This past weekend accountant-cum-outdoorsman Ben Sandifer, author of the Dallas Trinity Trails blog, donned his Carhart overalls and led a small cadre of nature types and SMU engineering students down to Big Spring, the site of preservationists’ ongoing but apparently successful battle with City Hall. Initial surveys put the modest…
Two days ago, Mark Cuban took time out of his busy schedule to acknowledge the existence of San Antonio and its “muddy ugly-ass River Walk.” The proper response would have a polite curtsy, if not gushing praise, from San Antonio, thanking Cuban for deigning to mention their humble burg and…
Last fall, Eagleridge Energy won some permits to frack right next to a few Denton neighborhoods, despite a new city ordinance that was supposed to keep the company farther away. The city said sorry, it was powerless to stop Eagleridge, because the company had found an extremely clever loophole. So…
The people of Fort Worth have been doing a good job of using their water sparingly, and that has the Fort Worth Water Department very, very worried. Recent news reports claim that Fort Worth has been bleeding cash because of its noble water conservation efforts. The city lost $11 million…
Developers have been bitching about Dallas’ tree-preservation rules since they were first put in place two decades ago. Though the regulations are fairly light (trees of certain desirable species must be replaced or offset by a contribution to the city’s reforestation fund), they’ve been loath to accept the notion that…
The United States has never quite figured out what to do with its spent nuclear fuel, some 68,000-plus highly radioactive tons of which is sitting in temporary storage at the nation’s 104 nuclear power plants. The plan has been to bury the stuff in a secure geological formation deep underground,…
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have done it. Using science, they’ve confirmed your deepest suspicion: Southlake really is the worst. In this case, it’s not the exceptionally high number of traffic tickets they hand out. It’s the exceptionally large amount of carbon dioxide (90.8 tons) the average Southlaker…
Few people are kidding themselves that the $2 billion voters set aside for water projects in November will be sufficient to quench Texas’ growing thirst. The population is growing too fast and the prospect of drought looms too large. Coping with that will take some combination of new infrastructure, technological…
The EPA inspector general dumped it right before Christmas, when the media had checked out on holiday auto-pilot. Because of this curious timing, the report didn’t get nearly the play it should have. But it can be summed up like this — given the EPA’s statutory authority under the Safe…
Pretend that a corporation from China wants to build a factory in Texas just for the fun of it and needs to seize a bunch of Texans’ private property to build the factory, because it’s going to be really big and awesome. Do you think the Texas Supreme Court would…
At some unknown point in the not-too-distant past, after the advent of the internal combustion engine, human beings discovered that pouring volatile chemicals into underground burrows made it much, much easier to hunt rattlesnakes and other critters. The practice, aptly called “gassing,” caught on and has been in use in…
The Azle High auditorium was filled near to capacity Thursday evening with an occasionally raucous crowd that demanded answers state regulators couldn’t — or weren’t willing — to answer about why, over the last two months, earthquakes in a seismically silent area have grown in number and intensity. Peer-reviewed research…
When a natural gas company is accused of making an oopsie during fracking, the EPA’s response has typically been to come down hard on the company at first but then back away. That was one of the the major plot points of the Gasland documentaries. Environmentalists and homeowners accuse the…
Should libtards keep giving government handouts to species that can’t acclimate to Texas’ business-friendly atmosphere? Take prairie chickens. They once roamed Texas’ prairies and are known for an awesome mating ritual that includes a funny little dance and a “strange, booming sound across a sea of grasses.” Those prairies are…
Other cities sitting on the Barnett Shale are popular among the natural gas industry for quickly handing over their land to be fracked. But Dallas has turned out to be a surprisingly tough conquest. On Wednesday afternoon, the Dallas City Council finally passed its long-awaited fracking ordinance, and the regulations…
The shaking around Azle and Reno, which I will hereafter refer to as “San Andreas Minor,” has attracted the attention of the U.S. Geological Survey precisely because the area has almost no record of seismic activity. A few studies, including one recently from SMU, point to correlation between the epicenter…
A team of researchers at SMU has reached a conclusion that may seem obvious to those who have felt the 20-plus earthquakes that rattled North Texas last month: The recent bursts of seismic activity could be linked to fracking. The researchers, led by recent SMU grad Ashley Justinic, took a…
Earlier this year, the city of Denton approved regulations that would supposedly stop gas companies from drilling new wells near homes. Yet recently, residents in the Vintage neighborhood began noticing some suspicious noises and vibrations. They were coming from an old gas well site nearby. Denton officials realized a company…
According to the natural gas industry, states are doing a really, really great job of keeping a tough eye on the natural gas industry. “State regulators have done an awfully good job,” says the CEO of one energy company. “States are doing a good job of regulating hydraulic fracturing,” adds…
Watchdog group Public Citizen and landowners along the Keystone pipeline’s route through Texas have raised serious questions about the frequency with which TransCanada excavates sections of its line for repair. TransCanada told Unfair Park last week that it had indeed replaced some 700 feet of the 485-mile project, set to…
In a matter of weeks, crude oil will begin flowing through the Gulf Coast portion of the Keystone pipeline in Texas. The question watchdog group Public Citizen asks: Is it ready? That’s because, with the help of landowners along the line’s course, they say they’ve identified 125 separate instances in…
Flexing the new muscle given to it by the Legislature last session, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission enacted sweeping new rules Thursday to halt the seemingly inexorable takeover of Texas lakes by zebra mussels. Since the Eurasian bivalves incursion into Lake Texoma in 2009, they’ve spread steadily southward, to…
