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Texas relaxed environmental enforcement during the pandemic, state data show

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) is one of the largest and most influential environmental protection agencies in the country. With an annual budget of $400 million, it polices about 400,000 polluting businesses and conducts more than 100,000 inspections in a normal year. The agency inspects not only the state’s many large refineries and chemical plants, but also its neighborhood gas stations, dry cleaners, and public water systems.

Many of the state’s 29 million residents live in the shadow of heavy industry and in cities with smog levels that rank among the worst in the country. In short, a slowdown in TCEQ’s enforcement efforts could be deadly. So when the COVID-19 pandemic brought the country to a halt earlier this year, TCEQ’s chairman penned an open letter reassuring environmental advocates that, even though employees were going to work from home, the agency would continue to be “fully engaged in its mission to protect public health and the environment.”

But a Grist analysis of the agency’s internal data has found that, in the six weeks after the agency asked employees to work from home in response to the pandemic, TCEQ pursued 20 percent fewer violations of environmental laws than it did during the same period in 2019. The agency also initiated 40 percent fewer formal enforcement actions resulting in fines for polluters. Finally, in a move that appears in line with the Environmental Protection Agency’s controversial discretionary enforcement policy, TCEQ issued about 40 percent fewer violations to companies for failing to monitor and report pollutants emitted into the air and water.

Even as the agency reduced enforcement, it continued processing permits that allow construction companies, industrial facilities, and other businesses to pollute up to certain limits at about the same rate that it did last year.

Adrian Shelley, director of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen’s Texas office, called TCEQ’s enforcement slowdown “disappointing” and said that Grist’s investigation shows that the agency prioritizes permitting over compliance.

“There’s been a large period of very little regulatory oversight,” he said. “The implications for community health and for the workers at the facilities really concern us.”

In a 7-page response to Grist’s findings, TCEQ spokesperson Brian McGovern denied that the agency had scaled back its oversight of polluting businesses during the pandemic, listing various shortcomings of the data his own agency provided. He said that TCEQ conducted a separate analysis of its enforcement work and found that inspections had decreased by just 10 percent.

“While there have been some decreases in these [enforcement] activities as staff transitioned to working remotely and the economy has slowed suddenly and dramatically, these decreases are far more modest than you have concluded,” McGovern said.

The agency has long been criticized for lax enforcement. Analyses of TCEQ’s enforcement work by environmental advocates and journalists have consistently found that the agency rarely penalizes polluters while disproportionately issuing fines against small business owners. A 2017 Texas Tribune investigation found that the agency levied fines in fewer than 1 percent of the cases in which polluters exceeded air emission limits.

“Any further relaxation of environmental protections will keep endangering Texans who are facing this triple threat of air pollution, chemical disasters, and now COVID-19,” said Catherine Fraser, an associate working on air quality issues at the nonprofit Environment Texas.

Shifting priorities

TCEQ inspectors — both full-time employees and contractors — perform more than 100,000 inspections a year. Just 5,000 of them are in response to complaints; many of the rest are routine and dictated by federal laws. (For instance, every gas station in the state is inspected once every three years due to a mandate in the 2005 Energy Policy Act.) About two-thirds of the inspections are conducted on-site while the remainder are performed remotely by reviewing self-reported data from businesses.

Once an inspection is complete, inspectors write up any violations of environmental rules they may have witnessed. These citations range from relatively minor paperwork violations to more serious infractions, like those that cause degraded air and water quality. If a polluter does not correct the issue that led to a notice of violation — or if the agency decides the violations are exceedingly serious — then TCEQ purses formal enforcement action, which is typically accompanied by fines and an order to remediate the issue.

In order to assess TCEQ’s decision-making during the pandemic, Grist requested data about the complaints the agency received, the inspections it conducted, and violations and enforcement action it pursued from the beginning of 2019 through the end of May. Due to lag times in updates to the agency’s internal database, we limited our analysis to the six-week period starting March 16, when TCEQ employees began working from home.

