StateImpact Texas is a National Public Radio-KUT Austin-KUHF Houston joint dedicated to environmental issues. This morning, reporter Dave Fehling out of Houston looked at the water coming out of his tap and wondered: Where’s it coming from? The answer: “It’s the roar of many showers and toilets using water in…
Over the course of the last month, both ERCOT and the North American Energy Reliability Corporation have warned of outages as early as next summer, due in large part, they say, to new regs issued by the EPA aimed at reducing the amount of mercury, sulfur dioxide and other pollutants…
For folks in Dallas, where the council-appointed gas drilling task force is running to stand still, or in Southlake, the subject of a recent cover story on towns grappling with urban drilling, this EPA report released today tying fracking to groundwater contamination in Wyoming probably doesn’t mean much. We get…
Emissions of cancer- and central nervous system defect-causing toxic air pollution put Texas power plants atop the pile of serial polluters, a report based on EPA data finds. Nationwide, pollution controls such as smokestack scrubbers have reduced the rates at which air toxins are pumped into the air we breath…
Texas cattle country lost some 600,000 head this year — a 12-percent reduction in the herd — driven by a drought that withered grasses and baked river beds and stock ponds. It’s the kind of en masse decline the likes of which this state hasn’t seen since drought ravaged the…
Ever since the EPA announced new pollution regs that would come down hardest on dirty power plants, there’s been considerable Sturm und Drang from the industry, who’ve been making all sorts of dire predictions about rolling outages resulting from burdensome, onerous, expensive federal regulation. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation…
Injection wells, like most aspects of gas drilling, elicit conflicting opinions, contradictory data and the frequent, familiar demand: “Not in my backyard!”. While the wells used for the disposal of produced fracking water are not currently allowed within Dallas city limits, the issue prompted a particularly lengthy debate at yesterday’s…
It was early November when watchdog group Downwinders At Risk found out that Dallas-Fort Worth had set off air-quality monitors more times than Houston in 2011. Yep, America’s petrochemical hub violated EPA standards less often than we did. Depressing, right? As you may recall, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality…
The most recent Dallas gas drilling task force meeting ended with mutterings of how to speed up the process of drafting drilling ordinance recommendations. Several task force members voiced concerns that they were crawling toward the finish line — even after the task force’s schedule for deliberation was extended by…
Last week, during an oil-and-gas drilling confab at the Hyatt Regency in Houston, execs turned their attention to a very touchy subject: how to get folks decidedly against gas drilling on their side. At which point, according to audio first obtained by CNBC earlier this week, gas-drilling spokesmen offered some…
The University of Texas released the preliminary results today of that comprehensive study on the controversial natural gas producing process known as hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), drawing no link between it and claims of groundwater contamination. “While there have been casing/cement issues identified by regulators, we haven’t seen evidence in…
The city council-appointed gas drilling task force stopped listening to The Experts yesterday and got down to the business of discussing just what it’ll suggest the council do about the business of fracking. And for its first recommendation, the task force decided … the city should keep on doing what…
Forgive us for seeming a little primate-obsessed today, but the Dallas Zoo is giving us an awful lot of material. Hot on the heels of the news that a Twitter-savvy “rogue” spider monkey got loose this morning and was quickly captured, we heard back from Dr. Lynn Kramer, the deputy…
In Texas, Houston and filthy air have always been synonymous. But the Armpit of Texas has just been dethroned. For concentrated, ozone-laced air pollution, Dallas-Fort Worth has outstripped the country’s petrochemical hub as the EPA’s worst offender. According to watchdog group Downwinders at Risk, DFW exceeded air-quality standards more often…
At last night’s Gas Drilling Task Force public hearing at Dallas City, citizens’ outcries ranged from polite thank-yous to pleas for tighter restrictions all the way to full-on verbal assaults that made fracking sound like the onset of The Apocalypse. Several of the people who spoke at the task force’s…
The Sierra Club gave Luminant Generation Company, downtown-based and one of Texas’s biggest power suppliers, notice Thursday that it plans to sue them for thousands of alleged violations of the Clean Air Act at two of its coal-fired power plants in northeast Texas. According to environmental law organizations Earthjustice and…
Texas ranchers, bowed under the driest year in state history, are looking to Gov. Rick Perry for help. In an online petition, they’re asking him to use the Texas National Guard and any state resources at his disposal to bring hay into the starving ranch country. Drought has withered much…
As chair of the city’s gas drilling task force, Lois Finkelman has a pretty tough job, directing task force meetings, guiding discussions, fielding calls and emails from concerned citizens. (Did we mentioned she doesn’t get paid? Strictly voluntary.). And with a public hearing coming up tomorrow, the task force’s deliberation…
What you see at right is the urban garden the Deep Ellum Community Association would like to plant on this lot at Canton and Good-Latimer. The idea isn’t new: In December 2009 we wrote about DECA’s attempt to green up Deep Ellum, and initially they’d looked at planting on the…
On opposite sides of the legal teeter-totter over gas-drilling, citizen protection and drilling flexibility weigh heavily, with a city’s gas drilling ordinance at the center — trying, at least in theory, to find balance between the two. It’s happened in Forth Worth and other small cities. And next week, Dallas’s…
Water, water, everywhere — more than ample supply to frack, according to Jody Puckett, the director of Dallas Water Utilities, who spoke at yesterday’s gas drilling task force meeting. She clarified that, sure, there’s a drought, and conservation is always important, but she also insisted that water for fracking isn’t…
So, what’s our problem? Mostly, it’s La Nina, that little trollop. She’s been messin’ with Texas for a long time. And the relationship between her cool Pacific sea-surface temperatures and dry times here is pretty well established. For nearly 120 years, since we’ve kept any kind of reliable records, La…
