Growing Semantics

Texas is home to a variety of people who have different racial background and culture, which makes for a very diverse range of languages all around the state. The number of languages spoken in Texas at home has been increasing over the past decade and it only seems to grow as the years go by. 

Out of the 24 million residents who live in Texas, 65% of that population are only-English speakers at home. The rest of the percentage speak more than 160 languages combined. According to an article posted on The Texas Tribune website, Spanish is the most spoken, non-English language in the state of Texas followed by Vietnamese placing in second and Chinese in third, which includes Mandarin, Cantonese and other Chinese languages. From this information one can assume that the majority of the people who don't speak English at home are of Hispanic and Asian demographics.

The largest group of immigrants in Texas come from people born in Latin America, which explains the 6 million people who are primarily Spanish speakers at home. According to a detailed study done by the United States Census Bureau, Bexar County, Texas, has the largest amount of residents who speak Spanish at home while Harris and Dallas County tie for second and Tarrant County has the smaller percentage out of the whole. 

Considering the language barrier, Texas education does a good job at offering ESL (English as a Second Language) classes at the majority of campuses, but an increase in budget in the education department could provide the needed amount of faculty, a variety of faculty that each specialize in a language, to create a more engaging environment not only for the Spanish speaking population, but also for the entire population who's primary language isn't English.

Commentary: Convenient Accuracy

The solution offered by the author of this post combined with Heather K. Gerken's idea of a "one-stop shop" for voter registration is one of the more ideal and straightforward answers towards the registration issue, which of course is just an opinion, but also a decision based around the reasoning behind the many solutions offered. This seems to be the solution, among others, that offers a simple but clever way to implement voter registration into other forms of registration for the state of Texas.

Emission Revision

Texas is now one of many states that have increased in carbon emission amounts in the country. According to Climate Central, Texas, California and Pennsylvania are at the top of the charts with Texas in the lead. Everything is bigger in Texas and unfortunately, so is the pollution.

Almost double of California's carbon emission count, about 653 million metric tons, Texas comes back with an estimate of 641 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and a spike of 4.5 percent of carbon emissions from 2012 to 2013. The source of all this? Burning energy. Mainly coal, petroleum and natural gas are the one's affecting major climate changes.

The Obama administration has recently presented some new climate policies such as the Clean Power Plan. The Clean Power Plan will regulate greenhouse gas emissions from currently running power plants that burn fossil fuels. Many states are declaring the policy unconstitutional and are filing lawsuits. In my perspective, Texas really needs some sort of emission regulation because the numbers are astonishingly high.

The plan works in a simple way; The Clean Power Plan gives each state a goal of greatly reduced carbon emission numbers based on what they already produce and both the residents' use of electricity and the power plants' efficiency. The plan will leave it up to each state to figure out how to regulate carbon emissions and they are to submit their plans to EPA no later than 2018.

At least Texas is taking an interest in really regulating and caring about emissions in the state. On Thursday, October 8, Texas filed a lawsuit against Volkswagen and Audi vehicle manufacturers for violating consumer protection laws and the Clean Air Act of 1970 by inserting devices into their diesel cars that enabled them to "cheat" any emission tests. Texans purchased around 32,000 of their diesel models since they were first introduced to the market and Texas code for violation each day the car is used rests between $50 and $25,000 in penalties per violation. The attorneys persist on using the "maximum power of the law to penalize [the car companies]." Hopefully the state of Texas continues to regulate these emissions for the people's sake and the states "health" in terms of pollution.