The Texas House and Senate took up legislation Tuesday to address a drought-induced water crisis. A proposed bill out of the House would pull $2 billion from the state’s Rainy Day Fund to implement a 50-year water plan. Municipalities and water districts could apply for funds the state would prioritize…
Congressman Steve Stockman represents what the evidence tells us is an especially crazy swath of Texas in the suburbs of Houston. There’s really no other way to explain why voting-age Americans could choose to send such an individual to Washington as their duly elected representative. Last month, it was the…
Austin’s plastic bag ban has been in effect for three weeks now, and the city has so far managed to avoid economic Armageddon. Austinites, it seems, are still able to buy groceries, go shopping, and order restaurant takeout. They just have to carry their purchases in reusable bags. It’s an…
Policymakers in Austin, having finally come to terms immensity of the state’s water challenges, are about to throw some serious cash at the issue. But the vast majority of this, more than 96 percent, is going toward building new reservoirs and pipelines. Trammell S. Crow, among others, has a problem…
One of the few areas of bipartisan agreement in Austin this legislative season is that the state needs to take major steps to meet the state’s long-term water needs. The arithmetic — exploding population + historic drought + increasingly stressed water supply — is simply too stark to ignore. The…
Last week, the number of drilling rigs operating in the Barnett Shale, the massive natural gas reservoir that underlies much of North Texas, dropped to 27, the lowest figure in a decade. But the boom’s not over quite yet. There may be less drilling going on at the moment, but…
As it stands, anyone caught watering their lawns more than twice a week and/or during daytime hours and/or outside the official watering days ordained by City Hall faces a fine of between $250 and $2,000. As of last summer, the city had handed down slightly more than a handful. But…
If there is one thing I hate, it’s talking about morality with people who agree with me. But this has been one of those weeks. I’m your basic anti-gas-and-oil-fracking-in-parks type of guy. Call me soft. I’ve just always been against major petro-chemical operations where the children play. So generally speaking…
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 fracking operations…
It’s T-minus three hours until all hell breaks loose at City Hall, as the Plan Commission meets to decide whether to let Trinity East Energy drill for natural gas in Dallas parkland, and things are already starting to simmer. Case in point is a letter sent this week to Mayor…
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-based electricity generator Luminant plays second fiddle to only…
Last month, Jane Bryant finally lost her years-long fight with the city when demolition crews rolled in early one morning and made quick work of 604 Elsbeth S., better known as Lee Harvey Oswald’s old apartment. For a brief moment, the building, with its tangential connection to history, drew the…
If you happened to be passing the corner of Akard and San Jacinto Monday night, the huge, blue LED lights spelling out “IDLE NO MORE” might have left you nonplussed. It was no coincidence that the demonstration, known as a light brigade, took place within a stone’s throw of the…
Water — or the lack thereof — has already made it to the top of the state Legislature’s priority list, and it’s an area of rare bipartisan agreement. After all, it doesn’t take a hydrological engineer to figure out that growing population plus soon-to-be-maxed-out water sources plus historic drought equals…
As of around 2:30 yesterday afternoon, two Keystone XL pipeline protesters were perched atop platforms strung through the trees in East Texas, aiming to block construction of what may soon become the longest pipeline in the Western Hemisphere. The controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which could be approved by the end…
In 2011, state lawmakers took a break from slashing school funding, dreaming up new abortion restrictions and fighting against the encroachment of Islamic law to do battle with a new enemy: the compact fluorescent light bulb. More and more, those tightly coiled tubes were replacing Edison’s good ol’ incandescent bulbs,…
Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons knows well that money, particularly when doled out in large quantities to candidates and political action committees, is the grease that keeps our democracy running smoothly. So it was only natural that, when it came time for the Texas legislature to consider a measure that would…
Right now, something like 100 U.S. cities have curbside composting programs. That is, residents put their food scraps, yard trimmings and other organic waste into special bins alongside their trash and recycling cans and the municipality hauls it not to the landfill but to an enormous compost heap, where it’s…
An independent review of the University of Texas study that famously declared fracking could not be tied to groundwater contamination has recommended that the school retract it. The well-publicized report released earlier this year by the Energy Institute, “Fact-based Regulation for Environmental Protection in Shale Gas Development,” purported to bring…
Something a little bizarre going down this morning at Dallas County Commissioners Court. Or not. A number of people are supposed to show up at this morning’s commissioners meeting to speak against a move by the county to create a mosquito district. Only there is no move to create a…
It’s something of a head-scratcher why the Texas Legislature decided in 1905 to entrust the Daughters of the Republic of Texas with the care and preservation of the Alamo, site of one of the fiercest — and most pivotal — battles of the Texas war for independence. The DRT is…
When Dr. Sean Morrison and a handful of researchers at UT Southwestern placed two lists side by side, it was as if the air had been pulled from the room. On one list were patients being treated for melanoma — skin cancer — and patients who had died from it…
