The lesson of the Highland Park Party Barge is the lesson of Winfrey Point is the lesson of 30 years of history in East Dallas. At key rubber-meets-the-road moments, City Hall becomes the single worst enemy that inner city neighborhoods can confront. Forgive the Parkies, for they know not how…
Twenty years ago, White Rock Lake was a dump. The park was run-down. The lake itself was half-filled with silt. The main activity out there at night was people having intercourse in cars and then going to the bathroom on the lawns of nearby houses. Good times. The strong souls…
Last night at the Turner House, the Old Oak Cliff Conservation League unveiled its 2012 Architecture at Risk List, its annual enumeration of properties in danger of being demolished, neglected, and otherwise relegated to the dust bin of history. They offered a sneak peek of the first item on their…
The ability of a leukemic cell to remain in an immature state, capable of relentlessly propagating, has remained one of the vexing obstacles to the effective treatment of leukemia, particularly acute myeloid leukemia. Rather than maturing, or differentiating, inside the blood-cell forming kitchen of the bone marrow, they grow and…
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 story this week in the Morning News pointed out that the…
Take a look outside your window. You’ve probably gotten used to that omnipresent, smoky haze that hangs over the Metroplex like a pall of economic viability — upwind power plants a’chugging; cars snaking down tangles of toll roads and highways; shale gas production amid the cities and ‘burbs slowed but…
Last summer — the state’s hottest and driest on record — brought Texas ranchers to their knees. Rains have revived parts of the state, especially the east. But 50 miles west of Fort Worth and further, the drought varies from severe to exceptional. So, what’s in store for us this…
While Jim’s wife hosed out the dog house over his Arboretum screed this morning, lawyers for the Arboretum and the city were in court trying to get a judge to let them turn Winfrey Point into a temporary parking lot, to prepare for the crush of visitors for this weekend’s…
Hey, Dallas Arboretum: Do you really not see how this is shaping up? You have one of two things staring you in the face. A great opportunity. Or a well-deserved black eye. You are in court this very moment, hauled there by citizens trying to stop your plans to decimate…
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 last fall when it discovered a litany of…
Before SMU prof Al Armendariz had even warmed the seat at his post as EPA regional chief, he was pilloried as an activist whose research into the air pollution caused by fracking operations made him unfit to run a five-state office overseeing some of the industry’s most important drilling grounds…
When President Obama appointed SMU prof Al Armendariz to the EPA regional post in Dallas back in 2009, it was to the sound of collective groaning from the energy industry and Republican politicos. Only months before, he’d authored a study citing oil and gas production as a major source of…
Let’s talk trees for a moment. They’re a bit like orphans or endangered species in that when people cry out to save them, there’s little push-back, even if little action is ultimately taken. But in an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, one sentence amid an opus of tree-praise…
Councilman Scott Griggs kicked off last night’s festival of shared discontent over the possibility of drilling in Dallas under the ordinance changes recommended by the drilling task force. Two city drilling task force members, a former member of the Fort Worth drilling task force, members of environmental advocacy groups and…
The city of Dallas has a bit of an issue with gas, one that anti-drilling activists call potentially silent but deadly and hydraulic fracturing proponents call a huge economic relief for the city — one that would provide an whopping amount of energy. The issue seemed to briefly and temporarily…
It was clear when A&M’s livestock economist said the drought had an agricultural toll of $5.2 billion back in August — which didn’t even really mark the nadir of the heatwave — that we hadn’t seen the worst this drought could do. Now we know: $7.62 billion in agricultural losses…
You’ve likely noticed that gas stations have been changing the numbers on their signs to reflect an increasingly more expensive product, over and over again. As prices creep around the $4 mark while campaign season stirs, and energy continues its rise to the top tier of our national concerns, views…
By 2008, the high price of natural gas, coupled with the novel combination of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, touched off a modern-day gold rush in the Barnett Shale. Regulators were caught on their heels. “They moved forward very rapidly, and state regulatory programs had a difficult time catching up,”…
Chesapeake Energy and Rolling Stone writer Jeff Goodell are battling over his March feature. The abridged version of the lengthy piece, unpacked further by Brantley, goes like this: Drilling appears to be a Ponzi scheme with Chesapeake’s founder, Aubrey McClendon, as its leader. Neither McClendon nor Goodell are the type…
A senator from New Mexico has proposed a bill that could change the face of Texas electric generation. And it has another interesting side-effect: It could reinvigorate a shale gas play depressed by tanking prices. U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman, chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, envisions a…
Texas is in a tight spot. Electric supply simply isn’t keeping up with consumer demand in a state bursting at the seams. By 2013, grid operator ERCOT predicts we won’t have enough to cover peak demand, when we’re all sweating and dashing for our thermostats. Summer 2012, on the other…
City ordinances governing drilling are based on the perspectives, experiences and whims of the group gathered at the table. It’s the nature of creating rules governing a contentious issue with contradictory information and competing interests coming from both sides — the drilling industry and anti-drilling activists. With that come differing…
