Dennis Bonnen Does The Environmental Strut (Again)
February 12th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Regular Observer readers will remember Dennis Bonnen (R-Angleton). Bonnen chairs the Texas House Committee on Environmental Regulation.
He now is also chairman of the Select Committee on Electric Generation Capacity and Environmental Effects. Speaker Tom Craddick has charged the new committee with preparing a long-term energy and environmental impact plan to be submitted to the next Legislature.
At its recent first hearing, Bonnen managed to make some news by boldly declaring that Texas has done a great job on the environment when compared to other states — something he says people just don’t recognize.
The Dallas Morning News reported last week that Bonnen said, “We’re probably one of the best environmental states in the country. Now there are those that would like to argue that, but the facts won’t allow it.”
The article notes: “The standing-room-only audience was largely power industry managers, lawyers and lobbyists.”
This is how “Dennis the Menace” operates. He claims to be an effective environmental steward, all the while killing bills in his committee that would reduce toxic emissions, toughen clean air standards, and give the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality the regulatory power to make a dent in Texas’ staggering pollution problems.
And then, as Bonnen likes to do, he adds a smidgen of insult and blatant fact manipulation to his sad, false argument about the state’s leadership on the environment.
Observer writers Forrest Wilder and Patrick Michels have written about Bonnen’s confrontational chairmanship style. In a post called The House Comedy on Environmental Deregulation, Wilder noted Bonnen’s response to the testimony of Environmental Defense’s Jim Marston (who is on the Observer board):
If you want to watch a YouTube video of Bonnen berating Marston, it’s posted on the Texas League of Conservation Voters site.
The Austin Chronicle also chimed in on the absurdity of a different meeting in a post called “What did Austin do to Dennis?”
At the meeting of the select committee, moreover, the defenders of the carbon dioxide-emitting, air-polluting, and all-around environmental nightmare fossil fuel coal waded up to the trough to push for more coal-fired power plants. As Dallasnews.com reported, our PUC chair brought it up:
“If we want to fix the environment, if we want to deal with climate change, then we have to do it in the context of: We are going to burn more coal,” [Public Utility Commission Chair Barry] Smitherman said, citing government projections that the country will rely more heavily on coal in the future.
Apparently, TXU’s failure to get all 11 of its coal-fired plants was the genesis for the committee. The Morning-News:
The idea for the committee came up when TXU Corp., now called Energy Future Holdings, proposed building 11 coal-fired power plants two years ago. Public protest about the pollution the plants would emit prompted the company to scale back plans to only three plants.
Here you can find a list of bills Bonnen opposed during the last session along with a list of the bills he supported — all of which either went too far in terms of sensibly protecting Texas’ environment or went just far enough on behalf of industry in order to gain Bonnen’s approval.