We found that, across the board, the agency’s enforcement work shifted after Governor Greg Abbott directed state agencies to provide remote work options to employees in March. For one, the agency conducted far fewer inspections that led to violations. Last year, the agency conducted about 2,120 such inspections every six weeks, on average. But between March 16 and the end of April this year, that number dropped to about 722 — a nearly 70 percent decrease.

Clayton Aldern / Grist

TCEQ also issued 20 percent fewer violations in March and April, compared to the same six-week period last year, and likewise found fewer more serious violations of environmental laws. Agency staff categorize violations as “major,” “moderate,” and “minor” when calculating penalties depending on the amount of pollution, the threat to public health and the environment, and the compliance history of the business in question. Major violations are the most severe and trigger mandatory enforcement action resulting in fines, while minor violations are often over paperwork. While the types of violations fluctuate dramatically over the course of a given year, Grist’s analysis found a marked decrease in “major” and “moderate” violations after the shutdown compared to last year. From mid-March through the end of April last year, the agency issued citations for 17 “major” violations, but during the same time period this year, the agency found just three. “Moderate” violations were also down by about 20 percent.

“That’s a large shift,” said Tim Doty, a former TCEQ employee who worked in the agency’s enforcement division before retiring in 2018. “Is it because companies are coming up with excuses or a natural explanation? Maybe [inspectors] can’t get an in-person look and they’re not inclined to assign [the violation] a ‘major’.”

The agency also appears to have changed how it handles violations of routine monitoring and record-keeping requests. In March, it announced that businesses that are unable to comply with environmental rules due to the pandemic may request enforcement discretion from the agency. According to a spreadsheet that the agency has been updating on its website, it has received about 150 requests for enforcement discretion and granted about 80 percent of them. The vast majority of these requests are for extensions to reporting and monitoring deadlines.

The agency’s decision to overlook these monitoring and reporting violations may partially explain the overall decrease in violations. In March and April of 2019, the agency issued about 240 record-keeping and routine monitoring violations. This year it issued about 142 of those violations — a 40 percent decrease. Similarly, notices of enforcement — formal notification to businesses that the agency intends to seek penalties for violations — were also down 40 percent.

The decrease in enforcement activity is likely not due to businesses closing down to comply with stay-at-home orders. The vast majority of facilities that TCEQ oversees — gas stations, public water systems, and oil and gas infrastructure — were considered essential and exempted from shutdown orders.

Clayton Aldern / Grist

“This is really very bad in my view, because the plants are getting away with breaking the law now,” said Neil Carman, a former TCEQ air inspector who now works for the Sierra Club in Austin. “They’re probably less worried because they don’t think anybody’s going to come out there and call them about their violations.”

McGovern, the TCEQ spokesperson, said that the “conclusion that TCEQ is choosing to pursue less severe violations is incorrect” and that the agency “does not choose which violations it finds or pursues based on severity.” He said that TCEQ does not have a policy to not pursue violations of monitoring and reporting requirements during the pandemic and that the number and severity of violations can vary from year to year for other reasons — “sometimes dramatically” and “without our knowing or ascribing a reason.”

McGovern’s main criticism of Grist’s analysis pointed to several flaws in the data that the agency itself provided, which he said did not lend itself to an “apples-to-apples comparison between 2019 and 2020.” For one, the agency provided Grist with data on investigations that led to violations — not the entire universe of investigations. (While this might impact the accuracy of the raw numbers Grist analyzed, it would not impact the accuracy of the year-to-year changes.) McGovern also said that lag times for database updates could cause an undercount of inspections for 2020.

TCEQ publishes monthly enforcement reports outlining the number of inspections conducted and enforcement actions pursued. In response to Grist’s findings, TCEQ conducted its own analysis and found that it was conducting just 10 percent fewer inspections over the ten-week period from mid-March to the end of May, compared to last year. The discrepancy in findings is likely a result of the limitations McGovern listed as well as the agency’s method of counting inspections: According to McGovern, a single investigation report can contain multiple “investigation activities.” A count of these investigation activities is reported publicly and to the state legislature.

