Saturday, February 12, 2022

The Calm-Me-Downs Wrangle from Far Left Texas

The Environmental Wrangle from Far Left Texas


Flaring at Valero’s Houston refinery in Manchester sent black smoke billowing above the city’s East Side Monday morning. [...] (That) follows another flaring event Friday night (Feb.4) at the Galveston Bay refinery owned by Marathon Petroleum Corp. It too blamed flaring on a power outage. ...

Shell Chemical Company also alerted neighbors to possible flaring at its Deer Park plant Monday night, though the cause was unclear. Shell was not immediately available for comment.

Flaring events like these rain chemicals on the city’s eastern neighborhoods, polluting the air and affecting the health of sensitive groups, said Bryan Parras, an East Side resident and an organizer with the environmental advocacy organization Sierra Club.

“One of these events can exceed the permitted levels they are allowed to emit for the entire year, depending on how long the flaring lasts,” he said.

Just another day in Big Greasy.


Bruce Melton at The Rag Blog wrote a comprehensive essay about what he called the 'Tex-Ice' disaster ahead of Valentine's week, offering some survival stories about our current emergency and some new solutions to our existential crisis.  Sharon Wilson for Earthworks reminds us that methane releases are the damaging ecological impacts of Texas winter storms nobody really mentions.  Clean Technica points out the hidden costs of keeping natural gas-fired electric plants online (paying surge prices in a Uri-like event).  And Luke Metzger at Environment Texas has new research showing the role rooftop solar could have played in preventing 2021 Texas power crisis.

The last Wrangle this week has my calm-me-downs, and it will appear later today.