Photo by chrissatchwell

Is there one right way to recycle? Maybe.

The City of Houston is moving forward with plans to build a recycling project, but environmentalists still insist the project the city has chosen is, ironically enough, bad for the environment.

Now city officials have opened up the field for bids on the project, and Tyson Sowell of the Texas Campaign for the Environment is still saying the project is the wrong way to go.

Back in March, Mayor Annise Parker announced that the city had received a $1 million grant as finalists for a proposed recycling project, "One Bin for All." New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the sponsor of the contest, was, of course, a big fan of the idea, which would take recycling out of the hands of individuals and make it something that simply happened to all Houston trash as a matter of course.

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No water from the Oklahoma part of the Red River for Texas

If North Texans thought they'd get their hands on Oklahoma water from the Red River, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled they've got another thing coming.

The Tarrant Regional Water District has been trying to buy water from Oklahoma to help the growing population up in that corner of Texas -- you know, the part where Dallas and Fort Worth are located -- but Oklahoma legislators passed laws that basically made it illegal to sell North Texas the water.

Texas argued that the Red River Pact, an agreement made between Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana and approved by Congress in 1980, said that the states would share water "equitably" as it flows through the states. The thing is, Tarrant found the water that flowed south from Oklahoma was unusable by the time it reached Texas. About six years ago, the water district asked to tap into the water further up, across the border in Oklahoma. Oklahoma declined the request, citing laws that protect their water, and the folks at the Tarrant Regional Water District sued.

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To say that the town of West has had a rough time is pretty much the understatement of the year. Since a fertilizer plant exploded, killing 15 people and leaving half the town looking like it had been wiped out by a nuclear bomb, the people of West have been struggling to rebuild and move on from the tragedy. There has been help from the federal government, but now it turns out that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is denying funds to help rebuild the town, according to the Associated Press.

FEMA has already provided a ton of money -- millions -- to aid the town, but the decision means the residents of West won't be getting the funding that would help them repair their infrastructure, such as the roads, the electric lines, the sewer lines and, you know, that school that got blown up.

Gov. Rick Perry issued a statement on the FEMA decision on Wednesday, and it's stating the obvious to say he made it pretty clear he's understandably not happy with the decision.

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Remember when it was all about this happening?

It's been awhile since the Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed 11 men and kicked off the British Petroleum oil spill, sending barrels of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. Now it seems it's been long enough that the tragedy of it all has taken the track these tragedies always seem to take -- namely, veering off into the court systems to try and figure out which people and companies should be held accountable for what happened out there in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. And of course the companies and people in question are doing their best to avoid shouldering too much of the legal blame.

There's been plenty of litigation, and now two of the rig managers, Robert Kaluza and Donald Vidrine, are disputing the manslaughter charges filed against them in the deaths of the workers on the rig. Their lawyers claim that 11 of the 22 involuntary manslaughter charges filed against the men don't count because the explosion and subsequent spill happened on a foreign-owned rig operating in waters outside the jurisdiction of the United States. The lawyers say the other 11 counts of "seaman's slaughter" should also be dismissed because they were on a Swiss-owned vessel outside of U.S. territory. Basically, they're taking the age-old principle of whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas and trying to apply it in court.

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Photo by Jonas B

The next big biofuel? Exxon thinks not.

Once upon a time -- way back in 2009 -- Exxon Mobil announced they were putting a whole bunch of money into algae. Yep, they were going to turn the goopy seaweed-type stuff you find in the ocean and washed up on the shore into a biofuel that would replace fossil fuels.

And it still might happen, but after spending $100 million in research, Exxon folks have decided it won't be happening just now.

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Photo by Yortw

The Keystone Pipeline people just can't seem to win. First there are the landowners and environmentalists down this way objecting to the pipeline hauling the sticky black tar sands through their property. Then the Native Americans are furious because they feel the federal government isn't negotiating properly with them about running the pipeline through their property. Now there's an endangered beetle standing in the way, and the only way to safely move that beetle population and get the pipeline laid in Nebraska is going to stink. Seriously. It will take lots of dead rats.

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Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, who determined that he would rather continue business than "save the planet"

A couple weeks ago, carbon dioxide within the Earth's atmospheric makeup exceeded, for the first time in human history, 400 parts per million. They've not been this high for the past 3 million years -- when sea levels were approximately 80 feet higher than they are now. And while no massive ice shelves instantly sloughed off in celebration, there was a remarkable ripple through those observing. The tally was as much of an inauspicious milestone for our climate health as we could find. And now we're here, and we've no signs of stopping.

Two weeks after we reached the mark, the shareholders of Exxon gathered to vote on a pair of company policies. With this 400-ppm threshold fresh in their minds, the shareholders of Exxon voted 3-to-1 to bar the implementation of any form of either emission cap or emission goal. At a 75-percent clip, those with a stake in Exxon's fiscal health opted to continue pumping their wealth of dioxides at any rate they pleased. Coming off its second-largest profit in the company's history, shareholders opted to continue the selfsame policies that have helped, perhaps more than those of any other company in the world, smother us in the blanket of carbon dioxide mentioned above.

It was the seventh time such a vote has fallen among Exxon shareholders. As CEO Rex Tillerson said following the decision, "What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?"

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From the U.S. Drought Monitor

Will voters remember this in November?

To the surprise and shock of nobody -- aka almost everybody -- legislators managed to get together and pass the state water infrastructure plan before the 83rd Legislative Session ended.

They did it by basically breaking the legislation into pieces and passing each piece separately, including the creation of a bank where local government entities will be able to get low interest loans to pay for water infrastructure projects, which cleared the Lege last week just before the end of the session.

Perry officially signed House Bill 4 into law on Tuesday, and now it will come down to the voters to approve the $2 billion funding required to actually revamp the Texas Water Development Board and to create the State Water Implementation Fund (SWIFT-- what are the odds they named it after that other queen-of-the-breakup-song, Taylor?).

The thing is, there are already a couple of things to maneuver (and here maneuver is code for figure out how in the hell to get around these abominable snowmen of roadblocks) before this plan to help local government build better water infrastructure actually becomes an actual thing.

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Photo by shannonpatrick17

If you're the leader of a sovereign nation meeting with another sovereign nation to discuss a pipeline that will tote thick, sticky tar sands oil through your land if the project is approved, you might be just a little put out when the head of the other nation doesn't make time to sit down and talk this whole thing out. You might even walk out of the meeting.

Historically the Native Americans have never fared too well when they go up against the United States. Mainly because they get horrible new-to-them diseases like smallpox, fight and die, fight and are forcibly "relocated" or simply assimilated into the culture. It's a painful history of broken promises, slaughter and the steady ebbing of an entire culture.

But the thing is, the ones who were relocated to South Dakota and other areas now find themselves in an interesting position -- namely, their land is where a company, TransCanada, needs to go through putting in and expanding pipe to make the Keystone XL Pipeline. The project has been an issue of contention, with landowners and environmentalists concerned about the impact that a pipeline transporting viscous bitumen, a thick, heavy type of crude oil, more than 1,700 miles from the Alberta Tar Sands to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast.

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Going into the 83rd state legislative session, it seemed as if the state water plan would swim on through the legislative plumbing faster than Nemo went down that sink drain and onward to freedom and hanging out with some tubular sea turtles in Finding Nemo.

Well, that's just not how things went down. The water bill itself got passed, but the bill that would provide the funding for it faltered in the state House as Tea Party Republicans -- who never want to pull anything from the Rainy Day Fund -- and the Democrats -- who would only pull from the fund for water if the fund was also drawn on to restore education budget cuts made in the last session -- got together against the bill and managed to kill it on a technicality.

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