Texas regulators last week approved water rights for a new, 2,500-acre reservoir to meet the growing needs of chemical plants, refineries and other industries on the Gulf Coast. 

A draft permit issued by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality authorizes the Lavaca-Navidad River Authority (LNRA) to divert up to 31 billion gallons per year from the Lavaca River. It would go into a reservoir proposed on property Formosa Plastics owns, about two miles east of its massive Point Comfort chemical complex, where the company has quietly pursued permits to expand in recent years since its Louisiana megaproject has been stalled by legal complaints. 

The draft will undergo a period of public comment before being adopted. 

It’s the first time in 50 years the small river authority has sought additional water rights, according to general manager Patrick Brzozowski. 

“There is interest in our area to develop industrial plants,” he said. “That’s where the demand is going to come from.”

The 20-year-old fracking boom in Texas continues to fuel a downstream buildout on the coast, where pipelines deliver oil and gas to enormous facilities that refine it into chemical products or prepare it for export by sea.

Around Lavaca Bay, this mostly rural middle section of the Texas Gulf Coast lacks the great conglomerations of chemical manufacturers that ring the water at Houston and Port Arthur to the north and Corpus Christi to the south. Here, a single actor reins supreme: Formosa Plastics, a $460 billion Taiwanese company, and its 2,500-acre complex on Lavaca Bay, which turns Texas shale gas into the materials for common single-use plastics. 

The company has incurred hefty fines and complaints for years over unpermitted discharges into air and water. It currently faces steep opposition over its proposed new chemical complex in Louisiana, which has mired the project in challenges over environmental justice, climate impacts and wetlands destruction. 

Now, its prospects for expansion in Texas trouble environmental advocates. 

“Formosa got such hell from people in Louisiana stopping them that they keep it very quiet when they are trying to expand,” said Diane Wilson, a retired Gulf Coast fisherwoman who won a $50 million settlement in 2019 from Formosa over its routine dumping of plastics into Lavaca Bay over decades. “They want water for expansion.”

Formosa declined to answer questions about expansion plans or the proposed reservoir. 

“Since the Lavaca-Navidad River Authority (LNRA) applied for the water permit, we feel you should contact LNRA,” a Formosa spokesperson wrote in an email. 

Industrial water demand

According to Brzozowski, two customers account for 98 percent of water demand in the Lacava-Navidad basin, the smallest major river basin in Texas. 

One is the City of Corpus Christi, 100 miles to the southwest, where a single new plastics plant owned by ExxonMobil and the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation accounts for up to 25 percent of regional water demand (and where a 2018 city ordinance exempts industrial water users from restrictions during drought).

The other is Formosa Plastics. The two customers consume roughly equal amounts, according to the region’s latest water plan. 

The LNRA currently supplies about 28 billion gallons of water each year from its only reservoir, Lake Texana on the Navidad River, with none left to spare. Its pending water rights permits would add to its portfolio an additional 31 billion gallons per year from the neighboring Lavaca River, to be stored at the 16-billion-gallon reservoir (small by Texas standards) planned on Formosa property in Jackson County. 

Formosa would get first rights to a portion of the water, Brzozowski said, but the details haven’t been negotiated. 

Expansion plans

For Formosa, the opportunity for growth in Texas comes after legal challenges have stalled its plans for a new, $9.4 billion chemical complex in St. James Parish, Louisiana. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers revoked that project’s permit to build on wetlands in 2020, and in 2022, a state judge struck down its air pollution permits, citing concerns over environmental justice and climate. 

Seventeen days later, Formosa applied with Texas regulators for permits to build a new hexene plant at Point Comfort and expand its adjacent polyethylene plant. The two projects together were approved in September 2023 to emit about 170 tons of regulated pollutants per year. 

The company has also applied for amendments to nine of its air permits to authorize four new ground flares—large facilities used for burning off unwanted chemicals—and to sharply increase emissions limits at its existing flares. 

“Formosa has not explained why it is seeking to increase flaring limits,” said official comments filed with the TCEQ by the Environmental Integrity Project in February 2023.    

The broad collection of permit amendments would increase authorized emissions from the facility by 2,262 tons per year for regulated pollutants and 323,028 tons per year for greenhouse gases, according to those comments.

