Nature and the Environment

Texas Sues the Feds, Part Infinity: Greg Abbott Wants to Take Greenhouse Gas Challenge To Supreme Court

Last summer, Texas, Big Oil interests, the automotive industry and other assorted industrial polluters were dealt an unambiguous defeat in a legal challenge to dismantle greenhouse gas regulations. The Feds, a federal appeals court panel ruled, were "unambiguously correct" for setting limits on carb ... More >>

Trinity East's Vapor Chase

Drilling thousands of feet into the earth is a cakewalk compared with dealing with City Hall.

Angela Hunt and Scott Griggs Want a Vote On Trinity East Drillsites in 30 Days

Before term limits and elections change the complexion of the Dallas City Council in unknowable ways, Scott Griggs and Angela Hunt want an up-or-down vote on proposed natural gas wells along the Trinity River. Last month, the Dallas Plan Commission voted down the permits for drilling outfit Trinity ... More >>

Federal Appeals Court Ruling on Lawsuit Against EPA is a Partial Loss For Dallas-based Luminant and Enviros

The ongoing legal war of many fronts among Dallas-based Luminant, the state of Texas, the EPA and environmentalists is mostly a war of incremental victories.This week, EPA arose victorious. Next month or year? Anybody's guess. Just know that this time, nobody (except the EPA) is totally happy with t ... More >>

Plan Commission Prepares to Vote for the Second Time on Fracking Along Trinity River This Thursday

For Trinity East, the Fort Worth-based shale gas producer, the Dallas Plan Commission meeting this Thursday is make or break. Nearly six years ago, the company bid on drilling city-owned land while Dallas sought to shore up a budget shortfall. Since then, the company shelled out tens of millions of ... More >>

Carrollton is Desperately Trying to Fend Off the Coming Egret Invasion

Two summers ago, more or less out of the blue, a couple of thousand egrets descended upon a neighborhood off Josey Lane in Carrollton, just north of Frankford Road. It was an ideal spot for the birds: They liked the dense tree canopy and sizable pond, and there no predators to speak of. It was less ... More >>

Rafael Anchia Files a Bill to Help Texas Export its Natural Gas

State Representative Rafael Anchia of Dallas filed legislation Friday that he hopes will position Texas to lead the sustainable age. He describes it as a launching point for a dialogue in the Legislature, a "shell" of a bill that will eventually drive workforce development for the next generation of ... More >>

How the Bastards Win: A Greedy Lying Bastards Review

City of Dallas Owns Stake in Irving Well That's Already Been Drilled By Trinity East

Before City Manager Mary Suhm struck a secret side deal with natural gas producer Trinity East to drill on parkland in the Trinity River floodplain, there were two, lesser-known gas wells situated in Irving that Dallas stood to collect royalty checks on. According to Railroad Commission of Texas d ... More >>

Plano Lawmaker Authors Bill to Strip Cities of Right To Regulate Oil and Gas Drilling

State Representative Van Taylor, a real-estate investment banker from Plano, has introduced legislation that would settle, once and for all, who gets the last word on drilling under private property: That would be the Railroad Commission of Texas. The bill, filed Tuesday, would strip from Texas mun ... More >>

Dallas' City Plan Commission Just Got a Very Special Workshop on How Safe Gas Drilling Is

When we last left the beleaguered members of the City Plan Commission, they were opting to once again delay a vote on energy company Trinity East's application to drill for natural gas in the floodplain along the Trinity River. This morning, the CPC was subjected to a four-hour workshop on gas drill ... More >>

Environmental Groups Wants EPA Investigated Over Dropped Parker County Case

Greenpeace, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Public Citizen -- along with more than 80 other groups from across the country -- are calling on the EPA Inspector General to investigate the agency's withdrawal from legal action against a company accused of contaminating a water well through its ... More >>

Mary Suhm's Drilling Memo Shows Typical City Hall Pattern: Decide, Then Pretend to Listen

So Mayor Mike Rawlings responded, sort of, to Schutze's post this morning about City Manager Mary Suhm's double-super-secret letter of understanding with gas drilling company Trinity East, in which she promised the city's staff would do its level best to get the company the permits it needs to drill ... More >>