But Grist’s findings are also reflected in data that the agency is required to submit to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA has delegated much of its permitting and enforcement authority to states. Chemical plants, steel mills, refineries, and other air polluters receive permits from TCEQ so they can emit pollutants. Then, TCEQ reports the number of inspections and fines issued to those facilities. That data show that the agency conducted about 180 inspections each month in 2019. But the inspection numbers plummeted to 88 in March 2020 before climbing back up to 156 in April and 133 in May.

“This is just further evidence that the agency is giving polluters a free pass to pollute during a pandemic, when we should really be doing everything that we can to protect our health and our environment,” said Fraser, the advocate with Environment Texas.

A downward trend

A further look back at TCEQ’s oversight of large polluting facilities also shows a downward trend in inspections over the past 10 years. At the beginning of the decade, the agency was conducting more than 7,500 inspections per year of federally-permitted facilities with limits on air emissions. Those figures have now dwindled to a little over 2,000 — despite the number of facilities the agency is overseeing remaining steady. Similarly, penalties, violations cited, and formal enforcement actions taken against these facilities have also declined significantly.

After the EPA announced its temporary relaxation of monitoring and reporting rules for polluters in March, many states and environmental groups sued. In a recent filing, they argued that the agency did not consider the effects of the policy on public health and safety — particularly on low-income communities of color that disproportionately live close to polluting facilities.

“In addition to this existing backdrop of public health concerns, mounting evidence regarding the incidence of COVID-19 in low-income and minority communities amplifies the importance of considering the Policy’s impact on public health,” the attorneys representing nine states wrote.

In Texas, too, the effects of scaling back enforcement are likely to be felt disproportionately by communities of color. An analysis by the University of Texas Health Center found that neighborhoods close to industrial facilities in Harris County — where Houston is located — are at higher risk for hospitalization and intensive care needs due to COVID-19. These neighborhoods are also already at higher risk for cancer and a slate of respiratory illnesses.

Environmental and public health advocates say that lax enforcement and poor regulatory oversight are to blame for the distressingly frequent industrial fires and explosions in the Houston area. Last year alone, two major fires at petrochemical sites near the Houston Ship Channel burned for days and blanketed the city in a plume of thick smoke. A 2016 Houston Chronicle investigation found that major chemical accidents occur in the Houston area every six weeks — and that industry being allowed to self-regulate is one major reason for the frequency of unsafe incidents.

“The lack of enforcement action taken by TCEQ is creating this culture where safety and health laws aren’t prioritized,” Fraser said. “There’s often little incentive to comply with the law.”

Clayton Aldern contributed data reporting to this story.

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Texas relaxed environmental enforcement during the pandemic, state data show

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One state just banned reusable shopping bags to fight coronavirus

New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu announced last week that reusable bags will be temporarily banned during the COVID-19 outbreak, and that all retail stores will be required to use single-use paper or plastic bags.

The move is a dramatic reversal of the recent trend of states and municipalities banning single-use plastic bags. Over the past few years, Hawaii, California, and more recently Oregon and New York have prohibited the use of plastic bags. The bans are an effort to reduce plastic pollution, which is driven by single-use plastics like shopping bags and has taken a terrible toll on ocean ecosystems.

“Our grocery store workers are on the front lines of COVID-19, working around the clock to keep New Hampshire families fed,” said Sununu, a Republican, in a statement announcing the executive order. “With identified community transmission, it is important that shoppers keep their reusable bags at home given the potential risk to baggers, grocers and customers.”

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New Hampshire isn’t the only state to revisit its plastic bag policies due to COVID-19: Maine has postponed a plastic bag ban that was set to go into effect on Earth Day, and New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation has said it won’t take any enforcement actions against retailers who violate the state’s new ban until May. But New Hampshire is the first state to take the additional step of banning reusable bags.

