If you know me at all you know I dearly love Texas, and I utterly loathe the GOP who are ruining it as fast as they can for the quick money. Those of you who remember the Gulf Watchers will know that the threat spreads beyond the borders of the Lone Star State. Historically the South has a love-hate relationship with the environment, and a hate-hate relationship with minorities and poor people. The GOP has found a way to exploit that, at even greater cost to the poor, while raking in foreign money.
Now, on an industrial scale a lot of moneymaker enterprises in Texas are bad for the environment -- CAFOs, concrete plants, smelters, traffic -- yeah, even the newfangled low-emission cars, in big enough numbers, create smog; and in places like Dallas and Fort Worth and El Paso, not everybody can afford one of those new low-emissions cars, not to mention your "coal-rolling" megajerks. So yes, sometimes it's not even an industry; it's a "culture." Or a fad. Or, you know, a fertilizer factory or storage facility, like the one that used to be in West.
We have a lot of predators in Texas, when it comes to the environment. Not just oil and gas, but they're a big part of the problem, especially when we're talking about environmental destruction on an industrial scale.
If you've been paying attention to the Chinese industrial revolution (didn't start with Nixon, but the GOP loves to use its "boom" as a pattern for US development) you know that unregulated corporations have made the air unbreathable and the water undrinkable across Chinese territory. What the GOP won't talk about is the consequences for people who can't afford to move out of the Bhopal-lite environs they're creating right here in the good old USA, especially on/around the ports that serve the oil and gas industries.
What you may not know is the Chinese press (and to some degree the government) is trying to stop the worst of the corruption ... so the Chinese are exporting dangerous methanol fuel production.
To the US. Flammability, toxins, wasteful use of grains that could feed people, and all. For the benefit of Chinese corporations: not a gallon of the methanol processed in these sprawling plants, owned at least in part by notoriously corrupt Chinese industrialists, will be sold in the US. But the tax breaks and lax enforcement? That's right here, right now.
Texas and Louisiana, more specifically. Where "jobs" will be promised, and hazards will be further entrenched, in neighborhoods that are NOT places where you'll find Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry or Greg Abbott raising their children.
Where GOP "elected" celebrities like (hop over the gas flare with me)
Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry have created sweetheart deals for Chinese corporations to build methanol plants -- in / around historically black and minority neighborhoods.
http://america.aljazeera.com/...
TEXAS CITY, Texas — The administration of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a likely 2016 GOP presidential contender, appears to have had a hand in helping two Chinese politician-entrepreneurs — who in recent years have come under public scrutiny on allegations of environmental abuses and corruption — park assets in a proposed methanol plant beside an underserved, predominantly black community in southern Texas.
http://america.aljazeera.com/...
The big new one, according to Al Jazeera America, is going into Texas City -- or maybe Donaldsville in Louisiana. Or maybe, if there's enough money to be http://http://made, both.
ST. JAMES PARISH, La. — A prominent Chinese tycoon and politician — whose natural gas company's environmental and labor rights record recently started coming under fire in the Chinese press — is parking assets in a multibillion dollar methanol plant in a Louisiana town. And he appears to be doing it with help from the administration of likely GOP 2016 presidential ticket contender Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.
It's not news that living in what used to be called Refinery Row increases the risk of health problems related to environmental toxins.
It's gotten so bad even the TCEQ admits there's trouble.
“We have a friend that lives on Dona street,” says Connie Gonzales, who has lived in the neighborhood for more than forty years. “They told her that her baby wasn’t going to be born, and that it would be best for her to abort it. And she said, no, I’m gonna take a chance. And her baby was born, but it was born without an ear.”
Her husband has prostate cancer, and studies of residents have shown high rates of benzene in their blood, and elevated rates of birth defects. Bill Placker says the health effects of living so close to the refineries is obvious. “Just doing a little bit of talking to some people in the neighborhood, out of 284 homes it looks like forty to fifty percent of the people could have cancer,” he says. “Fifty percent of the children in this neighborhood have some kind of physical or mental disorder. And basically people in the plants or who have anything to do with them – they do not care.”
And the State of Texas under Perry and his successor Abbott think that a penny on the million dollars is about right when fining repeat offenders, as long as they're such upstanding citizens as BP, Valero, or Exxon.
Asked about the criticism from Harris County, TCEQ spokesperson Terry Clawson told StateImpact in an email that in the past year, the state agency and the Texas attorney general had issued nearly $18 million in fines and penalties to polluters statewide. What’s more, Clawson pointed out that earlier this month, the state reached what Attorney General Greg Abbott said was a record settlement with BP Products North America. BP agreed to pay Texas $50 million for air emissions from its refinery in Texas City, pollution that came during and after a 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers.
Thanks to the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Texas GOP's shortsighted focus on quick money (not to mention the well-documented bigotry and lack of care for the black, Asian and Latino residents of "unimportant" constituencies oil/gas/chemical/ag/insurance money has bought GOP "representatives" into the seats theoretically designed to provide government and stewardship for) -- and the spread of that mindset across the Gulf Coast (remember BP? Remember the Deepwater Horizon blowout in their Macondo offshore operation? Remember their Texas City refinery explosion? Yeah ...) and around the world, it looks like things are about to get worse for those who can least afford to fight this foreign invasion.
People like the folks in Dona Park -- and their industrial neighbor is Valero Energy, of the "Drive Clean Across America" ad campaign. Valero had a power outage in a plant that made the neighbors fear the entire refinery might explode.
“Everything happened the way it was meant to,” assures Bill Day, spokesman for Valero Energy Corporation. He says flaring events are rare, and declining in frequency. The fire Billy Placker witnessed was a safety measure, a way of releasing gas during a power outage. “It is pretty bright, when it happens, especially at night, because of the combustion,” Day says. “No external impacts to the community were known, as far as I was told.”
Far be it from me to suggest maybe he wasn't told on purpose.
On the other hand the GOP will happily soak up the money to turn the Gulf Coast into a clone of Beijing.
Unless we -- the people -- stop 'em.