Author Archives: David Evans

They say everything is bigger in Texas — and that includes the scale and brazenness of voter suppression efforts. The 2020 election saw record turnout in the Lone Star State, an 8% increase from 2016 overall and a 9% increase among nonwhite Texans. In a healthy democracy, such a substantial jump in voter participation — especially in a state plagued by notoriously low turnout — would have been cause for celebration.
But Texas Republicans only saw peril. Echoing former President Donald Trump and the national hysteria over election fraud — the same Big Lie that led to the failed Jan. 6 coup attempt — Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session of the state Legislature in the summer of 2021 to rush a slate of new voting restrictions into law. The fact that a multimillion dollar audit of the 2020 election by the Texas secretary of state found no evidence of widespread voter fraud did not deter the passage of SB1, with the Orwellian title of the Election Integrity Protection Act. “Senate Bill 1 ensures trust and confidence in our elections system,” Abbott said at the signing ceremony on Sept. 7, 2021, “and most importantly, it makes it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”
For Black and Latino Texans, who have fought against disenfranchisement for generations — and who have paid an especially high price for the environmental and public health damage wrought by the unregulated oil, gas and chemical industries that are among the perennial top donors to Republican campaign coffers — the timing and intention of SB1 could not have been more clear: It had nothing to do with “election integrity” and everything to do with limiting the influence of likely Democrat voters, especially Texans of color.
“It didn’t make any sense,” said Bridgette Murray, a registered nurse, environmental activist and community organizer from Pleasantville, on Houston’s east side. “We were in the middle of a pandemic, and you’re saying people can’t use a drop box?” 

“They make people believe their vote doesn’t mean anything. Nothing ever changes, so why bother?”
~ Elida Castillo, CHISPA Texas

 Houston is in Harris County, where election officials expanded access to the polls in 2020 with measures like extended early voting, curbside and drive-through voting, 24-hour voting and broader availability of mail-in ballots, all of which made voting easier for working-class people and people who were concerned about exposure to COVID-19. Harris County’s voting access efforts were successful: Turnout jumped about 25% from 2016, equivalent to more than 300,000 additional voters casting ballots. But activists like Murray have good reason to worry that turnout won’t be so high in 2022: SB1 restricts or bans most of the measures used in Harris County to expand access to the polls. In Murray’s opinion, SB1 is just “another tool in their toolbox” to keep Texans of color from the polls — and she has witnessed the effects firsthand.
Now 69 years old, Murray, who is Black, has watched for decades as her neighborhood, Pleasantville — once a bustling community of Black laborers, professionals and small business owners — has been walled in by highways, railyards, truckyards, chemical storage facilities and other industrial businesses. In 2012, Murray founded a nonprofit called Achieving Community Tasks Successfully (ACTS) to organize Pleasantville residents to work for better air quality, reduced exposure to toxins from industrial facilities and improvements to flood mitigation, but she says she remembers a time when her neighbors could work with their elected officials to get results.
“It wasn’t unusual for there to be over 90% voter turnout back in the day, and it was basically the power of the vote that helped get a lot of the infrastructure improvements that we needed in our community,” said Murray, who cast her first vote in 1971 at age 18. “Our community leaders were able to get the funding to close open ditches, to make use of green spaces. There were a lot of infrastructure improvements at that time.”
But over the course of her life, Murray has witnessed her community’s voice in regional and state politics diminished to a whisper due to voter suppression and gerrymandering. “Voter suppression means that communities that need those dollars for infrastructure improvements can’t get them,” she said.
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The history of voter suppression in Texas is as old as the state, and for more than a century, it was Democrats — anti-Reconstructionists and Jim Crow segregationists among them — who used tactics such as poll taxes, white primaries and terrorism to keep Black and Latino Texans from exercising the most fundamental right of citizens in a democracy. But the tables have turned. Now, it’s Republicans who are driving voter suppression, and the momentum of their anti-democratic efforts is accelerating.
“The Republican Party doesn’t want Black people to vote if they are going to vote 9-to-1 for Democrats,” Texas Tea Party activist Ken Emanuelson told the crowd at a Dallas County GOP event in early June 2013. Later that same month, with its 5-4 Shelby v. Holder decision, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act meant to protect racial minorities from discriminatory voting laws. Locked and loaded in anticipation of the ruling, Texas enacted the nation’s harshest voter identification law the very next day.
Shelby v. Holder also emboldened proponents of aggressive partisan gerrymandering after the 2020 census, who used a tactic known as “cracking and packing,” which splits up voting blocs and then crowds them into a few districts. In Texas, this process was seen as a way to undercut the growing voting power of nonwhite Texans. “They make people believe their vote doesn’t mean anything,” said Elida Castillo, who was born and raised in Taft, Texas, across the bay from Corpus Christi on the Gulf Coast. “Nothing ever changes, so why bother?”
The notoriously conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals tends to intervene to keep restrictive voting laws on the books and has only become more aggressive with the addition of six Trump appointees. (Only four of the 5th Circuit’s 16 judges were appointed by Democrats; a Joe Biden nominee is awaiting confirmation for the vacant 17th seat.) Numerous lawsuits challenging Texas voter suppression laws on the grounds that they violate nonwhite citizens’ constitutional rights under the 13th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act have been successful in the Western District of Texas, but time and again, the 5th Circuit has stepped in to block the lower court’s decisions. 

