During our most recent Green News Report, we sang the praises of California for a number of recent, noteworthy environmental accomplishments and initiatives.
You’ll pardon us if we do so just a bit more here, but only because it affords us an opportunity to bash Texas at the same time.
An editorial by the San Antonio News-Express late last week criticized how lawsuit-happy the state of Texas has become over the past decade. Specifically, under their former Republican AG, now Gov.-elect Greg Abbott, the state filed 31 lawsuits against the federal government from 2004 to 2013, claiming the state had little choice, as they’d become a victim, as some sort of “target” of the feds due to their “success.” Or something. (Didn’t those guys used to be pretend to be against frivolous abuse of the judicial system?)
Anyway, the paper’s editorial board noted how the state has filed lawsuits against the federal government of late on everything from Obamacare to immigration to voting laws, etc. And then they noted this [emphasis added]…
Yes, Texas is a big state with a lot of people, but that doesn’t fully explain why its emissions dwarf that of other states, according to the EPA’s latest rankings. Texas leads at 441.2 million metric tons of emissions. More populous — and also big — California comes in at 116.9 million metric tons. Texas’ emissions nearly equal that of the three next biggest contributors in the nation, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Louisiana.
Wow. Really? Texas, which has about two-thirds of the population of California, emits about 400% more greenhouse gases?
According to the EPA, it’s true. Who knew? This set of EPA data (using a slightly different data-set from 2011) ranked Texas as the nation’s top overall emitter, with 25.59 metric tons of CO2 emissions per capita, versus California, the nation’s second largest overall emitter at the time, with just 9.18 metric tons per person.
Last summer, Abbott had a stinging loss at the U.S. Supreme Court during his attempt to keep the EPA from enforcing the Clean Air Act by setting limits for carbon emissions at large new power plants. After losing at the Court 7 to 2, Abbott accidentally correctly described it as “a great victory for the rule of law and for the Constitution,” during his attempt to lie about the case to his constituents.
Even with the state’s shameful record on emissions and at suing the federal government, Abbott has vowed to file even more frivolous lawsuits against the EPA’s newly proposed rules to further reduce carbon emissions.
I don’t know if “emissions shaming” has yet become a thing, but, if not, it should.
How embarrassing. For Texas.
Texas and California are like the Hatfields and the McCoys for a good reason. I remember how corporate Bush buddy Enron scammed you guys to the hilt, joking about grandmas going down and – what was that quote about turning off the lights on the Titanic?
Good memory, Larry. You’re referring to this…
“Will you rephrase that?” asks a second employee.
“OK, he, um, he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day,” replies the first.
The tapes, from Enron’s West Coast trading desk, also confirm what CBS reported years ago: that in secret deals with power producers, traders deliberately drove up prices by ordering power plants shut down.
…
“They’re f——g taking all the money back from you guys?” complains an Enron employee on the tapes. “All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?”
“Yeah, grandma Millie, man”
“Yeah, now she wants her f——g money back for all the power you’ve charged right up, jammed right up her a—— for f——g $250 a megawatt hour.”
The phony crisis created by Enron traders led to the removal through recall of Gov. Gray Davis (who was wrongly blamed) and the installment of Schwarzenegger and his hand-picked Sec. of State Bruce McPherson who recertified the Diebold touch-screen voting machines in the sate after they were decertified by the previous Sec. of State following Stephen Heller’s discovery of documents showing that Diebold was using uncertified hardware and software in California and lying about it.
Huge scam, that most folks still don’t understand was a scam at all.
Man, that’s even nastier then I remember. Watching Enron have all that trouble was about the only thing I remember getting out of having the Democrats put in charge of the senate when Jeffords showed he had a conscience.
Didn’t Darrell Issa have something to do with unseating Gov. Gray Davis?
Yes, Issa’s opportunistic pretend outrage over pretend scandals started long before his determination to make an ass of himself over the Benghazi “scandal”.
Issa led the pack of those blaming Gov. Gray Davis for the phony power shortage caused by Enron. He led the fight for a recall election of Davis (having spent $1.7 million of his own money) which, Issa thought, would lead to him becoming governor, only to see Arnold Schwarzenegger jump in the race and still all of Issa’s glory.
The only amusing thing about the whole fake scandal was watching Issa, literally, cry at a 2003 press conference when he realized he was not going to become the next Governor of California.
The video above is described this way…
“It was not a citizen uprising that dumped Davis, a Democrat,” wrote Skelton. The 2003 recall election was called because one ambitious Republican congressman, Darrell Issa of Vista, spent $1.7 million of his own money to collect the needed signatures. Issa wanted to run for governor himself. But he gave it up when Schwarzenegger leaped into the race.”
As a gesture of kindness to Issa — as of December 2010 the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee — Skelton did not mention what should have been the career-killing moment when Issa broke down sobbing in front of news cameras during his announcement that Schwarzenegger had bigfooted him out of the race he’d used his fortune to contrive.
Wow, what a girlie man. 🙂
We need a three way contest between Rev. Swaggart, Issa, and Boehner.