“The application very clearly, dramatically raises the limits,” said Collin Cox, the attorney who wrote the comments. “They could definitely be laying the groundwork for expansion.”

According to a report this month by the business intelligence website Offshore Technology, upcoming projects at Formosa Point Comfort include expansions at its caustic soda plant, chlorine plant, propylene plant #2, PVC plant and its vinyl chloride monomer plant. 

That follows 40 years of steady growth for Formosa at Point Comfort. According to the company’s website, it began operations at the 2,500-acre complex in 1983, then underwent major expansions in 1994, 1998, 2002 and in 2012. In 2016 it applied to add a new polyethylene plant, then in 2020 retroactively doubled the plant’s authorized emissions of volatile organic compounds after it was built. 

Formosa’s first contract with the Lavaca Navidad River Authority, in 1980, secured 1.6 billion gallons of water per year. Today Formosa holds contracts for 13.4 billion gallons of water per year. 

A notorious polluter

The facility also has a history of illegal pollution. Wilson, the fisherwoman, previously sued Formosa over its large-scale dumping of plastic chemicals into Lavaca Bay. In 2019, she won the largest settlement ever awarded in a case brought by a citizen under the Clean Water Act, $50 million. 

Diane Wilson stands across Lavaca Bay from Formosa Plastics’ Point Comfort complex on July 23, 2023.
Christopher Baddour/Inside Climate News

In the settlement, Formosa agreed not to dump any more plastic into the bay. However, it has reported 584 violations of that agreement to the TCEQ, most recently on Feb. 26, incurring $15.5 million in additional penalties. 

Formosa also regularly reports violations of its air pollution permits, most recently on Jan.  22, when an emergency shutdown caused the release of 27 chemicals, including benzene at 33 times Formosa’s permitted rate, butadiene at 70 times the permitted rate, and gaseous ethylene at 758 times the permitted rate, according to the company’s report to TCEQ. 

On Jan. 17, freezing weather prompted Formosa to release almost 250 tons of air pollution, including gaseous ethylene at 500 times its permitted rate. 

“They are still polluting, and now they are trying to expand,” Wilson said. 

The draft water rights permit will undergo a period of public comment in which affected citizens may request a hearing before an administrative law judge. If that happens, it could be several years before the project breaks ground, said Brzozowski, the river authority manager.

“We don’t have a timeline right now, we’re trying to get a permit and we don’t know how long it will take,” he said. “We do know there is future demand. They are interested in how long it’s going to take.”

Trouble in Louisiana 

In Louisiana, Formosa continues to slowly advance plans for its huge new complex. After the state judge struck down its permits in 2022, Formosa and the state of Louisiana appealed. In January, an appeals court reversed the 2022 decision, re-validating the permits. Opponents of the project have until March to raise the question to the state’s supreme court. 

Regardless of air permits, the project in Louisiana still lacks the authorization to build on wetlands since permission was revoked by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2020. Since then, the Corps has ordered an environmental impact study of the project, a meticulous, yearslong process. 

“It will likely be years before the Corps makes a decision whether to grant approval,” said Corinne Van Dalen, a senior attorney with Earthjustice in New Orleans, who has represented opponents of the project. 

The Chicago Bears are working on a deal to hire Shane Waldron as their new offensive coordinator, multiple league sources confirmed Monday morning.

Waldron has been the Seattle Seahawks offensive coordinator for the last three seasons and helped quarterback Geno Smith to a comeback season in 2022. Before that, Waldron spent four seasons with the Los Angeles Rams as the passing game coordinator, quarterbacks coach and tight ends coach.

He is well-respected inside league circles as a young, energetic coach on the rise and a strong teacher with a creative mind and — especially important to the Bears — three seasons of play-calling experience.

NFL Network first reported the Bears are planning to hire Waldron.

The Bears reportedly interviewed at least nine candidates for the opening, including San Francisco 49ers passing game coordinator Klint Kubiak, former Baltimore Ravens offensive coordinator Greg Roman, former Carolina Panthers offensive coordinator Thomas Brown and former Arizona Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury.

