the Chronicle in a story where they provided much of the opinion themselves. 

Wisconsin court ruling could mean Houston thinks more about transit, Dug Begley, Chron.com

“It feels like it is almost the sky is the limit for our team on these kinds of issues to stop wasteful highway building and increase transit,” said Jay Blazek Crossley, program development and research director with Houston Tomorrow, an urban planning nonprofit.

(...)

Crossley said past decisions in the Houston region — building the Grand Parkway and Texas 288, widening U.S. 290 — were made with the full knowledge they would benefit future users and open up more land for development. The Wisconsin ruling, if it stands, helps ensure that planners have to explicitly study the effects of sprawl in a wider capacity than they do now, and have that discussion publicly.
“I think what the judge is talking about is meaningful public input,” Crossley said.

In fact, other than the snippet from the Natural Resources Defense council ALL of the "expert opinion" offered up in Begley's story comes from: Jay Blazek Crosby, Head of program development and research for......Houston Tomorrow.

So basically, Houston Tomorrow (and several other transit activists) displayed a stunning lack of knowledge about the trial process, were able to convince a reporter (who was either lazy or also possessed the same lack of knowledge about the legal process) to run a story touting the "ruling" as a potential game changer based SOLELY on their opinion, without bothering to include a dissenting opinion, and then touted that same story as being objective proof their opinions are correct.

Cozy relationship isn't it?

The Highwayman and Houston Tomorrow: An introduction to Trinketland

First I read this:

Wisconsin Court Ruling means Houston could think more about transit. Dug Begley, The Highwayman, Chron.com

A federal court judge in Milwaukee might have made it a little trickier to widen Texas roads.
Leaving aside whether that’s a good or bad thing, the ruling has certainly energized Houston-area people who push for more transit and less freeway building.
“It feels like it is almost the sky is the limit for our team on these kinds of issues to stop wasteful highway building and increase transit,” said Jay Blazek Crossley, program development and research director with Houston Tomorrow, an urban planning nonprofit.

Then I read this:

Federal court says highway sponsors must first study transit, impacts on suburban sprawl. Kaid Benfield, Switchboard

It is just an interim ruling, but it is potentially an important one:  In a suit brought by inner-city, minority plaintiffs, the US District Court in Milwaukee has indicated that the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) cannot enlarge a major urban freeway connection without further study of the project's impacts on transit-dependent populations and on regional suburban sprawl.  For now, the case is headed to mediation; but the court's ruling on legal issues in the case, as articulated in an opinion signed by federal judge Lynn Adelman, is potentially significant to other highway-expansion controversies with similar circumstances.

Then I went and read the entire opinion:

Court Opinion

Before me now is the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction. The plaintiffs seek an order prohibiting the agencies from taking further action in connection with the project pending a final decision on the merits of this case.

For the reasons stated below, I find that the plaintiffs have a likelihood of success on the merits and that they are likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction.

There's a lot more in the 36 page court opinion that makes what was reported, breathlessly here, ring hollow.  First, this was a preliminary injunction which doesn't mean that the court is stating firmly that the plaintiff's case has merit, only that there's a likelihood that it does.  Second, even IF it's determined that the case has merit there's no getting around this:

The controlling statute at issue here, NEPA, “declares a broad national commitment to protecting and promoting environmental quality.” Robertson v. Methow Valley Citizens

Council, 490 U.S. 332, 348 (1989). It has been described as a “procedural” or actionforcing” statute that does not “mandate particular results” but instead requires agencies to study and describe the environmental consequences of their proposed actions. Id. at 348–51; Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corp. v. Nat. Res. Defense Council, 435 U.S. 519, 558 (1978). Thus, under NEPA, if an agency has adequately identified and evaluated the environmental effects of its proposed action, it is permitted to take that action even if the environmental effects will be devastating. Robertson, 490 U.S. at 350. Put differently, “NEPA merely prohibits uninformed—rather than unwise—agency action.”

This is NOT the wording of a ruling that's got the potential to be a "game-changer" as the sardine urbanists are currently classifying it. What it appears to be is more of a procedural hand-slap to an agency that tried to half-ass their way through an EIS review hoping that no-one would notice.  However, even IF the EIS revealed a benefit to attaching some form of public transportation component to this project, when you consider that the agency in charge of the project has no jurisdiction over mass transit, it's inherently clear in the judges decisions that they would be under no obligation to add it.

