Feeling the urge to open up, “It’s been four months since my last confession.” This space truly has been an empty hole for a good stretch. I’ve been absorbed in a finishing a series on the nuclear fuel chain, Nukes of Hazard, for the Current.

I’ve posted two worthwhile blogs since. One, Speaking from the Edge of the End, attempts to round-out my personal feelings about the series as San Antonio’s City Council reaches for another $400 mil to feed the nuke monster. Another questions our apparent inability to talk alternatives (despite MSM promises of a front-page Sunday feature weighing non-polluting options).

So, the vote comes, and clean-energy advocates are taking their fight to another level: threatening to raise 10,000 signatures from unincorporated CPS Energy customers and fight nuke-related bill increases before the Texas Public Utility Commission. In short: the thing will not die with Thursday’s vote.

Watching San Antonio energy politics, the pace of renewables development, and the clean-energy lurch in federal priorities under Obama, I feel a bit like the former Hanford nuke worker I interviewed for the third Hazard installment, Until the End of the World. Kirk Drumheller surmised that while the nuclear-fusion solution to radioactive waste may one day arrive, by the time it gets here the pricing and efficiency of renewable sources will be so good it will be an unremarkable event.

Our energy landscape is shifting so fast in favor of renewable solutions that don’t carry national security risks that soon enough it will be little more than a haunting memory. First, we have to survive it.

So HOE is in a rut. Popular (boss) demand has me scrawling all my madness (virtually) solely for the SACurrent.

Still, every once and a while a golden noodle will slip loose. Latest dangling gem is a Q&A — with me bouncing around the ‘A’ column for a change — in the latest Society of Environmental Journalists’ Journal.

How much did I pay for such dynamic exposure? How many travel-bottle shots did I inbibe to loosen up? What did it feel like to sleep my way to such heights?

Tease out the ever-squirming truth. It’s all there.

Or: How I snuck aboard the USS Scripps despite erratic biorhythms.

Getting accepted into the Scripps Howard Institute on the Environment for a week of specialized enviro journalism training has got my brain humming. It’s humming early Ramones. Stuff about Chinese food and electric shock; the crackle of adrenaline and obliviousness.

Seems the neural channels this opportunity is illuminating are deep in those same pleasure centers of delinquent memory. Simple, pure, and supercharged.

It’s as if the prettiest girl in school walked blithely by the rows on rows of steroidal jocks lined up like penguins at the school dance and gripped my elbow for a turn beneath the light-fracturing disco ball and streamers.

You know, if that sort of stuff mattered to me.

It’s even more dear to me as someone who has seen similar opportunities crash in the recent past thanks in no small part to what is known in head-shrinking circles known as a Major Depressive Disorder and a century past more simply, and less completely, as dark melancholy.

I don’t dwell overly much on past decisions — I’m more of present-predicament obsessive — but being invited to participate in a Q&A with Bill Dawson for the journal of the Society of Environmental Journalists a few weeks before loading my Florida-bound bones on Continental’s best gave me reason to pause and consider these past dozen years.

Why have I sought to tell environmental stories time and time again? Sought to make them central to my work? And, more generally, why didn’t I bum rush my way into Jupiter (or its like) two, four, six years ago?

Those would be lessons for me to suss out, and Bill’s questions certainly put them plainly on my plate (thanks, Bill!) in a way that forced me to look a little harder. While the details of all that mess wouldn’t be as popularly interesting, it’s enough to say the whole situation bumps my proud meter over this fellowship up another point or two.

So, like, this is for all my chemically imbalanced amigos and amigas out there. I pray you will keep muscling through to enjoy a few lighter moments to come.

Today, it will be my pleasure to plumb the obscurities of conventional agriculture, land use, topsoil loss, genetic manipulation, and toxics. When the weight of the world’s diet gets to be too much, we are promised a canoe trip down a stretch of the Wild-and-Scenic Loxahatchee River.

Tonight, Marla Cone, editor-in-chief of the Environmental Health News, will school us on the “slow poisoning” of the Arctic.

Tomorrow’s focus is on water and water policy; climate change will be the topic the day after.

You can check out our full agenda and even ship me your questions about any of these topics. I really will try to get them answered.

So, whether dear Scripps had a slow year and decided to round up the applicant base with a San Antonio rabble-rouser just to make things interesting or they thought I was cherry from the first string of epithets they stumbled into in the Current, no matter.

I’m here. Now somebody feed me some green knowledge. Or at least hum me some Road to Ruin classics.

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Scripps-related blog posts:

“Great Jupiter” ii (Marla Cone on Arctic toxics, etc.)

“Texas can look to Louisiana for coastal destruction clues”

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If you haven’t yet, read my critique of ongoing nuke industry efforts across the great state of Texas. Loving that The Daily Climate rolled it into their feed. I’d blush if all my oxygenated blood hadn’t poured into my purple prose already…

Straddling my body, perfectly preserved by ocean-milled plastic, a bottle drums your heel. Imagine a message in that bottle. A warning. “Blog machine stuck on ‘hum.’ Can’t figure out how to stop this flash non-fiction train.” Omnipresent Guest, possessing my Twitter feed, you know all.