Texas has added about 4 million new residents since 2010, and 95% of the newcomers are nonwhite.

 As a result, prospects have dimmed for the kinds of substantial gains in the Texas Legislature that could move the needle on environmental policy — from climate change mitigation and resilience to green energy transition to environmental justice. “Gerrymandering has impacted us greatly,” said Castillo, who lives in San Patricio County, which used to be part of Senate District 21 — stretching north from the Rio Grande Valley with zig-zag boundaries clear up to far South Austin — but which is now in Senate District 20 as a result of 2021 redistricting. “You don’t always have an open polling location in your community, especially in more rural areas,” Castillo said. “They have varied hours and they’re usually not convenient for the greater population who actually work, so they’re totally inaccessible and inconvenient.”
Because of the 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision, it was the first time since 1965 that new district maps were drawn and implemented in Texas without preclearance from the federal government. An analysis by the Texas Tribune found that the new maps protect Republican incumbents, dilute the power of nonwhite voters and increase the number of districts where Trump would have won in 2020.
Castillo works as a pro-democracy and environmental activist for CHISPA Texas, a project of the League of Conservation Voters. Like Bridgette Murray in Houston, she has seen her hometown and its surrounding areas overrun by industrial facilities — in her case, a massive plastics plant owned jointly by ExxonMobil and a Saudi partner, and a Chiniere Energy gas liquefaction plant, to name just two.
Castillo said industrial growth in San Patricio County, where she lives, has exploded as a result of the lifting of the oil export ban in 2015; four years of regulatory free-for-all under the Trump administration; and, most recently, with the surge in global demand for liquid natural gas caused by the war in Ukraine. In her work with CHISPA, Castillo helps Corpus Christi-area residents understand the environmental and public health issues that affect them as a consequence of industrial activity, and she helps them make their voices heard in public comment sessions about matters like air quality and water usage permitting.
“I want politicians who aren’t going to constantly sweeten the pot by giving these industries so much money and pushing back when they come with greenwashing pipe dreams,” Castillo said, referring to proposals from major energy companies for carbon capture and sequestration facilities in San Patricio County. “They’re being proposed by the same industries that are causing these problems. It’s like a robber saying, ‘I know I broke into your house, but hire me to fix it.’”
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As Texas becomes younger, less white and less rural, Republicans have reason to worry that organizing efforts by Castillo, Murray and others like them will weaken their stranglehold on state politics. The state has added about 4 million new residents since 2010, and 95% of the newcomers are nonwhite. About 85% of the growth has occurred in the cities and suburbs of just four metropolitan areas — Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin — all of which chose Joe Biden over Donald Trump in 2020.
Harris County, where Murray lives, is the third-most diverse county in Texas and one of the fastest growing. In 2018, Harris County voters elected Colombia-born Democrat Lina Hidalgo to the position of Harris County judge. She has used her power of the purse to increase funding for the county’s Fire Marshal’s Office (to bolster its hazmat team) and its Pollution Control agency. Under Hidalgo, both agencies have stepped up enforcement against industrial polluters. Hidalgo has also teamed up with Houston-born County Attorney Christian Menefee, who was elected in 2020, to seek damages from major polluters in court.
It’s not hard to understand why the powerful Texas Republican politicians — who take in millions in campaign donations from the oil and gas industry — would view outspoken reformers like Hidalgo and Menefee with alarm. Abbott alone took in more than $12 million from the industry in the lead-up to the 2022 Republican primaries. In the same period, industry donors gave more than $800,000 to Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian, the senior member of the agency responsible for regulating oil and gas companies.
The more voters in places like Harris County get to the polls, the more likely it is that Democrats who share Hidalgo and Menefee’s commitment to holding the oil and gas industry accountable and taking strong action to mitigate the risks associated with climate change will win a statewide election. That day seems to be getting closer with every election cycle. In 2018, Harris County voters helped make Beto O’Rourke’s bid for Ted Cruz’s U.S. Senate seat the most competitive performance by a Democrat in a statewide race since 1994.
O’Rourke, who is currently running an underdog campaign against Greg Abbott in the 2022 gubernatorial race, has pledged to fasttrack the state’s transition to green energy and prioritize climate change resilience. He’s trailing by a wide margin, but a Democrat running in one of the less publicized statewide races — the race for land commissioner — may have a shot at victory. 