So will the reusable bag ban make grocery store shoppers and workers safer? The science on that is somewhat shaky. It’s highly unlikely for the virus to spread from one person to another via a reusable cloth bag or another fabric, Vineet Menachery, an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Texas Medical Branch, told Grist earlier this month. While the novel coronavirus, like previous coronaviruses, has been shown to survive for up to three days on plastic and stainless steel surfaces if left undisturbed, it’s easily destroyed with soap and water, or rubbing alcohol. So washing a cloth bag with detergent would stop the virus in its tracks.

That said, grocery store workers obviously don’t know whether a person bringing a reusable bag into a store has cleaned it recently or not. Sununu is right that grocery store workers are on the frontlines of this public health crisis, and we should all probably be doing what we can to make their lives easier and less stressful these days. And the climate impact of plastic vs. paper vs. cloth bags is actually more complicated than you might think — although reusing a bag you already own is always a more climate-friendly option than creating demand for a new bag.

So eco-conscious New Hampshirites shouldn’t feel too bad about obeying the governor’s order for now. Just make sure to keep tabs on your reusable bags so you don’t have to buy new ones once the pandemic is over.

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This Philadephia refinery is the country’s worst benzene polluter. Trump wants to keep it open.

Before it exploded last June, Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) — the largest crude oil refinery on the East Coast — was processing 335,000 barrels of oil each day. It was also producing some of the highest levels of benzene pollution of any refinery in the country, according to a new report by nonprofit watchdog group the Environmental Integrity Project.

The report, which follows a recent investigation of PES’s benzene pollution by NBC News, found that 10 refineries across the U.S. were releasing cancer-causing benzene into nearby communities at concentrations above the federal maximum in the year ending in September 2019. Under 2015 EPA rules, facilities are required to investigate where their toxic emissions are coming from, then take immediate action to reduce impacts — both of which PES failed to do. The refinery had an annual average net benzene concentration that was more than five times the EPA standard, beating a long line of refineries in the oil-friendly state of Texas. Out of the 114 refineries that the group examined across the country over the course of a year, PES emitted the highest levels of benzene.

Environmental Integrity Project

That includes the period after the refinery was shut down following the explosion.

Residents of South Philadelphia say they were awakened in the early hours of June 21, 2019 by a loud boom. Large pieces of debris poured down on the streets followed shortly by the smell of gas. Neighbors looked out their windows and saw clouds of dark smoke billowing from the nearby complex, which already had a history of safety issues.

For a while, that seemed to be the end for the refinery. Rather than make repairs and clean up the mess after the June incident, PES shut down the facility and filed for bankruptcy. The company put the 1,300-acre waterfront property up for sale, either to be maintained as a refinery or to be turned into housing or mixed-use development. And last month, after a closed-door auction in New York City, Hilco Redevelopment Partners, a Chicago-based real estate company, was the selected winner. But just when it seemed the PES refinery complex would shut down for good, the Trump administration got involved, offering its help last week to spurned bidders who are challenging Hilco’s victory because they want to keep the property processing crude oil.

The idea of keeping the refinery active doesn’t sit well with some environmental activists, especially in light of the new benzene report.

“Today’s report is just one more factor and data point on why this plot of land should not be put back into a use that puts local communities at risk,” said David Masur, executive director of PennEnvironment, a statewide environmental group working for clean air and water.. “Whether it’s an explosion or a constant threat of pollution from known carcinogens, the choice of putting a refinery there is just too dirty and dangerous.”

A community fuming

South Philadelphia has long been a diverse cultural hub for the city. It also faces multiple sources of pollution. In addition to the PES refinery complex, the largest source of particulate air pollution in Philadelphia and a repeat violator of the Clean Air and Water Acts, South Philly also has major arterial highways, the Philadelphia International Airport, large industrial factories, and other processing facilities.