In other words, this is not a tool Blazek-Crossley, his dad and other members of the non-productive class can use to "stop" highway construction, but it is a possible way for TxDOT to distract them down the line by giving them input and then completely ignoring it. 

In a way, this shouldn't surprise anyone. After all, those who are constantly amazed by trinket governance are typically unaware when different trinkets are used to distract them from the real issues. 


Oooh!  Look!  Peak Oil!

On Climate Change

Presented without further comment......

Climate Scientists come to terms with lack of Global Warming. Daily Caller

“While, some climate scientists continue to resist the obvious that the climate system is more complex than they assumed, others are starting to accept that the multi-decadal climate projections provide very incomplete simulations has to how the real climate system works,” Roger Pielke, Jr., environmental studies professor at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Establishment media outlets have been reporting about the unexpected stabilizing global surface temperatures over at least the last decade, and even former NASA scientist and environmental activist James Hansen has recognized the the decade-long lull.

This has frustrated some environmentalists who recently sent a letter to major news networks urging them to have more coverage on global warming, and to stop portraying the issue as a “two-sided debate” by featuring global warming skeptics.

 

Have yourself a local, sustainable, vegan, zero carbon footprint Holiday.

Looking at recent surveys by firms interested in having people eat less meat, the trends are revealing that more and more of you are choosing Tofurky over Turkey for your holiday meal.  Given that I'm a hard-core omnivore you might think that this news would discourage me. The fact is that couldn't be further from the truth if it was presented in pie-graph form by His Royal Highness Al Gore.

That's right, I'm happy that fewer or you are deciding to take a nibble out of Tom Turkey or that you've decided chomping on Wilbur's rump roast is a bad idea.  What this all means is, in the long run, lower prices for me when I decide that a nice juicy steak from Bevo's rib region is to be on my evening menu.

As a matter of fact, I heartily support the movement of the foodBorg from actual, tasty food to artisanal foodstuffs produced by former hippies using only seeds, stems, sticks and leaves.  Eventually this means I'm going to be able to enjoy a meal at Underbelly with only a few people stopping mid-meal to take a flash photo of their food, thus blinding those sitting next to them and making the overall experience much less enjoyable. The way I see it the more diners of an Eating our Words bent that decide to gnaw on tree stems the better off the legitimate Houston dining scene will become for those of us who have no issue noshing on something we might have pet as a child at the petting zoo.

Despite my general avoidance of foodBorg types I would like to offer them something in the way of a Holiday season public service.  It has to do with your fascination, and confusion, over chalk-board menus being in anyway at all related to ecomental eating.

If you think almost every restaurant has some type of hand-written looking menu on a chalk (or white) board these days you wouldn't be too far off base.  In Houston you see food-carts setting up a-frame boards in the middle of the sidewalk, vendors at food markets have them everywhere, restaurants have them plastered on the wall, and even Starbucks and McDonalds are getting in on the act. (to be fair, Starbucks has been there for a long time.)

For some unknown reason foodies flock to places like this, I guess feeling that any menu written in chalk has to be something that's toiled upon daily, and that the artwork and pretty colors at Starbucks are spontaneously created by the local baristas and not shipped in from the corporate office or created using nothing more than glorified color-by-numbers stencils.  Of course, the vegan set will tell you that Starbucks is a different kind of company, one whose mission is the betterment of the world one cup at a time.  Hard-core Eating Our Words readers will state that they never touch Starbucks unless at a last resort, say, a time that they're about to die due to caffeine withdrawal.

In an effort to end this confusion over what is artesanal and what is not might I offer the following suggestion.  Given that the economy is sputtering along and people need jobs, restaurants of a ecological bent should employ the pretty unemployed people to act as temporary menu boards.  You see this on the streets of Houston every day, people standing their with iPods in place waving signs asking you to come and either buy gold, get one month free rent, or to visit some pawn shop for your holiday shopping.  Of course, the paper signs would be problematic, and that's why you would want to hire pretty people with flat stomachs on whom you could write your daily menu using ink derived from local grasses.  It's nothing that Abercrombie & Fitch haven't done for years, their ink being tribal armband tattoos of course.

