May 14, 2012 @ 1:28pm • Video Post • Tweet this • Share on Facebook

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Rick Perry, feds at odds over artificial reef program

The Texas governor and federal officials are in a disagreement over an initiative in place to remove offshore oil rigs that are no longer being used.

In 2010, the U.S. Department of the Interior began requiring offshore oil-producing companies to remove nonproducing platforms within five years. However, the state-run created the Rigs to Reefs program, which sinks capped and nonperforming oil platforms to create artificial permanent reefs.

March 28, 2012 @ 12:59pm • Photo Post • Tweet this • Share on Facebook

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Fort Hood ventures into solar power

Nearly 3,000 solar panels have been installed at a field at Liberty Village in Fort Hood.

The $3 million Fort Hood project was paid for by the private contractor that owns the housing area and federal tax credits. It will supply about 20 percent of the energy needs of the military families at Liberty Village.

Photo by Rodolfo Gonzalez AMERICAN-STATESMAN

March 6, 2012 @ 12:08pm • Video Post • Tweet this • Share on Facebook

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Restoring Lost Pines will take years of toil, millions of dollars — and help from landowners

What used to be here, before September’s fires swept through Bastrop County and blackened Bastrop State Park, is a mature forest of pines and hardwoods thick with deer and songbirds and the whoosh of breezes through treetops. Then the Labor Day fires consumed it, leaving behind an eerily silent cemetery of trees turned to charcoal and ground stripped to bare dirt.

The Lost Pines Recovery Team recently finished writing a five-year plan for restoring the vegetation. Officials say it will take enormous amounts of money, planning and volunteer labor to help the forest fully recover.

Read more of our stories, see video and photos six months after the Labor Day wildfires

February 17, 2012 @ 12:05pm • Link Post • Tweet this • Share on Facebook

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January 19, 2012 @ 1:50pm • Link Post • Tweet this • Share on Facebook

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December 12, 2011 @ 10:44am • Photo Post • Tweet this • Share on Facebook

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The City of Austin might enact one of the broadest bag bans in the nation and prohibit disposable paper and plastic bags at all checkout counters starting in January 2016.

In the meantime, starting in 2013, retailers could continue to offer thin, so-called single-use bags, but customers would have to pay 25 cents apiece for them, according to a draft of the ban. That three-year period would give the public and retailers time to prepare for the ban, city officials say.

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