More than 5,100 people live in the area within a one-mile radius of the PES refinery. Most of the residents are black, and 70 percent of the residents live below the poverty line. These residents also suffer from disproportionately high rates of asthma and cancer.

In a letter sent to the City of Philadelphia Refinery Advisory Group — a group the city created in wake of the June 21 explosion — at the end of October 2019, Drexel University researchers summarized the health impacts of living near the PES refinery based on data they’d gathered. They listed negative birth outcomes, cancer, liver malfunction, asthma, and other respiratory illnesses. They also included mental health impacts such as stress, anxiety, and depression that come with living near a large industrial site like PES.

“Because the PES refinery is immediately surrounded by several neighborhoods, communities near the refinery will be disproportionately affected by compounds released by it,” Kathleen Escoto, a graduate student at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel who was one of the authors of the letter, told Grist. “If the refinery released the highest levels of benzene in the country, especially considering its proximity to densely-populated areas, then the burden of disease that the refinery has on the surrounding communities is even worse than we thought.”

Benzene, a colorless chemical with a somewhat sweet odor that evaporates from oil and gas, is used as an ingredient in plastics and pesticides. According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, exposure to benzene can cause vomiting, headaches, anemia, cancer, and in high doses, death.

Philly Thrive, a grassroots environmental justice group that has been raising awareness about the public health costs of living near a fossil fuel facility since 2015, has been organizing community members from South Philadelphia to fight against PES and to ensure that they have a seat at the decision-making table.

“Part of what Philly Thrive has faced when residents tell their stories about the impact of the refinery on residents’ health is confrontation from politicians and leaders, who challenge our personal stories, lived experiences, and wisdom,” said Philly Thrive organizer Alexa Ross. “It’s always been offensive, perplexing and confusing to be challenged on the basis of facts.”

The refinery’s fate

Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to keep the refinery in operation, the fate of the land is still up in the air. On Thursday, Philly Thrive organized a call bank session for members to make phone calls to Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney and the Industrial Realty Group, an alternative bidder on the property that wants to keep it as a refinery. They cited the new report as part of their reasoning that the refinery should remain closed.

“This report just leaves us fuming, speechless, dumbfounded, and reeling about how residents have known for so long that the refinery has been killing generations of Philadelphians, but politicians still ask us to prove it,” Ross said.

“Imagine if we actually have the right kind of air monitoring system we need,” she added. “Imagine what else would come to light about what facilities like the refinery has been doing to human health.”

A hearing to finalize the details of PES’s 11 bankruptcy sale is now scheduled for February 12 in Wilmington, Delaware.

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This Philadephia refinery is the country’s worst benzene polluter. Trump wants to keep it open.

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Trump State of the Union’s brief environmental interlude: more oil, more trees

The reality TV president delivered a reality TV State of the Union Tuesday night. Over the course of 80 sometimes raucous minutes, he awarded a school voucher to a Philadelphia 4th grader, had the first lady present conservative shock jock Rush Limbaugh with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and reunited a military servicemember with his family.

Along the way, he ticked off a checklist of statistics, claims, and promises designed to galvanize his colleagues on the right side of the aisle. The most prominent parts of the speech touted the strong economy, celebrated the administration’s crackdown on immigration, and decried an alleged Democratic attempt to engineer a socialist takeover of healthcare.

One phrase that didn’t pass the president’s lips — to nobody’s surprise — was climate change.

Trump devoted just a few seconds of his address to energy and environmental issues: first by celebrating the massive oil and gas boom that has made the U.S. a net exporter of oil, and later by reiterating his commitment to joining an international initiative to plant one trillion trees worldwide.

The president took credit for the recent increase in domestic fossil fuel production, suggesting that it was his administration’s “bold regulatory reduction campaign” that made the U.S. the top producer of oil and natural gas in the world. But the U.S. actually reached that milestone under the Obama administration. Thanks to the explosion in fracking beginning in 2008, the U.S. became the top producer of natural gas in 2009 and of oil in 2013, according to the Energy Information Administration.

