This spring, Mike Bishop, an irascible former chemical engineer, filed a pro se lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the permit it issued for the Oklahoma/Texas leg of the Keystone oil pipeline. On Wednesday, at Bishop’s request, a federal clerk issued an entry of default against the…
Almost a year ago, I drove out to the East Texas pine country, where young men and women were fastening themselves to heavy excavation equipment, enduring scalding blasts of pepper spray from chuckling local sheriff’s deputies. Being there, you could almost believe that these kids were slowing the Keystone pipeline’s…
There’s a growing body of science that says injecting substances underground can cause earthquakes. Here in North Texas, we’ve had plenty associated with the injection of slippery frack water deep into earth. Motionless faults get lubricated into sudden shifting and a country not known for seismic activity suddenly gets active…
Last week, Governor Rick Perry’s chief of staff Brandy Marty — his newest appointee to the Public Utility Commission — broke the deadlock between commissioners Donna Nelson and Ken Anderson over just how much intervention the electricity market needs right now. Both Nelson and Marty signaled their interest Friday in…
Texans are set to decide whether to ratify a constitutional amendment creating a $2 billion water infrastructure fund, billed as the answer to a growing and drought-vulnerable state. It’ll finance new dams, reservoirs, desalinization plants and the development of new groundwater supplies. As we saw in many parts of the…
It was always the answer. What better way to pave over fears of spills and an unlocked ocean of carbon than by literally paving the soil above the Keystone XL pipeline with a bike path stretching from Canada to the Texas Gulf? The concept, rendered in hilarious detail by the…
Senator Wendy Davis, the first legitimate Democratic aspirant to statewide office in years, couldn’t vote without first signing an affidavit verifying her identity Monday morning. That’s because a state law passed in 2011 requires for the first time that voters provide a valid photo ID. So why did Davis get…
The highly anticipated investigation commissioned by Mayor Mike Rawlings has dropped. And, as expected, it boils down to this: Move along, folks. Nothing to see here. Most significantly, the report reveals that the charges against Uber drivers snared in undercover ops by Dallas vice officers have been tossed. Given the…
The flier after the jump is for a fundraiser to benefit Railroad Commission of Texas Chair Barry Smitherman, who is vying to replace Greg Abbott as our next state attorney general. We point this out not because it is illegal or in any way surprising, but because it is legal…
They don’t last long these days in the media relations office at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. First, longtime public information director Michelle Lyons resigned last year after being demoted and accused of fudging her time sheets. This was after she responded to a media request from a blog…
More plaintiffs are lining up to take a crack at Chesapeake Energy, this time joined by the city of Fort Worth. It’s the second major North Texas city to file suit against the first player to make a big splash extracting natural gas from the Barnett Shale. Arlington brought its…
Congress has kicked the can down the road for a couple of months until the next round of full-faith-and-credit brinksmanship. Ted Cruz, the freshman senator from Texas, maintained his cherished ideological purity by voting against increasing the debt limit and reopening the federal government — this time without obstructing the…
With Dallas-based Energy Future Holdings’ bankruptcy possibly approaching as soon as the end of this month, Public Citizen warns that if the giant electric utility’s assets are broken up, Texas taxpayers may end up paying to reclaim its coal mines. As we’ve reported before, the Sierra Club’s Beyond TXU campaign…
Gubernatorial hopeful and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott probably won’t get a chance this time around to roll back every meaningful regulation that curbs carbon-dioxide emissions — the gas driving climate change — but he will take a shot at a significant one. The high court announced Tuesday that it…
Localizing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most confident, depressing predictions yet is no mean feat for journalists. Which is why it helps when actual experts do it for you. Texas Climate News sought out the state’s finest climatologists, oceanographers and public-policy experts. If nothing else, their responses make clear…
Matt Berninger moved through a sold-out crowd at South Side Ballroom Saturday night, and you could trace his path only by following the outstretched arms holding up his microphone cord. Even as he was thronged by a respectful audience, he stroked a grown man’s face with something like love, guided…
Even now, legions of fans are descending on the State Fair for the legendary (and lopsided) match-up between the Big 12’s bitterest rivals. But before the cries of “Texas Fight!” and the invalid moaning of “Boooomer” carom through the Cotton Bowl, the schools’ respective editorial boards traded some good-natured barbs…
Dallas-based Energy Future Holdings, the electricity giant taken private in the biggest leveraged buyout in history, has been teetering toward bankruptcy for some time. Over-leveraged, with too much debt and not enough revenue in a weak electricity market, sources close to the negotiations tell Bloomberg News that a bankruptcy filing…
The U.S. Supreme Court will not hear an appeal from Dallas-based Luminant seeking to topple Clean Air Act limits on emissions increases resulting from planned startups and shutdowns of its power plants. The state’s largest generator of electricity sought an exemption for these operations from fines levied by the EPA…
Richard Slatkin must have appreciated the irony in his predicament. Here he was, a 66-year-old private investigator who caught cheating spouses for a living — whose stock and trade was sorting through lies to find something near the truth — and he was being divorced by a wife who had…
An NBC5 report last night shows just how desperate Yellow Cab Co. was to run Uber, the rider-summoned, smartphone-app car service, out of its territory. In emails dating as early as May, a lawyer for the biggest taxi company in North Texas hectored the city manager’s office about citing Uber…
In Cleburne, of all places, U.S. Rep. Roger Williams’ district office door was “vandalized,” he tweets, with signs that read “WE’VE HAD ENOUGH TEA. THANKS,” “IT’S TIME TO VOTE YOU OUT,” “ANTI AMERICAN RACIST” and, with a Donald Trump flourish, “YOU’RE FIRED.” Tea bags were also hung from the door…
