Color this old Greenie impressed. The City of Houston appears to get it, and the City's chief sustainability officer obviously does.

Last night at the Metropolitan Multi-Service Center, Lara Cottingham gave what I perceived as a stellar presentation regarding Houston's governmental efforts to stay in compliance with the targets of the Paris Climate Accord. The principal target, to which more than 400 US municipalities of various sizes have committed, is net carbon neutrality by 2050. Here is the PDF of the PowerPoint that she has used at a series of community meetings.

You may know that our alleged president unilaterally withdrew the United States from the 2015 agreement. The Republican-controlled 114th Congress never acceded to President Obama's wish that the Accord be given the force of a treaty, so His Orangitude and his oil-soaked cronies decided in 2017 to ditch it. However, cities and states have gone out of their way to affirm their commitment to the agreement and actually do something about it—including our own Petro Metro, under the leadership of Mayor Sylvester Turner.

In the ensuing months, the City came up with a plan and gave it the no-nonsense name "City of Houston Climate Action Plan." Cottingham announced last night, as she has at other community meetings, that implementation of the CAP is scheduled to begin in late 2020.

Through a somewhat fortuitous set of circumstances, I find myself at work an hour earlier than usual. Suffice to say that the cable is out at home, I woke up at 1 am, I was unable to get back to sleep, and after reading the first chapter of Ray Raphael's A People's History of the American Revolution I had the urge to blog. So instead of seeking out an early-morning coffee hut with dodgy wi-fi, I headed to the office.

Apologies if this entry is a sprawling mess, but it's not easy to keep big-picture observations short and tidy.

This past week-plus, instead of posting individual entries on individual news items, I waited until all the items congealed into a gestalt before commenting on them here. The gestalt in question has one of the items at its focal point: all the saber-rattling and other hubbub over Venezuela.

Since yesterday, I've seen some grumbling on Green Party Facebook pages about this recent development. Greens are not complaining so much about A. Ocasio Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and the Sunrise Movement staging a protest rally in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's office at the Capitol. What rankles them is that progressive Democrats are misappropriating the "Green New Deal" language that Jill Stein made the centerpiece of her presidential campaigns.

Also seen: Democrats wringing their hands about AOC and Tlaib upsetting the party establishment, virtually assuring that they won't get any committee assignments, let alone the ones they might want. If Pelosi et al. are that invested in bipartisanship and that petty about Progressives trying to shake things up a bit, that will reveal them as the Republicans in Democrat clothing they really are. Are the establishment Democrats smart enough to recognize that, though?

Sure, I would love to see these Democrats give full credit where it's due, tipping their hats to Stein and the Green Movement. If Green New Deal policies actually get implemented in full, without acknowledgment of their architects, I for one won't complain. We need to move forward on averting climate catastrophe with all due haste. Even if the Democratic Caucus adopts it but cannot get it past the Senate, I'll salute them for trying.

However, if the Democrats in Congress propose a watered-down version of the Green New Deal, fuck 'em. If they even try to include Cap & Trade language, fuck 'em harder.

Starting with a compromise, rather than battling toward one, is exactly why Democrats lose, both on Capitol Hill and in our polling places. On the issue of anthropomorphic climate disruption, science tells us that we have no space or time for compromise.

Saturday Activism
Despite what you've heard, not everything is big in Texas. We have a fiercely persistent progressive activist community in this state, including in its largest city. But for all its vim and vigor, it's tiny. That's why it's such a gas to see people other than the usual crew showing up at protest events.

San Francisco had about 30,000 people from literally all over the world show up for the Peoples Climate Movement's Rise for Climate, Jobs, and Justice rally Saturday.

Houston had about 60, from all over Metro Houston, but few or none from Third Ward where the rally took place.
​
We came together by the stage in the back of the Emancipation Park Community Center. I got some props from the organizers for riding my bike there; fortunately the weather was suitable for cycling, if a bit hot. We took turns making speeches and didn't march anywhere. Climate change or something has apparently made it too hot to march, even after Labor Day.

Harvey has drifted off to the northeast, still moving slowly, dumping a zillion gallons per hour on the Piney Woods of Texas and Louisiana. We have clear to partly cloudy conditions here in South-Central Houston today; yesterday, in light to moderate rainfall, I was helping a friend and his family move lots of stuff out of their flood-damaged home and surveying where Brays Bayou had lapped over some of its bridges inside Loop 610.

The university where I work remains closed, with classes canceled, but I will likely make a trip into the office to take care of some overdue business. Before that, however, I wanted to post this as an add-on to Monday's entry.

There has certainly been no shortage of articles, from various web publications, about the exact topic of Monday's entry. I wanted to link to just a few of those here.

Here's a pretty good piece from Ana Campoy and David Yanofsky on Quartz.