Harris County voters helped make Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 U.S. Senate bid the most competitive performance by a Democrat in a statewide race since 1994.

 Democrat Jay Kleberg is running against Republican Dawn Buckingham to head the General Land Office, which oversees state public lands, the Alamo and veterans’ homes. In recent years, the agency has also overseen allocation of federal recovery funds in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, which brought devastation to huge swaths of the Gulf Coast. Houston and its surrounding areas bore the brunt of damage totaling an estimated $125 billion. But in 2021, when outgoing Land Commissioner George P. Bush announced the recipients of the first round of $1 billion in federal relief funding, the city of Houston got nothing.
Houston’s inexplicable exclusion from relief allocations prompted lawsuits and, eventually, in March 2022, a letter from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development threatening an investigation and a potential referral to the Justice Department. HUD’s letter claimed the GLO’s process for awarding funds “discriminated on the basis of race and national origin” and “disadvantaged minority residents with particularly disparate outcomes for Black residents.” As of October 2022, the matter is still tied up in litigation and bureaucratic disputes.
Kleberg has said that he would have directed at least 50% of the first round of relief funds and mitigation funds to Houston and that he would use the GLO’s resources to make the Gulf Coast more resilient to climate change. A second round of $1.2 billion in relief funds is still pending, and if Kleberg wins the race for land commissioner this month, he will have an opportunity to make future disbursements more equitable.
Like many of her fellow Houstonians, Bridgette Murray is frustrated by the delays, and she does not have much hope that help will come any time soon. She watched as Interstate 610 drained flood water into Pleasantville like a funnel during Hurricane Harvey. The water was trapped for days due to the storm surge in the Houston Shipping Channel, causing severe damage in residents’ homes and contaminating groundwater.
“The city did submit a proposal to the General Land Office to address upgrading the storm water system in our community and creating detention,” Murray said, “but none of the projects submitted by the city of Houston were approved. So like so many communities, we’re still waiting for relief.”