Waldron would replace Luke Getsy, whom coach Matt Eberflus fired earlier this month after two seasons at the helm of the Bears offense. In the search for Getsy’s replacement, Eberflus emphasized his desire to find a new offensive coordinator who is a “great teacher.”

“That’s important because you know he has to coach the coaches to coach the position, and I think that’s the No. 1 trait of any great coach,” Eberflus said. “You have to be able to have the innovation to really look at the players you have and be able to help enhance and put those guys in position to succeed and to get explosive (plays) and to move the ball down the field.”

Waldron would take over a Bears offense that has major decisions ahead this offseason at quarterback. General manager Ryan Poles must decide whether to use the No. 1 draft pick to select a quarterback — potentially USC’s Caleb Williams — or to stick with Justin Fields, the Bears starter for the last three seasons.

Poles said he expected to ask candidates for their plans to coach different kinds of quarterbacks.

“I love it because what are you going to do for these four different types of quarterbacks,” Poles said. “I want to hear that, and I think it’s really important to hear the versatility and adaptability in their teaching, in the way they implement a plan, scheme, adjust. It actually makes it pretty dynamic in terms of the interview process.”

Waldron called plays in 2021 for a Seahawks offense piloted by Russell Wilson. In 2022, after Wilson was traded to the Denver Broncos, the Seahawks pivoted to Smith and won nine games while earning a wild-card berth.

Smith, in his 10th NFL season, was honored as the league’s Comeback Player of the Year after throwing for 4,282 yards and 30 touchdowns. Both marks would be single-season franchise records for the Bears.

This season the Seahawks ranked 21st in total offense (322.9 yards per game) and 14th in passing (230 ypg). They averaged 21.4 points, ranked 17th. That was down from 2022, when they averaged 351.5 yards (13th) and 23.9 points (ninth).

The Seahawks staff is looking for new jobs after the organization and coach Pete Carroll parted ways after a 14-year union.

In addition to working closely with Wilson and Smith, Waldron worked with quarterback Jared Goff for three seasons with the Rams.

Waldron served as an offensive assistant with the New England Patriots (2008-09) and Washington (2016) and worked in operations with the Patriots early in his career. He also has coached in college, high school and the UFL.

Waldron and the Bears must hire assistants to coach the quarterbacks, wide receivers and running backs after the team dismissed Andrew Janocko, Tyke Tolbert and Omar Young earlier this month. Offensive line coach Chris Morgan and tight ends coach Jim Dray remain on the staff.

The Bears also are seeking a defensive coordinator, and NFL Network reported Monday they will interview Tennessee Titans defensive pass game coordinator Chris Harris. Harris played safety in the NFL for eight seasons, including two stints with the Bears, and started for the 2006 Bears team that went to the Super Bowl.

More Bears news

Bears Q&A: Did GM Ryan Poles miss a chance at a big-name coach? How desirable are the coordinator openings?
Column: Keeping Jaylon Johnson is paramount for the Bears — but will they make him the NFL’s highest-paid cornerback?
5 player decisions besides QB facing the Bears, including Jaylon Johnson’s contract and Darnell Mooney’s future
Bears GM Ryan Poles staying ‘open-minded’ as he evaluates whether to keep Justin Fields or draft a QB at No. 1
Caleb Williams declares for the NFL draft — and the Bears, picking No. 1, ‘can’t be scared of the unknown,’ analyst says
Column: How can GM Ryan Poles fix the cycle that has plagued the Bears forever? Pick the right quarterback.
Bears President Kevin Warren says building a ‘magnificent’ downtown stadium remains a possibility

A Florida school district, facing pressure about “nudity” in schools, removed from shelves a picture book that showed an illustration of a goblin’s bare bottom. Some students were saved from debauchery when school officials colored in a pair of pants on the goblin.

That’s a particularly nutty example, from the newsletter “Popular Information” (the school district didn’t want to discuss the issue), of a right-wing puritan drive in education that appalls liberals: Conservatives are banning materials that mention gay people, racism or sexuality, skewing the teaching of history and students’ understanding of society.

“The freedom to read is under assault in the United States — particularly in public schools,” PEN America warned in a report last year.

Listen to conservatives, and they argue that the crisis in American schools is the opposite: It’s about leftist teachers propagandizing on critical race theory and giving kids new pronouns while denying them safe bathrooms.