Naturally, Dahr Jamail weighs in on the climate angle, his specialty, for Truthout.

And at least one contributor thought it appropriate to mention the twin scourges of climate disruption and suburban development in the Wikipedia entry for Hurricane Harvey.

All for now.

Friday night, as Hurricane Harvey was pulling ashore near Matagorda Bay, we got a little rain here in Greater H-Town. It wasn't enough to scare my visiting brother into packing up his three sons and his new ladyfriend and all their stuff to leave town ahead of their scheduled Saturday morning departure. The Friday night meet & greet proceeded as planned; they rolled out of our sister's driveway early Saturday and arrived safely in Pennsylvania last night. The boys presumably made it to the first day of school this morning.

Meanwhile, here in Southeast Texas, we are not having school this week. Thanks to Tropical Marathon Summer Shower Harvey, in many places, the water is too high even for a school bus to get safely through. Area districts will resume (or in some cases start classes) the Tuesday after Labor Day. My own employer, a small private university, just now announced that it is closed for the entire week. (My director just texted to say that we'd soon have more news on extended closure soon.)

Most businesses are closed; social media outlets are useful for informing us which are actually open. Metro service is suspended, although yesterday I saw an Out of Service bus on Scott Street, presumably taking people to a storm shelter. Some surrounding communities are under mandatory evacuation. There are far fewer cars and trucks on our streets than usual, but yesterday on a reconnaissance walk I witnessed people parking their vehicles on Scott where it crosses Brays Bayou, getting out, and taking video of the high and rushing water.

Stormy Thoughts and Tweets

Hey Lee & Jill, I love you guys, but it's not certain whether we can pin the blame for Harvey on Anthropogenic Climate Disruption. While my neighbors and I endure this unprecedented amount of moisture, I have been careful not to kvetch on my social networks about climate change and those who enable it.

Presumably, according to the scientific consensus, ACD is to blame for our planet having more frequent, more intense, and wetter tropical cyclones. The amount of precipitation from Harvey breaks all records locally, but a lot of folks around Alvin still talk about 1979, Victoria about 1998, even if they don't remember that storms by name (Claudette and—well, Victoria's storm didn't even have a name).

​However, just as Katrina was a man-made disaster in 2005, I see Harvey as a continuation of a man-made disaster that has spanned multiple years. With Katrina, the lack of evacuation infrastructure and the inadequate structural integrity of the levees killed more people and caused more misery in Greater New Orleans than the storm itself. You could also throw in the loss of wetlands and mangrove patches in coastal Louisiana and Mississippi, wetlands that would have absorbed a lot of the rain.

In the ever-expanding Houston metropolitan area, we've lost some wetlands too. More importantly, we've been losing prairies. To the northwest, west, southwest, and south of the city, developers have been turning those prairies (as well as the old rice farms) into subdivisions. There is far less permeable ground in the watersheds of the bayous that flow from those prairies. The subdivisions discharge their treated sewage back into the bayous. Downstream, older neighborhoods that formerly flooded never or very seldom have had devastating floods four times in the last three years.

Meanwhile, inside the Loop and just beyond it, older single-family homes and duplexes with yards (aka, affordable housing) have been razed and replaced with omnipresent, butt-ugly, multi-story townhomes on big concrete slabs with token vegetation deployed here and there (aka, profitable housing).

Bigger, Faster, Stupider
The connection between development (which is not exactly new) and the recent flooding is officially controversial, as this article notes. Even stupid development is not new: Just ask the folks who bought in Cy-Fair–area subdivisions like Norchester and Ravensway, both situated right along Cypress Creek.

But there are reasons, other than the Attwater's Prairie Chicken, for concerned citizens having fought against development of the Katy Prairie and the construction of the Grand Parkway for so many years. Even Republican candidates for elective office havepublicly and vociferously opposed the Grand Parkway, which has kicked the sprawl machine into top gear. Just as the oil & gas companies are now resorting to high-risk strategies like tar sands, deepwater drilling, and hydrofracking, the housing mafia has begun gobbling up the most vulnerable lands that might protect the area from Harvey-esque catastrophic flooding.

The painful part for me is that I have friends who live and work in that sprawl—e.g., teaching the children of the Sprawlites. One of them posted photos yesterday of Seven Lakes High School, which over the weekend has turned into One Lake.

Inside the city, the builders may be building for density, but they're doing it stupidly and maliciously. Townhomes and luxury mid-rises are pushing out students, working folk, and families who have lived in their neighborhoods for generations but can no longer afford the property taxes on their over-valued bungalows. The ultimate insult is the new Grey House and River Oaks District, which I've blogged about previously: a new-urbanism-style luxury apartment village with luxury boutiques on the ground floor, where rents start at if-you-have-to-ask-you-can't-afford-it. (OK, it's actually about $1,700 for a 1-1.)

