Forrest for the Trees

Today is managing editor Brad Tyer’s last day at the Observer. He’s been selected as a Knight Wallace Journalism Fellow, a prestigious program for mid-career journalists. We’re happy for him but also a little sad. I’m especially sorry to see him go and not just because he did a kick-ass job editing the Arts & Culture section of the magazine.

Like me, Brad has a thing for rivers and we fast became canoeing and kayaking partners. It helps too that he’s got awesome gear and isn’t (too) wimpy about the Texas heat. Granted, we did more daydreaming than paddling but, hey, that’s half the fun. We did manage, despite this damn drought, to hit the Colorado, San Marcos, Neches and South Llano Rivers. We’re trying to get together a trip to the remote Devils River in West Texas.

On his first day at the Observer, Brad pulled up in front of the office with a canoe strapped to the top of his truck. He’d just returned to Texas after a long stint in Montana editing the Missoula Independent. And he looked the part of a Montanan – out-of-season flannel and outdoorsy get-up, the kind you find advertised in L.L. Bean catalogs. But Brad’s a Texan at heart. His passion for rivers may only be superseded by his obsession with Texas BBQ and jerky.

There are plenty of river enthusiasts in this state but not many who can write intelligently about the deeper meaning of carp or make a review of a fieldbook on Texas water sound like a must-read. In Brad’s last column, which will appear online and in print later this week, he brings it all back home, writing about the stretch of river, a patch of the Colorado near Columbus, he first fell for:

Naturalist Loren Eisley wrote, “If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water,” and it’s magic that claims me on a river.

I saw it again Sunday. I drove through periodically heavy rains to get to the river and put in under grumbling clouds. As so many times before on that looping stretch, those clouds left open a pocket of sunshine, rimmed by heavy blue, that followed me downstream. Only once, on a broad, windy stretch near the end, did I drift beneath a gray wisp, and it rained on me lightly in bright sunlight, drops hitting the water at an angle, backlit and glistening. It was as magical, in that moment, as anything on the mighty Yarlung Tsangpo, or John Graves’ history-soaked Brazos, or any river anywhere.

 Paddling in that rain, simple math began to seem like fuzzy abstraction, and magic—for the moment anyway—the natural state.

In the comments section, several readers took issue with my climate change post in which I assert that there is “simply no scientific debate” on the causes of global warming. Reader “Just Sayin” wrote:

The truth of the climate issue is that it is very complicated and there is hardly broad consensus among the scientific community on the binary questions that you mentioned above.

This blog would serve the environmental cause much better if you took time to consider the claims of the “marginalized naysayers” with a kind of respect as opposed to marginalizing their informed opinions out of the gate.

I strongly disagree and you can read my full response in the comments. However, this does point to the reality that there is a relatively small, but very vocal group of people in this country who are hell-bent on destroying greenhouse gas restraints. And, no, not all of them work for the oil industry.

Many in the conservative grassroots view climate change as a liberal conspiracy driven by Al Gore, godless scientists and radical environmentalists. I have no doubt their beliefs are sincere but many have fallen victim to a years-long, multimillion-dollar campaign orchestrated by oil companies and other carbon-intensive industries to distort the issue. Conservative groups eagerly joined the cause.

But with the end of the Bush administration, most of these players promised to stop and get onboard with cap-and-trade legislation.

At least that was the PR. It seems the “success” of the townhall tea partiers in the health care debate has proven too alluring for the anti-climate change organizers to pass up. Talking Points Memo is reporting today on a leaked memo from the American Petroleum Institute:

A leaked memo sent by an oil industry group reveals a plan to create astroturf rallies at which industry employees posing as “citizens” will urge Congress to oppose climate change legislation.

The memo — sent by the American Petroleum Institute and obtained by Greenpeace, which sent it to reporters — urges oil companies to recruit their employees for events that will “put a human face on the impacts of unsound energy policy,” and will urge senators to “avoid the mistakes embodied in the House climate bill.”

API tells TPMmuckraker that the campaign is being funded by a coalition of corporate and conservative groups that includes the anti-health-care-reform group 60 Plus, FreedomWorks, and Grover Norquist’s Americans For Tax Reform.

The parallels are undeniable. In both the case of health care reform and climate change legislation, corporate interests are deeply involved in creating a grassroots stirring against congressional action they believe will hurt their bottom-line.

These aren’t movements in the traditional sense. They are as much astroturf as they are grassroots.

A memo circulating at Austin City Hall raises the prospect of Barton Springs basically drying up by the end of 2010 if the current drought persists. Asher Price has the story over at his Statesman Salsa Verde blog.

“With the drought approaching the worst on record, we are in unchartered territory,” [Victoria Li P.E., Director of the Austin Watershed Protection Department] wrote. “We do not know exactly how the aquifer will respond to continued lack of rainfall, if flow continues to decline at a constant, slower or faster rate as the drought deepens.”