Plan Commission Puts Off Vote on Fracking Permits, Begging City Council to Do Something

The Dallas Plan Commission voted to delay any decision on permitting natural gas wells in the Trinity River floodplain, telegraphing a clear message Thursday to City Council: Your move. Commissioner Gloria Tarpley remains none too pleased about being asked to consider a permit that currently runs af ... More >>

EPA: Dallas-based Luminant Produces a Hell of A Lot of Greenhouse Gas, And So Does Fracking

The Environmental Protection Agency -- that scourge of freedom-loving Texans -- just released a nifty little interactive greenhouse-gas database that will almost certainly threaten your liberty, the free market and the Second Amendment, somehow. For starters, the data it compiled indicates Dallas- ... More >>

A Year Since Disclosure Law, Fracking Fluid Remains a Mystery

A year ago, a Texas law was supposed to bring the raw ingredients used in hydraulic fracturing out of the shadows and into the sunlight. The process, which involves blasting millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals into shale formations a mile below the surface, isn't subject to the federal ... More >>

In Texas, a Company is Now Fracking Uranium

Because injecting mysterious chemical cocktails deep underground to release hard-to-reach deposits of natural gas hasn't proved controversial enough, miners are staking out a new frontier: uranium fracking. Yep. Uranium Energy Corp., a Canadian company with extensive operations in the "uranium belt ... More >>

The EPA Cut a Deal To Drop Lawsuit Against Fracker in Parker County Case of Flaming Water

We've long wondered why EPA backed off of a lawsuit against Range Resources, the driller accused of contaminating a Parker County man's water well with natural gas and levels of benzene, a carcinogen, above safe drinking water standards. It issued an endangerment order against the company in Decembe ... More >>

Absence of Two Plan Commissioners Could Tip the Balance in Favor of Fracking

It seemed a bit puzzling last week when Joe Alcantar, chair of the City Plan Commission, asked that the CPC reconsider Trinity East's request to drill in the Trinity River floodplain, which the body had just gotten through denying. Perhaps Alcantar, who voted in favor of Trinity East's proposal, ha ... More >>

Proposed Frack Site on Trinity River Floodplain Will Include a Gas Processing Plant

Trinity East intends to sink natural gas wells in the Trinity River floodplain, but it isn't the well pad itself that will consume most of that controversial real estate -- it's the natural gas processing plant they plan to set up right next to it. According to site plans for the Elm Fork lease, T ... More >>

Dallas Plan Commission To Reconsider Illegal Floodplain Fracking, For Some Reason

Last time the City Plan Commission voted to deny a request to frack the Trinity River floodplain, its rationale seemed pretty clear: For now, it runs contrary to a city law that says fracking land prone to flooding isn't such a swell idea. The commissioners felt plum awkward on December. 20. With l ... More >>

All Sides Are Pissed at City Council as Fracking Debate Comes to a Head

Over Thanksgiving weekend, the Morning News' Randy Lee Loftis posed a question we'd been wondering about ourselves: Just what the hell happened to that fracking ordinance the City Council was supposed to pass, the one that would finally and completely resolve all those unanswered questions about gas ... More >>

Pumpkin Season Means Good Times and Happy Eating for the Animals at the Dallas Zoo

Yesterday I drove past a pumpkin patch that had at least 200 large round squashes still remaining. Their lonely abandonment made me a bit sad. Would they ever serve a purpose in this world? Last year the Dallas Arboretum told me they send some of their leftover pumpkins to local zoos. So, I called t ... More >>

Former EPA Chief Al Armendariz Said Frackers Lit a Well on Fire, So the Frackers Lawyered Up

Range Resources, a company that fracks shale formations across America, wants controversial former EPA regional chief Al Armendariz to shut up about what happened in Parker County. The company's lawyer sent him a letter recently insisting that "(he) cease from making further false and disparaging co ... More >>

"Don't Frack My Park Day" Comes to White Rock This Weekend

On Saturday, a tad more than 1,400 people are expected to turn out to clean up their local green space for Dallas' It's My Park Day. The city launched the annual event last year as a way to give neighbors a sense of ownership of their parks and, one assumes, to squeeze a little bit of free labor out ... More >>