Rather than continue wallowing here, I may have some real wallowing to do today. I'll post a follow-up tomorrow or the next day.

I wanted to write something long and tortured about Our Alleged President's announcement that the US would be "leaving Paris"—i.e., withdrawing from the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. But I just couldn't. Apoplexy. Yes, it's a non-binding agreement, and the US would have totally fudged on attainment because we have a long history of flouting treaties and international agreements. But given all the work that went into Paris after President Obama's limp appearance at Copenhagen in 2009, given the European nations' commitment to the goals of the accord, given that members of the Cabinet and White House staff lobbied against pulling out, this decision is galling at best.

As with Brexit, there are too many aspects to this story even to form a coherent picture even in above-average minds. Several of the articles I have read have omitted several of those aspects. I'm not even going to try covering the implications of the Paris Pullout, much as I would like to.

So instead, I did a little upkeep on this website. In particular, I updated the Web Links page, adding links to the YouTube channels to which I subscribe. Because when modern life overwhelms you, there's always TV (or its Internet equivalents). Please enjoy these links responsibly.

What was I thinking when I decided to keep receiving Senator Ted Cruz's weekly email blasts? I had hoped to blog about his activities, or at least the ones he feels comfortable about reporting to his human constituents. However, I find it hard enough to read the damn things without clenching from head to toe. On the plus side, Cruz and his staff have the discipline to limit their communiqués to one per week.

In yesterday's message, after praising #45's executive orders to effectively un-regulate the energy industry and the Judiciary Committee's vote to move Judge Neil Gorsuch's Supreme Court nomination to the next level, the Tedster goes into his usual spiel about meeting with active or reserve military folks and the industrial lobbies who fill his campaign coffers.

It would be too easy to conclude from paragraphs like that, and the rest of the message, that Cruz does not give a tinker's damn about flesh-and-blood, air breathing people, rather than corporate or "pre-born" persons. It would be too easy to forget that he is not unique in that regard; plenty of other Congresscritters have similar sympathies or lack thereof. What continuously amazes and appalls me about Cruz and his ilk is the unmitigated glee with which he attacks federal regulations on everything. Apparently, homeboy truly believes that, absent these regulations designed to prevent needless death, maiming, chronic illness, and environmental devastations, corporations will behave altruistically, giving everybody a good-paying job and a pony.

As you read this press release about the latest fusillade of executive orders, you could nod along and say, "Oh yeah, that makes sense. We need jobs in this country, and regulation of greenhouse gas emissions is a job-killer." Or you could remember that the world's climate scientists have warned repeatedly for decades that not only is such regulation necessary for the survival of the world as we know it, but by this time we need to move toward limiting fossil fuel production and consumption to zero. It's not just Al Gore and those gol-durn lib'ruls at 350.org who say so.

You might also remember that both parties have held open the exit gates for American manufacturing jobs for the past 40-plus years, and that "job-creators" have fought every effort to require living wages and adequate benefits for health and education.

Sorry for not providing an April Foolish blog entry today. Far too many of my compatriots have been most dreadfully and chronically fooled already.

A Meetup group called Houstonians for Bernie Sanders currently claims 889 members, including Yours Truly DBC. It's sobriquet for members is "Progressives," which certainly applies to some of them. The group is associated with Houston Area Progressives, who last night held a meeting at Midtown Bar & Grill on West Gray Avenue. Midtown B&G has become the meeting place of choice for multiple left-of-center groups, but that's another story entirely.

I don't remember exactly when or how or why I decided to join this Meetup, even though I joined just within the past few weeks. Mostly I was attracted by the fact that some influential Progressives among them were organizing the protest march on the evening of Inauguration Day (i.e., tomorrow night) from City Hall to the Mickey Leland Federal Building.

UPDATE: Jill Stein has posted a reply on jill2016.com​ to Al Gore's remarks.

*****

Former Vice President Albert Gore, Jr., is quite correct about one thing: Florida's votes really, really, really count. But his campaigning with Hillary Clinton has gravely disappointed my ladyfriend, who got to meet her longtime crush during Climate Reality Training this past August.

At a campaign appearance with Hillary Clinton at Miami Dade College, the Sun-Sentinel notes, Gore recalled how much Floridians' votes counted in 2000, and the crowd responded with an enthusiastic chant of "You won! You won!" Considering the evidence that, if the recount had been allowed to proceed, he would have won Florida, the crowd was also correct about that. The Supreme Court and the Brooks Brothers Brownshirts stole the election from Gore and his running mate Joseph Lieberman.

Perhaps if Gore had won the presidential race in 2000, we humans would be well on our way to achieving international goals in reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the levels necessary to prevent the dreaded two-degree rise in global temperatures. Perhaps the United States would not have invaded Afghanistan and, subsequently, Iraq, because perhaps there would not have been a 9/11. Perhaps.