The president then went further, claiming that the boom has made the U.S. “energy independent” — ignoring the fact that the country is still subject to the global oil market, and that turbulence in the Middle East and elsewhere has the ability to affect gas prices in the U.S.

The dramatic increase in stateside oil and gas extraction has also generated environmental and public health consequences that went unacknowledged in Tuesday’s address. Though U.S. emissions likely fell by about two percent last year, those reductions are nowhere close to the cuts required to meet the targets set under the international Paris Agreement, which scientists say are essential to avoiding the most catastrophic effects of climate change. Research also suggests that increased pollution from the oil and gas boom could reverse that fragile progress.

Energy and environment have never been a point of emphasis in Trump’s State of the Union addresses. In 2018, the president devoted just two brief sentences to energy independence, focusing instead on immigration and tax cuts. Last year, too, energy and environmental policies were largely absent from his speech, save the passing mention of “an American energy revolution.”

The Trump administration’s decision to join the World Economic Forum’s initiative to plant one trillion trees worldwide is likely too little, too late. For one, if the U.S. is to compensate for all its 2019 emissions, it would need to plant trees on 371 million acres. That’s double the size of Texas.

Successful reforestation programs have also been hard to implement. Last year, Turkey planted 11 million trees, but according to reports from the country’s agriculture and forestry trade union, the vast majority of the saplings inspected died within just a few months. Trees also take decades to reach their full carbon-combating potential. Trees planted today may not reach full growth for 40 years or more — and that’s assuming they survive disease, wildfires, and droughts.

Then there’s the challenge of accurately monitoring and calculating the amount of carbon dioxide that the trees are pulling out of the air. Reporting by ProPublica and other research has found that many programs have grossly overestimated the emissions reductions from reforestation.

In fact, scientists have suggested that when it comes to climate change, conserving current trees is more helpful than planting new ones. Given that the Trump administration expanded logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest just a few months ago, one might be tempted to rip up Trump’s speech in frustration — if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had not already done precisely that at the end of the address.

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Trump State of the Union’s brief environmental interlude: more oil, more trees

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The Trump administration is helping 9 states prepare for climate change

When extreme weather hits the United States, coastal Southern states tend to get the worst of it. Just look at the past few years: In 2017, Texas, Louisiana, and the Carolinas were hit with back-to-back hurricanes, which left parts of those states submerged and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. The two years preceding that were rough on the South, too — flooding related to hurricanes Joaquin and Matthew killed dozens of Americans and cost the United States billions combined.

Any climate scientist will tell you that the natural disasters of the past few years pale in comparison to the climate change-fueled weather events coming down the pike. If state legislators were savvy, they would have taken steps years ago to protect their citizens from what’s ahead. The problem is, some of those hurricane-magnet states also happen to be governed by climate deniers.

In 2018, Congress devised a plan to help disaster-ravaged states actually prepare for extreme weather for a change, and President Trump signed off on it. It’s the first time national legislation has designed block grants to help states prepare for future disasters, rather than just clean up damage from ones that have already occurred.

That money, $16 billion of federal funding, will soon be released — more than half will go to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the rest will go to nine mainland U.S. states. The states that got the most money to prepare for climate change all went for Trump in 2016 and are all under at least partial Republican control: Texas is getting upwards of $4 billion, Louisiana is getting $1.2 billion, Florida $633 million, North Carolina $168 million, and South Carolina $158 million. Missouri, California, West Virginia, and Georgia are also getting grants. There’s a reason why a bunch of Republican trifecta states accepted climate change mitigation money without a fuss: none of them had to actually acknowledge climate change to access the funds.

That’s because, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) solicited proposals from the states explaining how they aim to use the funds, it didn’t require them to take climate change into account, even though the money being handed out by the department will be used to protect states from the effects of rising temperatures. Instead, the department asked the grantees to describe their “current and future risks,” based on the latest available science. HUD didn’t even use the terms “global warming” and “climate change” in its request for proposals, though it did ask states to take “continued sea level rise” into consideration. The task of drawing up the states’ proposals generally fell to housing and community development specialists at state general land offices or housing departments.