This would solve two problems:  It would allow you to better identify which restaurants will have daily specials consisting of twigs in bayou water, and it will decrease the wait time for the rest of us at Starbucks because we won't have to wait five minutes while you repeat endlessly your order of a fair trade, half-caff, low-acid, ran through an elephant's digestive tract, lactose, sugar, artificial sweetener, animal cruelty free, hand processed using only top-of-the-line French presses from the Alsace region, carried on the back of happy yaks from the Nepalese holy mountains Latte w/vanilla almond milk.

Yes, it's THAT important

At lest, it must be that important to the folks over at ChronBlog.....

Why else do you insert a faith-based climate story by Eric Berger 3 TIMES in the headlines?

In a way though, I'm glad they do this. Because the more and more AGW climate true-believers try and link individual weather events to their religious beliefs the more they'll look silly as natural weather patterns take hold.

Yes, the Earth's climate is changing, as it has for Millennia. What's happening now is no different then what happened during the times of the Dinosaurs, the Ice Age, the Dark Ages, and during the Renaissance. The Earth's climate has always changed. It's just that we're more attuned to it now because we have better tools and temperature tracking.

Unfortunately, we also have computer models, which can be programmed to assume that CO2 has X effect on the climate. The result of this is that models with increased CO2 in the atmosphere show the climate getting warmer. This is "true" in the models because that is what they are programmed to do. This leads to the false hope that man can somehow control Earth's complex eco-system by just cutting back on our economic activity, preferably through government control. Al Gore and his investors made a fortune doing this, and the scientific community agreed to throw-out the scientific method to play along and receive funding dollars.

The news media went mad, and this is the result. Now the clergy of the AGW faith are going through a mini-reformation as their faith becomes shaken by fact. Not a true reformation as we saw in the Catholic Church, but a plea to the powers that be to stop saying those things which make that in which they believe seem factually shaky.

Ah, but now the PUBLIC has seen the weather reports and is starting to believe that humanity has set the global oven to simmer. We're like frogs sitting in a cool bucket of water blissfully unaware that the Cajun chef has slowly cranked up the heat. The "faith" is being widely adopted which means that we can finally take the 'needed' steps to turn off the burner before it's too late.....Except that even our best efforts won't turn off the stove will just nudge it down imperceptibly. The water will still boil.

Yet it's so vital to our future that we MUST show this story three times. Faith MUST be restored. Meanwhile we're losing time figuring out how we're going to deal with climate change in a desperate attempt to try and prevent it. King Canute comes to mind, except that the great King used his moment of helplessness to learn humility. Modern nature conquerors aren't crossing that bridge.

Not thinking it through

Social media. It's tough. Especially Twitter, where there are very few hard and fast rules how to successfully communicate with the masses....

For example, right now I'm guessing the Houston Tomorrow smart dumb-growth, green ecomental set wishes they had timed these two tweets at different times....

Economic and demographic shifts driving Americans to drive less: - Sent at 7:52 PM, 12/13/11

Pedestrian deaths rose in 2010 nationwide: - Sent at 7:52 PM, 12/13/11


This group can't even get social media right, and they think they should be in charge of the Urban planning for Millions of people? The obvious comeback is that they should all take more walks, Darwinism and what-not, but we here at HCA don't want people dead, just proven to be the central-planning, anti-poor, pro-ruling class, Statists they are. So, they can keep driving their SUV's to work, we don't mind....


Thanks to them for keeping the humor going though, as a local blogger it's much appreciated.

That's Billion with a "B"

My two (or so) regular readers know that I'm skeptical of so-called "green energy" on a broad scale. The technology, and reliability, are just not there to make this economical when expanded at anything larger than cottage industry levels. Today's story by Texas Watchdog underscores that thought:

(Texas Public Utility Commission pushes for $7 billion transmission lines for wind power, Mark Lisheron, Texas Watchdog)

With a shale oil and gas revolution bringing us an era of inexpensive fuel and greater energy independence, an ever-resourceful state has found a way to add $7 billion to our electric bills.

The Public Utility Commission, chafing because deregulation has left it out of actual power generation decisions, wants ratepayers to pick up the tab to run wind power lines from West Texas to North Texas and Houston, according to a skeptical story today by the Dallas Morning News.

