Texas can’t secede from the planet
By William Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.
In June 2008, I was one of several speakers at the World Investment Conference in the French resort town of La Baule. The keynote speaker at dinner one night was Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
The conference’s mission was to build trans-Atlantic business collaboration in areas such as green technologies. Along those lines, I expected Perry to talk about pressing issues of the day, including the great business opportunities the industrial nations of Western Europe and North America could create by leading the world’s transition to a clean energy economy.
Perry’s insights would be instructive, I thought, given what’s happening in Texas. It puts more greenhouse gas emissions into the air than any other U.S. state. It burns more coal than any other state. But it’s also America’s leader in wind energy.
Instead, Perry delivered several minutes of unadulterated Texas boosterism. After extending a “warm Texas howdy” to the audience, he praised his state as one of the best places in the world to do business, in large part because of his efforts to “reduce government interference” and to “cut away all the bureaucratic red tape that stands between hardworking Texans and the American Dream”.
“May God bless you and may He continue to bless the great state of Texas,” Perry concluded.
The dinner was delicious. Perry’s speech, on the other hand, left a bad taste in the mouths of the conferees with whom I talked later. The speech contained nothing that could not have been mailed to La Baule in a box of brochures. No insights into the challenge of leadership in a state that finds itself somewhere between the old energy economy and the new. No proposals for dynamic and profitable green-tech partnerships between the United States and Europe. Nothing about what the corporate leaders in the room could do proactively to cut pollution, save money and reduce the need for government intervention. As they say in Texas, Perry’s speech was all hat and no cattle.
It appears Perry hasn’t expanded his vision now that he’s rumored to be positioning himself as a candidate for President. He still demonstrates he can’t see much beyond Texas’s borders. A prime example is the state’s lawsuit to stop the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.
Under the Clean Air Act, states are given the opportunity to implement their own plans for reducing pollutants. If states refuse, as Texas is doing, EPA is obligated by law to step in with a federal implementation plan.
On Dec. 10, a federal appeals court rejected a request from Texas and other plaintiffs to freeze EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gases while their lawsuits against the agency are moving through the courts. The appeals court ruled the plaintiffs failed to substantiate their claim that the new regulations would cause economic harm. The ruling will allow EPA’s regulations to go into effect on Jan. 2, as scheduled.
What Perry doesn’t acknowledge, or perhaps doesn’t understand, is that greenhouse gases are not solely a state issue. Caron emissions don’t recognize state borders. Each state’s emissions contribute to global climate change, triggering long-lasting climatic disruptions whose impacts reach around the world and across generations.
If a state like Texas does not clean up its own act, then the federal government has a moral as well as legal obligation to intervene on behalf of all the rest of us who are not Texans.
On an issue like this, parochialism is a poor qualification for President. Perry denies he plans to run, but it’s hard to avoid the impression that he’s Sarah Palin in cowboy boots. Like her, he wants to excite the Right by politicizing climate change.
As Kate Galbraith put it in the New York Times, “Every politician needs a villain”¦ Gov. Rick Perry has the Environmental Protection Agency, which has had the audacity to order Texas to do more to keep its air clean.”
But EPA isn’t the villain. It’s the sheriff. If this must be a showdown between the nearsighted gunslinger from the Lone Star State and the law enforcers at EPA, we innocent bystanders should pray the sheriff wins.
Perry’s speech: http://governor.state.tx.us/news/speech/4642
Kate Galbraith: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/us/politics/17ttepa.html
– Bill Becker is a regular contributor to CP and the executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.
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Icky Ricky (a.k.a. Scary Perry) went there only to be able to add a foreign stop to his resume when he tries to become another horrid President from Texas. If God were paying attention, there wouldn’t BE a Texas.
Governor Good Hair.
the new congress is going to neuter the EPA and Perry is going to win. Why do you think he’s so cocky? He knows now that he can get the Congress to impeach any EPA official who tries to penalize Texas while the EPA’s budget for enforcement gets slashed in the name of deficit reduction.
Meanwhile, all the industries that California is trying to crack down on are simply going to move to Texas, along with their jobs. Perry is working everyday to tell them that. In 5 years, Texas will be pumping out more CO2 than the rest of the country put together, and also will have all the jobs from all the industries that come with it.
And as long as there’s a Republican Congress to protect them from retaliation, there is not a thing anyone can do about it.
Rick Perry and Texas are going to win this fight.
wws wrote: “The new congress is going to neuter the EPA and Perry is going to win.”