Copyright 2022 Capital & Main

Laura McAndrews has seen and heard some things that the fashion industry wouldn’t want the public to know.For many years, it was her job to find factories to produce millions of items of clothing for big American brands like The Gap and Anthropologie.She started to worry about the environmental impact of clothing just as these multinational companies began accelerating into fast fashion.When she was asked about organic cotton in 2005, she found out just how easily sustainability could be dropped as a priority.”They were like, ‘Laura, look into how we get organic,'” she told ABC podcast, Threads.”I give them my little presentation … and they were like, ‘You know what? We just did some market research. No-one’s asking for it. No-one cares about it unless you can get us organic for the same price as everything else. Let’s just not do it.'”This period of her career changed her perspective on the industry.Dr McAndrews, now an assistant professor at the University of Georgia, sees a lot of the sustainability and environmental claims about clothing as little more than public relations spin to improve the image of brands.It’s a practice known as “greenwashing”, where companies misrepresent the extent to which a product is environmentally friendly, sustainable or ethical.”Greenwashing is a marketing strategy that gives you a reason to buy,” Dr McAndrews said.”Like putting a green tag on it, giving you a pretty little story – and now you feel good about your overconsumption. There’s nothing good about it.”Is greenwashing really that bad?As consumers become aware of the environmental cost of fast fashion, brands are finding new ways to market their clothing as sustainable.They might spruik the fast-growing nature of bamboo or lower carbon footprint of organic cotton, or tout the benefits of recycled polyester (more on that later).But the end results aren’t always what they’re made out to be.Earlier this year, high street retailer H&M was scrutinised for its use of bogus environmental scorecards for its clothing.

Most certified “home-compostable” plastics do not fully break down in home compost bins, a UK citizen science project has found.Key points:More than 900 people across the UK participated in a home composting experimentAround 70 per cent of plastics certified as “home compostable” remained as fragments or microplastics after a yearThe researchers say home composting is not an effective method of disposal for compostable packagingThe project also showed that while 85 per cent of people surveyed were “enthusiastic” about buying compostable packaging, many were confused by what “compostable” meant.The study was published in Frontiers in Sustainability.Danielle Purkiss from University College London, who ran the study, said even when people correctly identified certified home-compostable plastic and placed it in their home composter, most of those plastics remained in large fragments after a year, and many lingered as microplastics.Some barely broke down at all.”We have photos [of home compost-certified plastic] that people have submitted after 12 months where you can still read the home compost certification label on it, which is ironic,” Ms Purkiss said.”There were plastic bags that were still so intact you’d probably be able to hold your shopping in them.”Plastic not so fantasticThe world’s appetite for plastic has increased dramatically in the past couple of decades. Since the turn of the millennium, global plastics production — and ensuing waste — doubled.Around half of the 353 million tonnes of plastic waste generated in 2019 ended up in landfill, while just under a quarter was “mismanaged”, meaning it was burned in open pits or ended up in waterways, oceans or dumped on land.And while plastics that make their way into the environment do eventually break down, the process can take hundreds of years, and involves them first eroding into microplastics that permeate every corner of the globe.In an attempt to tackle plastic pollution, many countries, including Australia, are phasing out single-use plastics and replacing them with recyclable, reusable or compostable options.Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume.WatchDuration: 1 minute 43 seconds1m 43s

Single-use plastic items including straws and some takeaway packaging are banned in NSW from today, forcing businesses to transition towards more environmentally friendly products made from materials such as bamboo and paper. Key points:Single-use plastic items such as straws, plates and bowls are banned from November 1Biodegradable alternatives such as cardboard will still end up in landfillWork is underway to create safer compostable alternative products for consumers to useBut new EPA regulations mean these “eco” alternatives cannot currently be composted and will end up in landfill like their plastic counterparts.The NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) recently clarified its guidelines around what was allowed in green compost bins, banning items such as cardboard and certified compostable packaging after research found that some products contained chemicals like PFAS, which can be harmful to human and animal health.More than 40 councils in NSW currently run compostable food and organic waste (FOGO) programs and all councils in the state will need to adopt FOGO schemes by 2030.But for NSW Far South Coast cafe owner Peter Haggar, restricting items such as cardboard and compostable packaging from FOGO bins will make the transition away from single-use plastics problematic.”They’ve sort of closed a door on a way out, or an exit route, from single-use plastics,” he said.”They’re going to have to do something about it because single-use plastics aren’t just [used] in hospitality. They’re also in medicine in a big way.”