Quite unlike the downward plunge in fossil fuel prices, a project that just a few years ago was estimated to cost $5 billion is now almost $7 billion. And when Donna Nelson, the chairwoman of the Utility Commission who thinks laying the lines is prudent at either price, says the current figure is only an estimate, its track record would suggest the number will not be getting smaller.

All of this money spent for energy that's only expected to satisfy a small slice of Texas' energy needs is ridiculous on it's face. I see a burgeoning role for green energy at a micro level, but when you start to expand the concept the cost/benefit analysis gets very, very unfavorable.

Environmental stewardship is not the problem. It's possible to be green without being a raving ecomental. Really, it is. Let's start by trying to not pollute, recycle what we can, grow some square foot gardens and try and keep our cars in running order. If we choose to install personal solar panels onto our homes that's all the better. Because that's where 'green energy' has a future in my opinion. These pie-in-the-sky, job creating behemoths that are being fed to us from fantasy land are just going to result in the waste of Billions (with a B) of taxpayer dollars that could better be served fueling the real economy.

You get what you want to get.

Environmentalists are breathless today as a new EPA survey has come out "suggesting" that hydraulic fracturing is responsible for contaminated ground water in Wyoming.

(EPA links fracking to contaminated water in Wyoming, Neela Banerjee, Boston Herald)

The Environmental Protection Agency said that hydraulic fracturing, a controversial natural gas drilling process, likely contaminated well water in Wyoming, a finding sure to roil the debate about expanding natural gas drilling around the country.

EPA’s new draft report found dangerous amounts of benzene in a monitoring well near the town of Pavillion, in central Wyoming.

This Boston Herald article is fairly light on substance, surprisingly, the Houston Chronicle does a much better job filling in the blanks:

(EPA links fracking at Wyoming to tainted well water, Jennifer Dlouhy, Chron.com

The EPA stressed that the findings are limited to Pavillion, where fracturing has taken place both at and below the level of the drinking water aquifer and close to drinking water wells - conditions that are not common elsewhere in the U.S.

Oil and gas drilling has been conducted in the region since the 1950s, and some of the 169 gas production wells in the area were fractured as little as 1,220 feet below the surface.

By contrast, energy companies are extracting natural gas from Texas' Eagle Ford shale at depths of 4,000 to 14,000 feet.

Elizabeth Ames Jones, chair of the Texas Railroad Commission, said Texas' geology is different than Pavillion's.

"Hydraulic fracturing does not go on close to the surface here and it would be impossible to migrate up from miles below the earth to a water table," she said. She added that Texas also has stringent well construction rules to ensure water safety.

In short, what the EPA has is evidence of something, that hasn't been peer-reviewed, that's of a limited sample size, and for which there's no replication in shale fractured wells anywhere else in the Country, a one-off. A one-off that environmentalists are sure to try and use to stop shale gas development throughout the country.

What this study means is that the burden of proof is now on Encana to demonstrate that their Wyoming property is properly constructed and, if not, that they can mitigate any damage that's conclusively linked to their wells. It would seem that further testing, and tracking is needed, as well as a peer-review of the EPA's findings. What we're likely to get are politicians waving a poorly-developed flag in a rush to judgement. A judgement that many of them were determined to find no matter what. It just took them finding a field with a unique drilling profile. If you look hard enough you can find a data point to support any political agenda. The EPA now has found (albeit tenuously) the environmental argument. That they were looking for just that should give you pause.

The hope would be that this study leads to a cleaning of the water in this region. Instead we're going to hear calls to severely curtail promising energy production in the name of post-normal science. It's one of the biggest problems with Lisa Jackson's EPA, and the reason people are correct in saying that their powers need to be severely curtailed.

Eight Hundred Seventy Thousand

That's the number of jobs US Shale gas, the same gas that Leftist groups (along with the EPA) want to do away with, will create by 2015 according one study by IHS:

(Shale gas will support 870,000 jobs by 2015, study says, Houston Business Journal)

Shale gas plays will support more than 250,000 new U.S. jobs by 2015, according to a study published Tuesday by IHS Inc., an international information company.
The study said in 2010, the shale gas industry supported more than 600,00 U.S. jobs, and by 2015, it will support 870,000 jobs. By 2035, the industry is expected to support 1.6 million jobs.

Think about those numbers the next time you hear politicians talk about how much they want to create jobs, while following policies that won't.

This is why no one takes you seriously (Part II)

Consider this: these are the same people that were frothing at the mouth over the TCEP "censoring" an AGW proponent in a recent report.

