Environmental Headlines for the Houston Region: October 25, 2017

Featured Articles:

1. City could restart curbside recycling in early November (Mike Morris – Houston Chronicle, 10/11/2017. Photo by Eric Kayne.)
   “Houstonians who have been dragging their overflowing recycling bins to the curb every other week only to roll them back again untouched finally should have their cartons and cans hauled off early next month, Mayor Sylvester Turner said Wednesday… ‘We’re hoping that we can start picking up the green bins in the month of November, hopefully the first week,’ Turner said after the City Council meeting. ‘We’ll see how things are going, but based on the pace that things are proceeding, we’re thinking we can speed that process up. That’s the plan.'” houstonchronicle.com.
2. Trump’s pro-coal agenda is a blow for clean air efforts at Texas’ Big Bend park (Tom Dart – The Guardian, 10/11/2017. Photo by Alamy.)
   “Big Bend national park is Texas at its most cinematic, with soaring, jagged forest peaks looming over vast desert lowlands, at once haughty and humble, prickly and pretty. It is also among the most remote places in the state. Even from Alpine, the town of 6,000 that is the main gateway to the park, it is more than an hour’s drive to one of the entrances. So far from anywhere, it might seem an unlikely location to be scarred by air pollution. Yet for decades its stunning vistas have been compromised by poor air quality that Texas, working with the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is supposed to address. But environmental advocates fear that the Trump administration’s pro-coal agenda will derail the prospects of improvement, at least in the short term. Tuesday’s announcement that the EPA plans to abandon the 2015 Clean Power Plan to reduce carbon emissions came less than two weeks after the agency revealed a revised plan to combat regional haze in Texas and Oklahoma that critics say will do little to cut pollution.” theguardian.com

EcoNotes

• 19 October
  • Architect Charles Renfro shakes up annual Houston Parks Board luncheon (Amber Elliot – Houston Chronicle) http://www.chron.com
• 17 October
  • Coal Struggles In Texas, Despite Pro-Coal Administration (Travis Bubenik – Houston Public Media) http://www.houstonpublicmedia.org
  • Regreening the planet could cut as much carbon as halting oil use – report (The Guardian) https://www.theguardian.com
• 16 October
  • EPA to restrict settlements with environmentalists (Timothy Cama – The Hill) http://thehill.com
• 4 October
  • Goodbye – and good riddance – to livestock farming (George Monbiot – The Guardian) https://www.theguardian.com