The results are telling, as the New York Times reported last week: Florida and North Carolina’s applications said climate change poses a major risk to their states. South Carolina and Texas ignored the issue entirely, instead using phrases like “changing coastal conditions” and the “destabilizing effects and unpredictability” of disasters. Louisiana mentioned climate change once on the last page of its plan.

It might seem like allowing states to sidestep climate change is just another way the Trump administration is undermining science, but HUD’s reluctance to compel states to explicitly say they’re preparing for rising temperatures might actually be a good thing. “There are still states where it’s a political lightning rod to acknowledge that climate change is responsible for damage,” Marion McFadden, head of disaster-recovery grants at HUD during the Obama administration, told Grist. “HUD is focusing on the plans, not the root cause of the need to mitigate.” Whether Republican states accept the reality of climate change or not, they’re starting to prepare for it — which could save lives and prevent economic damage down the line.

“Climate change clearly is the motivation behind Congress making the money available, and HUD is making the funds available to communities to put together their own plans for what they want to do at the state or the local level,” McFadden said. “They have to use the best science and the best data available, they just don’t have to connect the dots explicitly.”

Regardless of HUD’s stance on climate change, it seems as though climate-denying state officials could soon face pushback from their own constituents. In Texas, Republicans control the state house, senate, and governor’s office. But the top elected official in Harris County, Texas’ most populous county, thinks climate change is a major problem for the state. “If we’re serious about breaking the cycle of flooding and recovery we have to shift the paradigm on how we do things, and that means putting science above politics,” Lina Hidalgo, a Democrat, said in a statement to the Times. Two-thirds of Texas voters, Republican and Democratic, are in favor of government action to combat the climate crisis, and a third are strongly in favor of it, a recent poll shows. It might not be long before the Texas officials are forced to start connecting those dots.

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The Trump administration is helping 9 states prepare for climate change

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A chemical plant exploded in this Texas town. Some residents want to ‘show grace.’

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A chemical plant exploded in this Texas town. Some residents want to ‘show grace.’

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Why Greenpeace activists dangled from a bridge in Texas — and face 2 years in prison

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Why Greenpeace activists dangled from a bridge in Texas — and face 2 years in prison

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How did the fate of the planet fare at the third Democratic debate?

Another month, another Democratic debate (Round 3, if you’re keeping count).

After the seven-hour marathon that was CNN ‘s Climate Town Hall last week, ABC’s return to the traditional debate format, in which candidates get one minute and 15 seconds to respond to questions, felt like the political equivalent of speed dating. The moderators didn’t exactly prioritize climate change (failing to ask about Houston’s chronic flooding when the debate was in, of all places, Houston), but candidates stepped up, in part, by segueing early and often to the greatest threat to the planet without getting asked.

Although Thursday night’s debate felt comparatively short on time and climate talk, it wasn’t short on drama. Julián Castro seemingly took a jab at Joe Biden’s age and memory, Pete Buttigieg called debate infighting “unwatchable,” and Andrew Yang announced he would give away $120,000 over the next year as part of a pilot program for his universal basic income plan. This debate also brought some fresh pairings: Biden and Elizabeth Warren were on the same stage for the first time, as were Warren and Kamala Harris, the two top-polling women in the field.

In terms of time spent discussing climate change, the third Democratic debate felt like a step back, if only because the candidates didn’t have the same 40 minutes CNN had given them last week to hash out the issue of our times. The longest stretch of conversation about the climate crisis came when one of the moderators, Univision’s Jorge Ramos, bounced a few global warming questions off the candidates in the second half of the debate. That resulted in a lot of reheated leftovers from CNN’s Climate Town Hall: Amy Klobuchar once again emphasized that she had a good vantage point as a Midwesterner to deal with climate change; when asked if American foreign policy should be based around climate change, Warren simply answered “yes.” Harris said that, as California’s attorney general, she’s already taken on Big Oil.