("Now would be a good time to think about saving our lives, David Crossley, The List @ Chron.com)

[As usual, comments from supporters of climate change will not be published]

Translation: If you don't agree with me, I won't publish your comments.

Pot, meet Kettle.

The good news is that AGW proponents like David Crossley do more to HURT their own cause than any fact could ever do. Prior to Climategate, the momentum was firmly behind them, wind at their back and all of that. Now the emperor has been revealed as the naked, science-free rogue many AGW deniers knew him to be, and they're starting to run into stiff headwinds.

Even more unbelievable is that Chron.com (the former newspaper of record for America's 4th largest City) is allowing a blogger, posting under their domain, to blatantly violate their comment policy.

America: Fat and getting fatter

Amazingly, the answer provided by the group performing the study is to do even MORE of the things that got us fat in the first place.

The definition of insanity is......



The answer to this problem isn't to put MORE kids on school meal programs but less. Even if you don't like Jaime Oliver and his Food Revolution thing, you have to admit the quality of food in public school lunches is abysmal at best.

The answer to this problem isn't to follow the lead of the USDA, it's to move AWAY from their recommendations. After all, since the inception of the "food pyramid" America has gotten fatter and fatter.

And the answer sure isn't throwing large amounts of money at the problem, or taxing sodas, or fast food or listening to the world's leading "nutritionists" on the matter. Hell, it's the nutritionists who are pimping for increased funding so that they can get more money to do studies such as this. The driving force behind modern day "prevention programs" is research, not the public good.

If scientists and government really wanted to help people they'd stop subsidizing soy, corn and beef and would open up the marketplace to a wide variety of fresh vegetables. Ending the subsidy on corn would a.) make it's price point more comperable with other vegetables and b.) raise the price of HFCS, which would raise the price of processed foods. Why tax an item on the back end that highly subsidized on the front end?

Government farm and fiscal policy, in many cases, was implemented in the interest of large multi-national food companies, and not the lowly farmers that Democrats & Republicans love to trot out in front of the cameras during election season. The single-family farmer is all but gone from America, excepting those who have learned to take advantage of the foodie, farmer's market fad and even they're just scraping by.

There's an argument to be made that time and technology have passed these groups by, that AGM and Cargill are the wave of the future. That might be so, but all I know is the tomatoes I grow in my back-yard mini garden taste much better than the red balls of wax I get at the store. Hell, even farmer's market tomatoes taste better.

The government isn't going to make one person less obese, despite their good intentions. What's going to change this trend is the public taking personal responsibility, taking a long look in the mirror and deciding that maybe 3 hamburgers for dinner just isn't a good idea any more. And while I don't advocate vegetarianism (and certainly not veganism, which is code for "fad eating") I do think that too many of us eat way too much processed and feedlot red meat.

That's why I'm a big fan of "The Omnivore's Delimma" and "In Defense of Food" by Michael Pollan. In neither of those books does he recommend a Government solution (although I'd be willing to bet he supports the soda tax). What he does recommend is taking ownership of your own diet, getting rid of the processed crap and eating a LOT more vegetables, a variety of vegetables at that.


In the end, that would probably be the simplest 'cure' of all for this epidemic, but there's no research money to be made and corporate profits would be low.

So the "tax everything we don't like" drum beat will continue, and America will get fatter. Experts will wonder why.

U.S. Falling behind in future energy development

As reported by RIGZONE....

Companies such as the UK, Netherlands, Russia, Canada, Norway, Italy and China pay less by way of additional taxes on their repatriated income and are therefore able to compete more effectively against U.S.-based companies - in some cases enabling them to afford to bid twice as much for oil and gas concessions.

If you're not clear on why this is a problem, think about the dire warnings of having our future energy supply dependent on foreign powers made by many of the same politicians who are forcing our future energy production to foreign shores.


Now they want to make the disadvantage worse.

Go read the entire article for more.

Paving the road to hell....

...with the best of intentions.


(International Landmarks Darken Around World for 'Earth Hour', Michael Lipin, Voice of America, 03/28/10)

International landmarks went dark Saturday as lights were switched off in thousands of cities around the world for "Earth Hour," a global call for action on climate change.

Then they burned up twice as much energy ramping the power back up to normal levels.....