NEW POST: CPS Energy coming back for another rate increase. http://is.gd/zc8Y This one is the “good” conservation rate increase.
NEW POST: Hardberger (and others) ask Gonzalez to push for tough climate bill. http://bit.ly/puBr9
ALSO NEW POST: Millions flowing to SA for home weatherization. http://bit.ly/tY6H5

LAST WEEK:
Matt Ahern’s EchoTown rolling out Saturday. http://bit.ly/cSLBe A promising new eco-endeavor for San Antonio.
NEW POST: On the pavement for climate action. P.S. did South Texas activists find their own Joe the Plumber? http://bit.ly/uiFgk
NEW POST human-rights and legal groups are suing mexico’s federal government over juarez femicides. http://bit.ly/23wOsh
NEW POST rep. gonzalez getting hammered by green messages at home. http://bit.ly/eFmha

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Wild in the Streets: U.S. Rep. Charlie Gonzalez got an early warning blast at the King William Fair parade this weekend from a handful of exhuberant climate activists. He must be thinking his support for giving pollution credits away to industry may not be such a sound idea.

I’ll be posting the video in the morning at Sacurrent.com.

Until then, let me just say that Charlie seemed genuinely surprised to be waylaid while a hat-wearing horse wheeled him about the delightfully quaint King William.

If he’d just play nice and support making industry pay for those pollution credits, we wouldn’t have to tell you what a louse he’s being, now would we?

[UPDATE, 04/27: Just posted video/analysis of climate protest. Enjoy!]

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Back-to-back killer news. The EPA is triangulating on greenhouse gas with the Obama Administration, leaving business-as-usual, ‘what-me-worry?’ petro-industry vassals convulsing in their untenable position AND I get shimmery gems from the Society of Professional Journalists up in Fort Worth, the former habitue of my former n’er-do-well teenagehood.

Let’s start with me, shall we?

Yep. It was a delicious night having the opportunity to step up for my paper, the San Antonio Current, and retrieve three First Amendment Awards from SPJ’s Forth Worth chapter (Since I was here an’ all, I felt duty-bound to collect my boss’s teardrop gem, too).

The competition open to Texas and Okie journos focuses on stories that fight to keep your government open and — even if unwillingly — more-or-less honest with you. I received the top honors (under 50,000 circ) in the “Defending the Disadvantaged” category for a few observations I had made about Bexar County’s pee testing ["Test-tube maybes"] and in “Investigative” for grueling expose on CPS Energy’s employee- and grid-management problems ["Hot Wired"].

Absolutely busted a button to see the Current do so well it’s first time out with SPJ’s First Amendment Awards. Even our newest newshound vaulted into a nomination. Everyone with the chapter was super kind and threw a great little shindig.

Icing on the cake, though, had to be arriving home to open an email letting me know I’d been accepted to the Scripps Howard Institute on the Environment. It’s been at least five years since I got to hang with a group of top-o’-the-crop environmental writers, teachers, and researchers. It’s just good air to be breathin’.

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Overshadowing my humble news, is the crunch of carbon regulation on the march.

The message from Washington to industry is, “We can do this the easy way through legislation, or the hard way.” Of course the former would be via a more business-friendly tool first used by Ronald Reagan to bring down sulfur dioxide levels linked to acid rain:  Cap-and-trade. That’s where Waxman and company are at today, but the promise of “cap-and-dividend” is more appealing.

The later, “hard” way is straight-up regulation via the EPA, which has concluded — again! Bush wouldn’t read their first verdict — that greenhouse gases are definitively linked to global warming and therefore pose a risk to the public health.

A couple Dallas Morning News writers attempted to put some local color in the cheeks of the EPA’s announcement.

DMN’s Randy Lee Loftis and Elizabeth Souder observe:

Whether the EPA or Congress writes a climate plan, Texas would find itself in the spotlight. The same factors that make the state first in CO2 emissions in the U.S. and seventh worldwide – coal power, oil and chemical operations, and cars and trucks for a heavily urban population of 25 million – also are among the state’s economic engines.

Meanwhile, geography puts Texas at special risk from climate change, research scientists have warned. Projected effects include changes in gulf fisheries and coastline losses, near-perpetual drought over much of the state and, a new EPA study says, more smog.

Texas is among a minority of states not involved in any regional climate plan, but it is taking some first steps on CO2. A bill approved by the Texas Senate and before the House would mandate a state registry, or inventory, of CO2 emissions and boost efforts to capture and store industrial emissions.

Now I have to appreciate this report for being one of the few that point out Texas has done jack to prepare for the inevitable conclusion of carbon pollution.

Yeah, there is movement in the Lege now, but otherwise we’ve been left with a governor who dismisses and mocks the reality of climate change (when he isn’t condoning thoughts of secession); a state that has failed to join the Western Climate Initiative to work with neighbor states north and south of the border to start cleaning up our act; and a state climatologist that doesn’t have the conviction or the balls to make a stink about the cost of our unsteady and unsustainable course.

