photo courtesy of Karen Hadden & SEED Coalition
Our ambush of U.S. Congressman Charlie Gonzalez at the King William’s Fair in San Antonio this weekend was both a blast and a great success.
If you couldn’t make it out, never fear — Greg Harman at the San Antonio Current did, and just posted a great blog post with full coverage from the parade. Be sure to check out the video, featuring our very own Sarah McDonald, ReEnergize Texas’ Patrick Meaney, and cameos from a whole host of Public Citizen, ReEnergize Texas, and SEED Coalition staff and volunteers.
More good news from the Curblog is that Charlie Gonzalez is still listening to both sides of the auction-or-free-allowances debate, Bloomberg article to the contrary.
Harman reports,
Ginette Magaña, a spokesperson for Rep. Gonzalez, said her boss had not committed to either side on the matter of carbon credits.
Not only that, but no letter exists as reported in the Bloomberg article, she insisted.
“There is no letter,” Magaña said. “He’s still looking at the bill and trying to find the best decision. I don’t have anything other than that right now … Charlie had never signed on to that letter … There is no letter.”
Things are certainly looking up. Check out this diary from Trevor Lovell of ReEnergize Texas fame for another perspective on the parade:
Sorry Charlie, Giveaways Aren’t Green
“This feels like one of the good old campaigns,” said Tom “Smitty” Smith, Executive Director of Public Citizen’s Texas office, Saturday afternoon in reference to activists swarming Congressman Charlie Gonzalez’s carriage in the King William Parade that morning in San Antonio.
Smitty may have been showing his age a bit (he’s directed Public Citizen’s Texas office for the last 25 years, and become a local legend and then some in the process), but the sentiments were positive among organizers young and old alike.
Congressman Charlie Gonzalez is the key swing vote on a subcommittee considering the Waxman-Markey bill. A conservative Democrat, Gonzalez has joined a misguided throng calling for CO2 credits to be given away, a solution deemed unacceptable by environmentalists and economists who point out that such a system would create unfair profits for polluters and cripple any attempt at CO2 real reductions.
Learning late Thursday that Congressman Gonzalez would be in the King William Parade, a Fiesta celebration for the well-to-do and well-connected King William neighborhood of San Antonio, activists at Public Citizen, SEED Coalition, and my group, the ReEnergize Texas student coalition, got together and planned a full scale outreach and publicity action to let the Congressman know that giveaways are unacceptable. (more…)
Representative Swinford and Representative Anchia, calls for an incentive program for solar power generation through surcharges on utility bills, and Mark Strama is looking at how Texas Schools specifically could benefit from the construction of solar panels on their rooftops.
For your Earth Day enjoyment, Public Citizen, Sierra Club, and Environmental Defense have written a joint Op-Ed that has been published in both the Austin American Statesman & the Houston Chronicle. So on this day of celebration, 
NEWSFLASH! Carbon Dioxide emissions may represent a threat to public health or welfare.
There is too much fun going on in the next few days… I can’t handle it. I wish I could be multiple places at once… and influence climate change legislation by sheer will power.. and attach documents to e-mails telepathically. Ah well, if wishes were horses, I’d have gotten that pony when I was six.
In the early 1970s, when it looked like the passage of the federal Clean Air Act was inevitable, power companies in Texas went on a building boom to construct 12 dirty, old-technology power plants before legislation went into effect. It was more than 30 years before the Texas Legislature addressed pollution from these “grandfathered” plants. Today, just as Congress and the Obama administration are poised to pass a series of tougher air pollution laws and cap global warming gasses, a dozen applications for additional coal fired power plants in Texas have been permitted or are pending. If built, this dirty dozen of coal plants would add an astounding 77 million tons a year of global warming gases to our already overheated air, 55,000 tons of acid rain forming gases, 29,000 tons of ozone forming chemicals and 3,800 lbs of brain damaging mercury. Your call to your state senator this week can help stop another generation of coal plants from being built.
This past Monday there was a public meeting to give the local community a chance to voice their opinion about the proposed White Stallion Power Plant near Bay City, Texas. The plant would be approximately a mile south of Bay City off of FM 2668, and construction is scheduled to begin next year.
announced an 