For at least two more years, there will be a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate to potentially prevent that happening.
Rick Perry and Texas are going to win this fight.
True , and Texas is going to see a 5 foot rain event in the very near future.
Colorado Bob
And how many ten gallon hats will that take?
That should mess with Perry’s hair and maybe washout The Alamo.
When West Texas becomes a permanent dust bowl we should name it the “Rick Perry Desert.”
Let’s not forget that the same Little Ricky who tried to reject stimulus funds and despises federal government meddling will be first in line for federal aid when rain, wind and hurricane mess with his precious beaches. And I live here! But at least we will have high temps in the mid 70s most of this week.
It’s no surprise that Perry took this angle. Most of Texas is under the thumb of its major industry: the oil companies and refineries. Many Texans do not believe in climate change, or they think God will rescue them by the Rapture.
I live in Houston and it is very depressing to see how many heads are in the sand there. Houston is one of the world’s most unsustainable cities. It has no hope of surviving the coming cataclysm, yet business as usual continues unabated. A lot of people are going to get a very nasty surprise in the next few decades.
We have already had several catastrophic flooding events in the last ten years, plus several hurricanes. Now we are in a drought. But Houstonians live in their AC and don’t notice these things much.
(from another houstonian) The next battle line in Texas is about the Keystone XL pipeline destined to bring oil from the tar sands in Canada to Texas refineries via pipeline. http://www.sierraclub.org/dirtyfuels/tar-sands/faces/ One Sierra club rep estimated that about 80-90% of the oil will be headed to Houston refineries.
Texas has always been implicated in climate change, but the involvement in this project will make Texas an active contributor.
Unfortunately Perry seems to have more teflon than Reagan or Bush did, and energy issues didn’t even come up in the recent governor campaign.
I recommend Comanche Empire to all Texans.It will explain it all, in a roundabout way. Sam Houston was the last great Texan.
It’s just the Dunning Kruger syndrome at work. Everyone gets to vote, no matter how dumb, ignorant, greedy or vicious. When the lesser lights see a like creature, one just as ignorant, ‘God-fearing’, arrogant and besotted with their own grandeur, they will vote for that creature out of simple fellow feeling and identification. It’s a process that guarantees that imbeciles will rule. And imbeciles lack any real moral or spiritual integrity, instead possessing that craven religiosity that is simply an ego projection and a futile attempt to deny death. Without real spiritual resources they see the natural world as alien, fearful and hostile, and just do not give a stuff whether it survives and prospers.
Better dunk on Gov. Gardner while we still can. Won’t be long before his presidential bid begins and ends, and his hair is signed to a contract with “The Young and Reckless” or some paper towel company. I hear there’s already a petition drive to draft Mr. Good Wrench as his replacement.
But not just yet. First he’ll have to deal with a new super majority of Republicans in the State House who are even crazier than he is. Then there are the Branch Davidians gathering for the second coming of Vernon Howell and the subsequent shoot-out in order to escape with him back to heaven. On the other side of the state, a violent child “marriage” cult is threatening violence if Warren Jeffs is sent to never-never-again land. Throw in a wicked drought and the intangibles of Perry’s karma and…….
Govenor Good Hair. That’s a good one. Thanks for the laugh.
WWS: the EPA is kicking Rick Perry’s TCEQ appointee’s asses right now and will continue to do so. Obama was smart enough to put someone in who knew the landscape and went to work on day one. Elections have consequences and you dance with the one who brung ya. Isn’t that what Bush Jr. said? Obama has enough time to finish up the rule making to finally make Texas industry follow Bush Sr.’s Clean Air Act.
Joe – fess up, you didn’t really expect Rick Perry to talk about “great business opportunities the industrial nations of Western Europe and North America could create by leading the world’s transition to a clean energy economy” did you? Surely you must have read something about Governor Goodhair in one of Molly Ivins terrific editorials.
Seriously though, Perry is is an insipid gasbag who isn’t at all bothered by being governor of
the CO₂ state. We Texans live in a state that seems to be proud of its rapidly growing coal-burning habit and unconcerned by being #1 in heavy-metal laced coal-ash waste.
Perry is a pig.
From the Ironic news department:
Perry Issues Disaster Proclamation Over Wildfires
The proclamation covers 244 of the state’s 254 counties.
Perry says lack of precipitation has dried grass and other vegetation across the state. He says the “significant fire danger” is expected to continue.
And the reason 244/254 counties are in drought conditions is…