Donald Trump has promised to defund “any school that’s pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity and any other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content on our children.” He added: “This is what must be done to save our country from destruction.”

My sympathies in the censorship battles are with the liberal watchdogs, but to me both left and right are missing the point.

The peril for America’s children is not bare goblin buttocks, nor is it goblins being clothed. The central problem is simply that too many kids aren’t getting the education they need.

We get distracted by these culture wars, but what we should focus on is that only 32% of America’s fourth graders are proficient at reading, according to a national test referred to as “the nation’s report card.”

Likewise, American children’s math skills are dismal by global standards. In the PISA international math test for 15-year-olds, U.S. students rank far behind the leaders (Singapore, Macao, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea) and also well behind peer countries including Canada, the Netherlands, Britain and Poland.

If education is one of the best metrics to forecast where countries will be in 25 or 50 years, as I believe, then we are hurting our children.

“Any nation that out-educates us will outcompete us,” the first lady, Jill Biden, has noted.

My fellow liberals like to fulminate at conservatives for neglecting children and provoking culture wars for show, but the left also gets in the way of education. Especially on the West Coast, Democrats significantly harmed children with prolonged school closures during the pandemic.

Excessive school closures caused a huge educational setback. American children still have not nearly caught up in either reading or math, and children in poor districts suffered the most.

San Francisco is a window into progressivism that doesn’t actually result in educational progress. In 2021, instead of focusing on reopening schools, the city’s school board undertook an effort to rename 44 schools that carried the names of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and others who were considered tainted. The school board eventually backed off after widespread mockery.

In 2014, the San Francisco school board also barred the teaching of algebra in eighth grade. Officials worried that white and Asian students were disproportionately getting on the higher math track, so the school district decided to hold everyone back.

This policy made things worse. Affluent parents hired tutors for their kids, so the Black-white and Hispanic-white education gaps actually widened. After the policy was instituted, Black 11th graders performed on math tests roughly the same as typical fifth graders, according to the Harvard journal Education Next. That’s shameful — not for those kids, but for the San Francisco school district. (Just this week, voters in San Francisco overwhelmingly passed a nonbinding measure encouraging the school district to return algebra to the eighth grade.)

But Republicans shouldn’t gloat. The GOP pretends to protect children from threats (like “woke” teachers), yet it is the party of child poverty. Republicans blocked the extension of refundable child tax credits, thus sending millions of children into poverty in 2022. If you want to understand why America has scandalously high child poverty rates, today’s Republican Party is one reason.

The states that seem to do the best job teaching kids, based on test results, aren’t just liberal or just conservative ones. They include blue states like Massachusetts and New Jersey and red states like Florida and Utah.

The bipartisan education reform movement to try to help left-behind students galvanized presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama and inspired tech executives and documentary makers, but it has faded. The paradox is that even as the resolve has fizzled, the evidence has grown for how to help.

Dallas, for example, took a far smarter approach than San Francisco to boost kids in math: Instead of canceling eighth grade algebra, it made it opt-out instead of opt-in. The upshot was that the share of children taking algebra in eighth grade tripled, with particularly large gains for Black and Latino students.

I’ve written about the remarkable progress that Mississippi schools have made in reading and math alike. If Mississippi, which still hasn’t come close to fixing poverty or racism, manages to get kids reading, there’s no excuse for the rest of the country.

Some of the solutions to weak education are complicated, but some are simple. Tutoring makes a big difference for lagging kids. Many children need eyeglasses but don’t get them, or they have hearing difficulties that aren’t diagnosed.

Here’s a scandal that I wish got half as much attention as culture war battles: The graduation rate for Bureau of Indian Education high schools is only 53%. Fixing that would be a big step toward breaking cycles of poverty in Native communities.

We are setting up too many of our kids for failure — and instead of focusing on that crisis, we adults are screaming at one another over whether to ban books that, at this rate, far too many kids won’t even be able to read.

Nicholas Kristof writes a column for the New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018. He at Facebook.com/Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof.

In a recent column I had a bit of fun with Donald Trump making an assertion that shows he hasn’t flown commercial in a very long time — saying that America’s terrible airports make us look like “a third world nation.”