EPA Wants to Tangle With Texas Again Over Air Pollution Rules

EPA isn't ready to give up the fight over a rule aimed at curbing air pollution wafting across state lines. The agency filed a petition with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Friday morning, asking for a re-hearing before the full court. This comes more than a month after, a three-jud ... More >>

FrackNation Creator Phelim McAleer Fibs About Parker County's Flaming Hose Case

Fracking is finally getting the Hollywood treatment. Promised Land, an anti-fracking film conceptualized by The Office's John Krasinski, co-written by Dave Eggers, starring Matt Damon and Hal Holbrook, and directed by Gus Van Sant (Milk, Good Will Hunting), is set in a hard-luck Pennsylvania farming ... More >>

Boom or Doom?

America’s fracking gold rush portends the greatest environmental disaster of a generation.

A Moron's Guide to the Fracking of Dallas

In this week's print edition, staff writer Anna Merlan provides a handy guide to natural-gas drilling debate in Dallas. Read on for a primer, a glossary of terms, a look at the opponents and supporters and a special fracking board game! Important civic issues have a way of sneaking up on you. They ... More >>

New Study Shows Fracking is Bad For Dallas' Air Quality. Environmentalists Want City Hall to Take Note

Much of the fracking debate has focused on if and how carcinogens like benzene and hexane find their way into the air and water supplies. Less attention has been paid to the impact of gas drilling on ozone levels, which is significant. Just how significant is hinted at in a new study published in th ... More >>

Federal Appeals Court Upholds Texas Challenge to EPA Power Plant Pollution Rule

A split three-judge panel of a federal appeals court rejected an EPA rule that would curb the drift of harmful power plant pollutants across state lines. The agency, the majority ruled, had overstepped its authority under the Clean Air Act. The legal challenge was mounted by a number of states and ... More >>

After Dueling Presentations, City Council Still Isn't Quite Sure What To Do About Gas Drilling

We promised you a throwdown during yesterday afternoon's gas drilling hearing before the city council, the first step towards an updated ordinance on drilling within city limits. Dallas Drilling, meanwhile, guaranteed a "smackdown." It's possible in retrospect that those were slight overstatements, ... More >>

John Cornyn Seeks to Fend Off Latest Threat to Texas Economy: Salamanders

I suppose it was only a matter of time before Texas politicians, still on a high from their glorious victory over the evil, job-killing dunes sagebrush lizard, turned their attention to similarly insidious threats to our economic well-being. This time, the threat comes from four species of salamand ... More >>

The Frackers and the Environmentalists Will Square Off at Dallas City Hall This Week

This was all supposed to be wrapped up months ago. The City Council formed the Gas Drilling Task Force more than a year ago, which was initially scheduled to wrap things up and have a final recommendation by November. A handful of issues -- proper setbacks, whether to allow drilling in parks and flo ... More >>

Lead Researcher of UT Fracking Report Has Substantial Ties To Industry

Back in February, I wrote about a heavily publicized report released by the University of Texas Energy Institute that billed itself as the authoritative guide for regulators wrestling with the extraction of natural gas from shale formations and the novel combination of directional drilling and hydra ... More >>

Associated Press Says Fracking Debate Based on Bad Science. What Science?

The Associated Press has news for the people who live above the shale formations experts say have transformed America's energy terrain: Critics of the gas extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing are as guilty of hyperbole, or downright dishonesty, as the industry's most ardent defenders. T ... More >>

EPA Accuses Dallas-based Luminant's North Texas Power Plants of Clean Air Act Violations

Dallas-based Luminant, the electricity generation arm of Energy Future Holdings, got hit with a violation notice from the EPA Friday, accusing it of completing major modifications to its northeast Texas coal-fired plants, Big Brown and Martin Lake, without installing modern pollution control devices ... More >>

Killer Whales

Al Armendariz, EPA Chief Ousted For "Crucifying" Energy Industry, Joins Sierra Club