But it did seem as if, fresh off of CNN’s climate master class, the candidates had found their footing on how to integrate the topic into a myriad of issues.

A few candidates brought up the subject right off the bat. Castro, the first candidate up, mentioned the “clean energy economy” in his opening statement. Bernie Sanders was the first contender to actually utter the words “climate change” when he promised — in front of a Texas audience, no less — to end fossil fuels. He also said he would pass climate legislation “to save the planet.” Biden, the frontrunner, also brought up climate change in his opening statement: “I refuse to postpone any longer taking on climate change and leading the world in taking on climate change.”

Cory Booker touted his own $3 trillion climate plan by mentioning environmental injustice during a response to a question about racism. He also talked about the effects of factory farming on the environment. On trade, Warren said she wants ”environmentalists on the table” at future talks.

Sure, it wasn’t the jam-packed seven-hour marathon we had last week, but the candidates often seemed keen to bring it up. Could this be a sign that Democrats are recognizing how our overheating planet touches pretty much every political issue? Tune in for the next round.

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How did the fate of the planet fare at the third Democratic debate?

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Texans could get a year in prison for protesting pipelines on their own land

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Texans could get a year in prison for protesting pipelines on their own land

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Elizabeth Warren’s latest policy proposal shares roots with the Green New Deal

For all her experience and name recognition, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is being out-fundraised by relative newcomers like Texas’ Beto O’Rourke and Indiana’s Pete Buttigieg this quarter. But when it comes to policy proposals, the Democrat is still outpacing most of her rivals in the 2020 Democratic primary.

On Monday, Warren released a proposal that promises, among other things, an executive ban on new offshore leases and drilling on government-owned lands on her first day in office. It marks her sixth policy plan in three and a half months, and is one of the primary field’s first climate proposals that touches on the themes laid out in the Green New Deal.

Warren’s proposal includes free access to national parks for American citizens and pledges to restore protections to national monuments like Bears Ears that were rolled back by the Trump administration. Most interestingly, she introduces the framework for the kind of conservation workforce that would put a smile on FDR’s face.

The 21st Century Civilian Conservation Corps, as she describes it, “will create job opportunities for thousands of young Americans caring for our natural resources and public lands.” The idea is to house the new corps under the umbrella of Americorps — the voluntary civil society program funded by the federal government.

If you squint you can see some similarities between Warren’s notion of putting 10,000 young Americans and veterans to work in conservation and the federal jobs guarantee laid out in the Green New Deal, which promises a family-sustaining wage to every American. The two plans, of course, borrow from Franklin Roosevelt’s economic stimulus package post-Depression in both name and content.

The centerpiece of the larger proposal is two-pronged: a moratorium on new drilling on federal lands with “a goal of providing 10% of [the nation’s] overall electricity generation from renewable sources offshore or on public lands.” Her idea effectively swaps oil and gas for renewable energy projects on public lands.

While some regions across the country have taken it upon themselves to impose their own temporary or permanent fossil fuel moratoriums, doing it on a federal level across all American public lands — more than 25 percent of the country’s total land — is unprecedented. Obama, in his last year as president, accomplished a portion of his (now partially dismantled) climate legacy through executive action. His administration removed certain areas of the country from oil and gas drilling, such as parts of the Atlantic Coast and Alaska, but also encouraged natural gas development as part of its “all-of-the-above” energy policy.

Warren’s public lands proposal contains seeds of what could grow into a full-fledged Green New Deal if the senator manages to clinch the presidency next year. Regardless of where she ends up, her plan is ambitious enough that her fellow 2020 contenders will likely feel the need to produce their own climate and environment proposals lickity-split.

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Elizabeth Warren’s latest policy proposal shares roots with the Green New Deal

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