As it happens, a few days ago I flew into Newark Liberty International Airport’s new Terminal A, which drove home a point that’s obvious to anyone who has been flying commercial over the years: America’s airports have in fact become a lot spiffier. I’d certainly rather fly into Newark, New Jersey, than into the many European airports where you still have to take a bus from the plane to the terminal.

But this got me thinking. Why do U.S. airports have so many more amenities than they used to? (The flying experience can still be miserable because of security lines, but that’s another issue.) The obvious answer is that they’re catering to their clientele, but surely that was always true.

Well, one main reason probably is that while flying isn’t the elite-only experience it was in the “jet set” era, people who fly frequently and spend a lot of time in airports are a lot more affluent than average. And over the past 40 years, high-income Americans — we’re talking the top 10% or 20%, not the super-elite who don’t fly commercial at all — have seen much bigger income gains than the middle class.

So my guess is that airports are catering to this wealthier clientele. That is, the same clientele who are driving the proliferation of gourmet supermarkets and the gentrification of some urban neighborhoods and so on are causing airports to have better food and shops than they used to. I’m not making a value judgment here — hey, I’m in that class myself, so I benefit from the trend.

My point instead is that airports, like many other institutions, cater to a particular income class. And it follows that the affluent buy different things than those less fortunate — which means in turn that they care about different prices. There have been innumerable posts on social media complaining about the prices of airport meals or room service in fancy hotels.

But these aren’t prices that matter to most Americans. And because people spend their money differently, the convenient abstraction that we think of as “the level of consumer prices” gives way to the truth that different groups face at least somewhat different rates of inflation: different slopes for different folks.

My New York Times colleague Peter Coy wrote about this the other day, but I thought I’d pursue the matter a bit further and ask whether the multiplicity of inflation rates should affect our view of how Americans have been doing in recent years.

For the truth is that while it’s fun to mock well-off people complaining about the prices of fancy meals, there’s good reason to believe that recent inflation has actually been worse for people lower down on the income scale. Why? Mainly because of rising grocery prices.

I recently debunked widespread claims that official numbers on prices of food at home greatly understate grocery inflation. There’s every reason to believe that the Bureau of Labor Statistics gets the numbers more or less right. But what those accurate BLS numbers say is that food prices have risen more than overall prices, reflecting a variety of factors, from climate change to the war in Ukraine.

And one of the best-established regularities in economics is Engel’s Law, which says that lower-income families spend a higher percentage of their income on food than higher-income families. So does this mean that U.S. economic developments over the past few years have hurt the middle and working classes more than the affluent? Not necessarily, because there’s something else going on.

As David Autor, Arindrajit Dube and Annie McGrew noted in a paper last year, there has been an “unexpected compression” of wage disparities during the Biden recovery, with wages growing much faster at the bottom than the top. Dube’s analysis found a striking process of equalization — the highest quintile’s real wages going down while everyone else gains, and the lowest quintile gaining the most. But real wages are calculated using the same consumer price index for everyone. As I’ve said, however, recent inflation has probably been higher for lower-income Americans who spend more on groceries. Does taking that into account undermine the conclusion?

Well, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has an experimental measure of inflation that varies across the income distribution. This measure isn’t updated every month; it goes up to only June 2023. But inflation has come way down, so it’s still a pretty good indicator of inflation disparities. Let’s take a look at the percent inflation faced by each of the five income quintiles from December 2019 to June 2023, according to the BLS measure:

— Bottom 20%: 19.5

— Next 20%: 19.3

— Middle 20%: 19.1

— Fourth 20%: 18.9

— Top 20%: 18.0

So yes, inflation has been higher for lower-income Americans. But the spread from bottom to top, 1.5 percentage points, is much smaller than the spread suggested in Dube’s wage data. In other words, taking differences in relevant inflation into account slightly softens the case for an “unexpected compression,” but doesn’t change the basic result.

So does it matter that the rich spend differently from you and me — or actually, that those of us in the top quintile spend differently from Americans in the middle? Yes, in some important ways. But it doesn’t change the story of a remarkably equalizing economic recovery.

Paul Krugman writes a column for the New York Times.