When video surfaced earlier this year of EPA's regional administrator Al Armendariz comparing his strategy for regulating the oil and gas industry as the EPA's regional head to crucifixion, Republicans gladly accepted the former SMU professor's proffered head. Then, when they asked him to Washington ... More >>

Texas Senators Demand EPA Review of Fracking Endangerment Order in Parker County

Six Republican members of the U.S. Senate -- including Texas' Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn -- have requested an investigation of the EPA's decision to accuse a natural gas producer of contaminating a North Texas water well. In a letter sent last week, the senators asked the EPA inspector ge ... More >>

Homeland Security Arrests Dinosaur Believed to Be in Country Illegally

Earlier this week, a federal judge signed an order directing the U.S. government to take possession of the Tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton that had been sold last month by Dallas' own Heritage Auctions. The fossil, the government said, had been looted from the Gobi Desert some time between 1995 and 2 ... More >>

Trinity East Says Its Floodplain Fracking Plans Are Kosher With the Army Corps of Engineers

Join Unfair Park once again as we delve into the deep and thorny question: Where exactly can the fracking company Trinity East drill for natural gas in the city of Dallas? Today's episode: The Corps of the Matter. A

In Fight Over Flammable Parker County Water Well, Judge Decides Who Is, Isn't A Journalist

Tricky work deciding who gets the protections of a journalist in court. In the case of a natural gas production company suing a Parker County man who blames it for contaminating his water well, state district Judge Trey Loftin attempted to suss it out in a recent order compelling fracking blogger Sh ... More >>

Trey Loftin, the Judge in a High-Profile Fracking Case, is Bragging in Campaign Mailers About His EPA Nut-Kicking

Politics is politics, and incumbents running for re-election in conservative Parker County, Texas, where the local economy is fueled entirely by shale-gas production, want to look like champions of the industry. But what if you're a judge? And what if, at the very moment you put up fliers of Rush Li ... More >>

As Dallas Considers Fracking in Parkland and Floodplains, the Usual Suspects Speak Out

It was Dallas city council member Tennell Atkins who, during yesterday's discussion of the city's still-far-off gas-drilling regulations, posed the million-dollar question. "Do you think that it's safe to drill in the city of Dallas?" he asked task force chair Lois Finkelman. Finkelman was noncommi ... More >>

Q&A with Trinity East Manager: Leases, Floodplains, and the Money Beneath Dallas

Four years have passed since Trinity East signed on as the largest gas lease-holder with the city of Dallas, and the company still doesn't know when it will be allowed to drill its first well -- if ever. As the company's name suggests, Trinity East wants to drill for natural gas along the east side ... More >>

Trinity East Wants to Drill in the Floodplain

Ah, the Trinity River corridor, that swath of green that anchors urban Dallas to Mother Nature. How we cherish it. Unless, that is, someone -- Mayor Mike Rawlings, for example -- wants to build a toll road through its heart ... Or maybe dump a few hundred gallons of pig blood into the river ... O ... More >>

The Dallas Arboretum's Winfrey Point-Attacking Botanist Had a Rough Weekend

Late on Friday, we passed along a letter from the Dallas Arboretum celebrating an agreement with White Rock Lake neighbors that allows the city to turn the grasslands of Winfrey Point into a temporary parking lot. It was a strange missive to begin with -- a botanical garden celebrating its ability ... More >>

Dallas Arboretum and City Hall Want You to Know: Winfrey Point Ain't Paradise, And They're Not Paving it Anyway

After an agreement was reached earlier to let the city mow the wild grass at Winfrey Point, both City Hall and the Arboretum have come out firing PR-wise, trying to turn the tide of support for keeping cars off of the "prairie." Below you'll find releases sent by both City Hall, which swears it's g ... More >>

Sierra Club Sues Energy Future Holdings, Accuses it of Thousands of Clean Air Violations

Sierra Club on Tuesday sued Dallas-based Energy Future Holdings, the state's largest unregulated generator of electricity, accusing the company's Big Brown coal-fired plant near Fairfield of thousands of violations of Clean Air Act standards. The environmental group gave the company an ultimatum l ... More >>