The department projects Barton Springs flow will drop to 12 cfs by the end of this year and 5 cfs by December 2010 if the drought persists.

“If the drought persists for long enough, the springs could cease flowing,” she wrote. “Significant rainfall might completely erase fears of the current drought or only delay them if drought conditions continue.”

The conditions have serious consequences for the endangered Barton Springs salamander. The 2009 count in Eliza Springs is down to 159 (there were 703 in the 2008 count).

“It is unknown whether salamander populations would rebound from extended flow conditions below 5 cfs and the associated low oxygen levels,” Li wrote.

As Li notes, there is considerable uncertainty in predicting how Barton Springs would respond to a prolonged drought. The historical point of comparison is the drought of the 50s during which Barton Springs dwindled to 9.6 cfs in March 1956. But there was much less pumping from the aquifer then. The memo states:

Today, various municipal and private users remove 10 to 11 cfs from the aquifer through permitted pumping. This level of pumping is a concern since it is equivalent to the spring flow rate during the worst of the 1950s drought-of-record.

In other words, all other things being equal, if this drought deepens to the level of 1956, we could reasonably expect the flow at the Springs to approach zero. I called David Johns, a hydrogeologist with the City of Austin, to ask if this assumption was accurate.

“I think that’s the ultimate implication,” he said. 

It’s hard to see how the endangered Bartons Springs Salamander could survive at that point. 

However, Johns pointed out that the Barton Springs/Edwards Aquifer Conservation District (BSEACD) is considering rules [large .pdf] that could require all permitted well-users to “completely curtail” pumping during an “emergency” stage of drought, defined in the draft rules as “sustained flow at Barton Springs being at or below 10 cubic feet per second (cfs) on a 30-day running average basis.”

That would relieve some pressure on the Springs.

Like everyone else, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that El Niño produces some serious rainfall this fall and winter. But there’s danger in holding out hope that Mother Nature will solve our problems. Water managers call it the hydro-illogical cycle: In dry times, we panic and decide that have to do something, but then it rains and we go back to being complacent.

Droughts are a reality of life in Texas but they’re likely to get harder and harder to cope with unless there’s a real, sustained effort to change our ways.

If you haven’t read Robert Leleux’s story on the Corpus pet-coke power plant in the current issue, you oughta do so. One small irony I wish he had noted, though: the name of the pollution-belching juggernaut is Las Brisas, which means “the breezes” in Spanish… I guess the owners are hoping the wind will blow all the crap somewhere else. Hello San Antonio!

Texas Climate News highlights some interesting, if unsettling, results from two public opinion surveys. First, a Texas Lyceum poll finds that Texans really aren’t all that different from other Americans when it comes to support for a congressional cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gases. Great news: we’re just about as complacent!

A national survey by the Washington Post, using an almost identically-worded prompt, found that support nationwide was 52 percent in favor to 42 percent.

But, let’s turn to the more disturbing of the two polls I mentioned above. It’s a survey conducted solely in Harris County (Houston) by Rice University sociologist Stephen Klineberg.

Houston’s the energy capital so perhaps it’s not surprising that only half of the people think climate change is driven by human activity. But it’s still disturbing. Scientists – outside of a handful of very marginal naysayers who can’t get published – agree on the mechanism of global warming. There’s simply no scientific debate. But politics and science are two different animals.

In Texas, the Republican leaders – from top to bottom – are global warming deniers. The Republican grassroots are just as willfully ignorant. Americans for Prosperity, one of the groups behind the anti-health care mobs, is touring around the country with a hot air balloon, spreading pseudo-science among the hoi polloi.

There’s always been a strong anti-intellectual and anti-science streak running through American society. But in recent years, we also have to include the factor of political polarization. According to Texas Climate News (who, by the way, is doing yeoman’s work trying to advance a rational, scientific perspective on climate):

A striking feature of the Houston Area Survey findings on questions about climate in recent years is “the degree to which it has become a partisan issue,” Klineberg said.

He discovered a growing separation in the views of Democrats and Republicans on environmental issues in general between 1990 (when there was essentially no partisan difference) and 2000, a period when he conducted the statewide Texas Environmental Survey.

The party divide was evident last year in a Houston Area Survey question that was not asked in 2009: “How serious a problem would you say is the ‘greenhouse effect,’ or the threat of global warming? Would you say: very serious, somewhat serious, or not very serious?”

In 2006 and 2008, both years when that question was posed, large majorities (77 percent in 2006 and 80 percent in 2008) answered “somewhat” or “very” serious. A major difference was manifest between the responses of self-identified Republicans and Democrats – in 2008, for instance, 32 percent of Republicans and seven percent of Democrats said “not very serious”, while 30 percent of Republicans and 68 percent of Democrats said “very serious.”

This is a real shame. There’s no reason why a conservative should be any less interested in empirical reality than a liberal. But as long as the Rush Limbaughs, Rick Perrys and Sarah Palins dominate the GOP, I’m afraid know-nothingism is here to stay.