Whenever Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has been asked questions about the state’s lack of preparedness for the catastrophe now eating Houston, he has deflected to expressions of gushing admiration for the bravery of all Texans. And he’s not wrong about Texans. Particularly among rural Texans, there is a powerful all-hands-on-deck…
The argument against leaving all those gaudy Confederate memorials in their places of honor in the city is that they amount to a corrupted version of history written by the losers. I could make the same argument about this private outfit that the mayor wants to create to rule a…
Explore any aspect of Dallas as intently as naturalist Ben Sandifer does on his birding and biking expeditions, and you are bound eventually to see all the rest of the city somewhere in the weave, especially if you look at all of it with the same wonder. Sandifer’s most recent…
For now, let’s pretend for a minute that nobody wants to build an expressway on top of the Trinity River through downtown Dallas. For the sake of argument, let’s just pick up that naughty little gnome of an idea by the ears and plunk it down in the center of…
Dallas County vehicle inspections are about to get a little cheaper. That’s not necessarily a good thing. The Dallas County Commissioners Court voted unanimously Wednesday to stop collecting the $6 fee it’s charged Dallas drivers for more than a decade as part of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s clean…
A lethal fungus that has driven some bat species to near extinction across the eastern United States has been found for the first time in Texas, researchers say. Biologists from Bat Conservation International and Texas A&M University’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences and Institute of Renewable Natural Resources spent…
On Tuesday afternoon, the United States Army Corps of Engineers granted an easement that will allow the Dakota Access Pipeline to go under a portion of the Missouri River known as Lake Oahe in North Dakota. The easement, sought by the Dallas-based builders of the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, will allow…
Newly inaugurated President Donald Trump made things a lot easier for Dallas’ Energy Transfer Partners Tuesday, signing an executive order streamlining the process by which the Kelcy Warren-owned company’s Dakota Access Pipeline will be built. Trump’s order is intended to help Energy Transfer Partners, based in Dallas, with a regulatory…
City Hall’s Approach on Whitewater Fiasco Is To Defend Its Own Castle
The kind of leadership creating successful communities in this city today will be sorely needed nationally soon.
Last session the Texas Legislature voted for a review of the Railroad Commission of Texas, the agency that regulates the oil and gas industry. Yesterday, the commission charged with the review voted on seven recommendations put before them. So, which changes were approved, and which denied? 1) REAUTHORIZE THE AGENCY:…
Tuesday night, about 100 protesters took to the narrow sidewalks around Energy Transfer Partners’ University Park headquarters to rail against the company’s Dakota Access Pipeline, challenging the decision to build the pipeline through the land and sacred sites of North Dakota’s Standing Rock Sioux tribe. “Dallas stands with Standing Rock,”…
A team led by Stanford University geophysics professor William Ellsworth has linked a 2012, 4.8 magnitude East Texas earthquake to human activity in an article published in the Science journal Thursday. Specifically, Ellsworth and his team found, wastewater injection stemming from hydraulic fracturing at a nearby well likely caused the tremor…
Dallas residents have been haunted by the specter of a 65-foot-tall flood wave thundering down city streets ever since the deteriorating condition of the Lewisville Lake Dam became public knowledge last year. If the 60-year-old earthen dam gave way, Dallas would be under 50-feet of water. This nightmare scenario sent North Texans…
Friday afternoon, both sides in the battle over the Dakota Pipeline got a victory. First U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg denied the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s request for an injunction stopping the building of the oil pipeline. Then, shortly after the ruling, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S…
It’s a time of scrutiny in Austin for the Texas Railroad Commission. The oil, gas and mining regulator is now under review by the state’s Sunset Advisory Commission, which evaluates agencies’ performance. The Sunset Commission can recommend changes, up to termination of the agency. These are only recommendations. The previous…
Southern Methodist University seismologists recently revealed human-induced earthquakes in North Texas are not only caused by oil and gas operations but also have been occurring since the 1920s across Texas. Oil and gas industry professionals were quick to denounce seismologists findings, and the Texas legislature was quick to take action…
As the cases of Zika and West Nile Virus continue to rise in Dallas County (20 Zika cases and ten West Nile as of today) more pesticides will be sprayed from trucks in more neighborhoods, insect repellent will be applied to ourselves and our children more thoroughly, and aerial spraying…
With Zika at the forefront of the news, everyone’s thinking about mosquitoes. The good news: There have been no local mosquito-borne transmissions of Zika virus in Texas to date, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC has identified 16 travel-associated cases of Zika in Dallas. …
The sun shines brightly on Texas, and there’s a lot of Texas for it to shine on. Little surprise, then, that Texas has the potential to generate more electricity from solar — more specifically, the solar panels people and businesses can install on their roofs — than any other state…
Let’s say, just for grins, they don’t wind up building that six-lane expressway along the Trinity River in downtown Dallas. Guess what. All of a sudden we’re looking at an adventure that could put Dallas at the global forefront of the most crucial issue facing mankind in the 21st century…
Thanks to one of the many quirks of Texas law, facilities across Texas industry aren’t heavily penalized for otherwise illegal pollution when that pollution happens because of anything classified as an accident or maintenance. In 2015, that meant 68 million pounds of air pollution, stemming from 3,421 breakdown and maintenance incidents,…