Clean Up AustraliaBy Phil MercerBBC News, SydneyOn Tuesday, Australia takes another step towards reshaping its throw-away society.A range of single-use plastic, including straws, cutlery and micro beads in shampoo, will be banned in its most populous state, New South Wales (NSW), in a bid to reduce waste.”Australia has been very active over the last few years in moving to ban single-use plastics. We now have bans in place in over half of Australia’s states and territories,” says Shane Cucow, the plastics campaign manager at the Australian Marine Conservation Society.”It’s been incredible progress considering just two years ago not a single state and territory had banned single-use plastics.”Australia has complex record with plastic waste. Though it has long been accused of inaction, the country has also seen celebrated examples of leadership.One of the forefathers of the anti-waste movement was Ian Kiernan, a Sydney-born property developer who became a professional yachtsman.In the 1980s, he had an environmental epiphany in the waters of the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean during a solo race around the world.”He was horrified by the amount of pollution, particularly plastic,” explains one of his daughters, Pip. “So, that was the impetus to come back and do something about it.”In 1989, Ian Kiernan launched Clean Up Sydney Harbour, a community effort to tackle litter in one of the world’s most famous waterways.”He was worrying that no-one would turn up, but 40,000 Sydneysiders turned up,” Ms Kiernan tells the BBC.This video can not be playedTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.A year later it became a national event, and Clean Up Australia Day was born.”It is absolutely quintessentially Australian in that we are great volunteers but we don’t like being told what to do. Clean Up Australia is about empowering you. You chose where you clean up. We’ll give you the tools,” adds Ms Kiernan, who’s the chair of the organisation her father set up, which attracts a million volunteer waste warriors each year. “He’d be encouraged to see that we are phasing out problematic single-use plastic items. But he would equally be frustrated that we are still producing and wasting so much plastic across the world.”The man who wanted to clean up the worldDo single-use plastic bans work?Can seaweed help end plastic pollution?In June, NSW banned lightweight plastic bags. Other items included in Tuesday’s ban include single-use plastic drink stirrers and cotton buds, as well as expanded polystyrene containers for take-away food.Queensland will disallow many of these products in September 2023, along with heavyweight plastic shopping bags under a proposed “five-year roadmap”. Victoria will act sooner, and will ban “problematic single-use plastics from sale or supply” from 1 February 2023.The pace of legislative reform might be impressive, but Australia’s mission to tame its plastic waste problem has a long way to go.”We’re just at the start of our journey. Across the board Australia’s plastic packaging recycling rate is still just 16%. Our national target is 70%,” Mr Cucow says. “So, we are a very long way from actually recovering and recycling all of our plastic in Australia.”Australia is so far behind in terms of recycling our plastic packaging and one of the big barriers is soft plastics, which are very difficult to recycle. That’s a legacy of decades of neglect.”Getty ImagesA global comparison of plastics waste management placed Australia 7th among 25 nations for its overall efforts to control plastic pollution, behind European countries, Japan, the UK and the US. Australia was rated 1st for “promoting safe and informed plastic usage” but 16th for “efficient collection and sorting channels”, said the report released in October last year.About a third of Australians live in NSW. The state’s environment minister, James Griffin, has acknowledged the challenges that lie ahead.”The amount of plastic in our oceans is predicted to outweigh the amount of fish by 2050. That is a horrifying prediction and a call to action to ensure our wildlife… can have a brighter future,” he said.Mr Griffin asserted the state’s bans would “prevent 2.7 billion items of plastic litter from entering the environment over the next 20 years”.In June, Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, reported some good news that plastic pollution littering the coast had fallen by 29% compared to 2013.For Britta Denise Hardesty, a senior principal research scientist in its Oceans and Atmosphere unit, it was a “heartening” discovery and a sign that government policies were working.”We are starting to see a real change in our relationship with plastic,” she told the BBC, noting a “really big shift” in state government practices, including buy-back or cash-for-containers schemes reward individuals for recycling bottles and other items.”We are starting to put a price on plastic where we actually treat plastic as a valuable item, as a commodity rather than just as waste. Think about aluminium. It has intrinsic value and we don’t tend to find it lost to the environment,” she said.”I don’t foresee that we are going to have a plastic-free future. I’d like to see us designing with a legacy mindset, designing products for longer-term and thinking about what is the next life of that product going to be.”For Pip Kiernan, her late father’s mission goes on more than 30 years after it began. “He predicted all those years ago that plastics would be the scourge for our generation and he was right,” she says.More on this storyVideo shows plastic entering food chain11 March 2017The man who wanted to clean up the world17 October 2018Plastic-eating superworms offer hope for recycling10 June