Of course, you know who we’ll blame when the transition to pollution-free power gets rough, as it will likely in the near future. I guarantee, it won’t be the ones that fought the obviousness of contemporary science, delayed policy shifts as long as possible, and misled the public about the common challenge before us.

Still, had I the funds, I’d be gobbling up those clean-energy stocks. Just a word to your inner wisdom. Should we survive global warming, it’d be nice to be able to actually afford the food prices of the future.

Even as I was filing my story on the latest from the climate-change frontier, news was pouring in.

The EPA was preparing the way for CO2 regulation by declaring greenhouse gases a danger to human health, and fascinating panels about adaptation to global warming were being held in Washington.

(And, yes, i still prefer “global warming” to the more nebulous, Republican creation, “climate change.”)

Then the first climate-change-related bill of the 111th was filed. (Good old Lloyd Doggett, one of those good Greens who don’t get enough praise.) I had to grab what I had and ship it. The fact the landscaping is changing so rapidly is a good sign, but to what end?

I guess that’s where my global warming story “Last Chance for a Slow Dance?” takes off. As usual, Chuck did a fantastic job on the artwork (check lovely flower-clenching cranium above left). Don’t much care for political flacks blaming me for their failures to represent, but, you know, whatever…

You can find a few audio files and links to the blogs that helped shape “Slow Dance” at the bottom of that page. Oh, and that way cool computer modeling program from University of Arizona that charts what X-level of sea rise will mean anywhere on the U.S. coast.

Have fun.

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I was the pest elbowing along stretched in a bellyslide inviting junior-league ticks a chance at longevity enhancement. Nine-banded armadillo at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge hardly seemed to notice.

Folks at the San Antonio Water System are trotting out revisions to the utility’s 50-year plan and I’m pulling out of jungstown for a few nights of simple waterfront camping.

Good time for both, being, as we are, in this deepening drought.

Then — Joiks! — into the middle of everything comes crashing solar news radiating outta Austin.

Forbes kicks it thusly:

The city of Austin, Texas, approved on Thursday a 30-megawatt solar power plant, the biggest of its kind in the U.S. The measure passed despite weary opposition from leaders in the city’s industrial community, a group that pays 83% of the municipal “green power” tab.

The plant will be built and operated by San Francisco-based Gemini Solar Development 20 miles from downtown Austin. The 300 acres of Suntech photovoltaic solar panels is expected to be completed by the end of 2010 and will produce enough energy to power 5,000 homes a day.

City-owned Austin Energy will pay about $10 million a year for the power under a 25-year purchasing agreement with Gemini.The plant is a key component of the city’s goal to have 30% of its power sales come from renewable resources by 2020. Currently, 12% of the city’s power sales, or 439 megawatts, come from contract windmills in West Texas.

(You can get more details from the horse itself.)

Now much of that silicon and aluminum was good old Texan handiwork, I’m told, but that’s about it. Rest is Chinese varietal, ’bout the same as Texan but without the swagger of local jobs. Rumor has it that Suntech would prefer not to ship aluminum and fancy sand back and forth like this for long and may be willing to open shop on Tejano tierra if the market sparks a bit more.

Back on the planeta Queblog treadmill you may have noticed a series of posts this week, including titillating links between solar and water, and carbon and water, and water and lesser water. (If you’re drawing blank here, I elucidate below.)

rolling out the carbon-cutting guillotine (for charlie gonzalez?)Over the weekend a new audience got a little better acquainted with Mayor Hardberger’s rush to lay down new tracks in his final months in office — tracks that ideally would steer San Antonio on course to become an international leader in pollution-free energy development, if all goes well.

asked her for water, she gave me listerine
Point one: If you are buying water in little plastic bottles, you’re an idiot. Tough love, I know. But it’s time get over all that insanity.
Point number two: We sit on an ocean of beautiful, crystal-clear freshwater. So why is our water utility talking about desalination of ocean water?

bexar county commissioners choking on anti-sewage billAs far as bill language goes, this one pending in the House Natural Resources Committee up in Austin is as plain as a one-sided coin. Clocking in at a mere 423 words, the bill to outlaw the discharge of septic water into creeks and streams over the contributing or recharge zone of the Edwards Aquifer doesn’t take much puzzling over to comprehend.

canary islanders deliver renewables-cum-desalination message
Canary Islanders represented a good portion of the European settlement stock of colonial San Antonio, ultimately helping transform the San Antonio River’s headwaters into an organized system of canals for drinking and irrigation water hundreds of years ago.

The hits just keep on coming.

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Want more Aransas Pass pics?

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Were I a runner, this sort of effort would have in me on the ground, cramped and retching.

But I am a writer. I sit at my desk, pick at the keys, stare across the room and mutter to myself.

Just my way of saying: Hope you enjoy some of my thoughts — and some of the well tenderized thoughts of others — about our dear San Antonio River.

Plenty of slideshows and liquid symbolism for all. Check in with San Antonio returns to its ailing Yanaguana.