OFF THE COAST OF SANTA BARBARA — Just yards from the Fish 1, a 22-foot research vessel, a humpback whale about twice the size of the boat hurled itself out of the water, sending shimmering droplets in a broken necklace of splash.In the other direction, a hulking cargo ship, stacked high with containers, crept closer.About this seriesClimate Visionaries highlights brilliant people around the world who are working to find climate solutions.Aboard the Fish 1, a slight figure whose face is crinkled from years in the sun and saltwater, looked from one to the other. Ocean scientist Douglas McCauley wanted to see whether the near real-time detection system he and his colleagues had developed, Whale Safe, could avert collisions between whales and ships in the Santa Barbara Channel.The tool represents one of the ways McCauley, who heads the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California Santa Barbara, is working to protect the ocean even as it becomes more industrialized. By collecting data from several sources — an acoustic monitoring buoy that listens for whale songs, identifies them according to species with an algorithm and sends that information to satellites; a predictive habitat model for blue whales; and sightings logged in an app — Whale Safe forecasts to ships the chances of meeting a whale. Then, it grades shipping companies on whether they actually slow down to 10 knots or less during whale migrations, from May 1 to Dec. 15.Story continues below advertisementAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAdvertisement“We can literally watch all of the ships in California and across the whole ocean; we are better positioned than ever before to try to track damage as it occurs, or before it occurs,” McCauley said a few days later in a Zoom call from the French Polynesian island of Moorea, where he is spending a month researching coral reefs. “We are in trouble if we don’t do something different, and I realized that if I kept sticking my head literally underwater or stayed in the lab, these problems weren’t going to fix themselves.”Humans have worked in the seas for centuries: fishing, seafaring and more recently, drilling for oil and gas and the development of offshore wind farms. Shipping lanes cross almost every surface of the sea, except for shrinking swaths of the Southern and Arctic Ocean.But as development has intensified and the planet has warmed, the 43-year-old McCauley has ventured into the gray area between scientific research and advocacy to try to fix these problems — or at least make them visible.A cargo ship is seen in the distance near the Channel Islands on Sept. 30.
He is trying to save the whales; collect plastic; explore the links between climate change, overfishing and nutrition in the South Pacific; warn about the dangers of seabed mining; track sharks using drones and artificial intelligence; and calculate the benefits to people, animals and the planet that come from protecting broad swaths of the sea.“One of Doug’s compelling traits as a scientist is that he is keen to explore outside the box,” said Benjamin Halpern, a UCSB professor of marine biology and ocean conservation who has worked with McCauley for about a decade. “He is a very creative thinker, and able to think differently about the solutions to problems and what kinds of research and science can help inform those.”[These whales are on the brink. Now comes climate change — and wind power]In meetings with corporate executives and political leaders, McCauley has made a consistent argument: Protecting the sea is in our interest, since it already does a lot of the work for us.In 2020 McCauley led a report that provided a framework for marine protected areas on the high seas, finding that such refuges could be powerful tools for biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration and climate resilience. Even port and fishing communities, he argued, depend on an ocean that is still wild and alive.“We have a globally unique chance to talk about this before it’s too late,” he said.California sea lions swim near the Channel Islands in California on Sept. 30. Humpback whales swim near the Channel Islands. Ship strikes killed 80 whales annually in three of the past four years, but the toll is probably much higher than reported.
Dolphins swim near the Channel Islands in California.California sea lions swim near the Channel Islands in California on Sept. 30.