Dallas, a city that has repeatedly gotten in trouble for concentrating its affordable housing in poor, blighted areas, safely away from white people, is now being praised for housing poor people on a site that used to be contaminated with lead. So, hey, we’re finally doing something right. The Environmental…
Cattle, like other mammals raised on a pasture, eat grass. But if there’s one things humans do well, it’s mess with nature, and so hundreds of years ago humans began sharing their discovery that feeding cattle corn makes them grow fatter more quickly. Sometime around the 1950’s, modern Americans took…
The hearings held by the Texas Railroad Commission to determine whether or not fracking companies XTO Energy and Enervest could continue injecting wastewater brine into the ground in Azle and Reno — towns in Tarrant and Parker County that have been hit with dozens of earthquakes in 2013 — went…
Former EPA regulatory director Eric Schaeffer remembers sitting in on an industry meeting in which an executive reacted to finding his business was on the list of the country’s top benzene polluters. The company boss told other executives he didn’t want to be on the same list next year. When you…
Some of our state agencies have confusing names. The Texas Railroad Commission, for instance, is the name of the entity that regulates fracking. And the agency called the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has actually kept a fairly consistent stance against environmental quality. Don’t feel bad if you’re confused. The…
The dumping of pig blood into a creek that feeds the Trinity River is an awkward moment in Dallas history. The Columbia Packing Co. was caught doing the type of corporate malfeasance that sounded like a story out of a Third World country or the Dark Ages, except the story…
The state of Texas has won a small victory in its fight to continue dump stuff in water in defiance of new Environmental Protection Agency regulations meant to protect the integrity of the nation’s water supply. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has joined with other states’ attorneys general to stop the…
My first inkling that America’s lawn obsession might not be terribly healthy came around 1995. We’d just moved into a new house in Far North Dallas, and 10- or 11-year-old me decided that the next-door neighbor’s lawn — green and smooth as flawless as a golf-course fairway with manicured grass…
The late-summer Sturm und Drang over high water rates made it to the Dallas City Council this week, where Dallas Water Utilities Director Jody Puckett explained that, calm down, you’re water meter’s fine, you probably don’t have a leak, you just probably forgot during the weird monsoons of spring and early…
In Dallas and other cities across the country, local transit agencies are proud to announce that their buses run on natural gas. Natural gas puts less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than diesel, so the switch to natural gas is supposed to be a positive step to slow global warming…
Last week, Texas authorities made the unprecedented decision to reject science. (Just kidding, they do that all the time.) The science dates back to April, when a peer-reviewed study by Southern Methodist University geologists seemed to finally confirm what many people living in Azle had long suspected: a recent, surprising…
The local news satire site Dallas Brisket described the situation best: “City Decides Polluting River Preferable to Minorities Playing Soccer.” A Dallas employee who works for the Park Department was shown destroying a youth soccer league’s goal post at Lake Highlands Park, in a video that aired last week on CBS-11…
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has a fantastic announcement about Texas’ air quality: It’s great! In an announcement his office posted last week about his staunch refusal to follow the Environmental Protection Agency’s new carbon regulations, he buries this inspiring news: …despite the past 15 years of rapid population and economic growth,…
When Texas isn’t suing for the right to dump crap in the water, we’re using the water we have to drill for natural gas, a process that may contribute to contaminating the water, in an endless water-crap cycle. The U.S. Geological Survey has a much more polite way of explaining the…
There was another earthquake near the former site of Texas Stadium Monday morning. It wasn’t a big one, just 2.4 magnitude on the Richter scale, but it was the first in about two weeks. That North Texas being tremor-free for 15 days is news would’ve been unfathomable before 2008, but…
As many of you know, the Observer is a safe no-judgement zone, so we will not point any fingers of blame as to why methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is leaking out of North Texas gas wells and associated facilities more than it was supposed to be leaking. In North…
Twenty-one. That’s the number of times the state of Texas has sued the Environmental Protection Agency since President Obama took office in 2009. No one is going to tell us what we can and can’t do to our planet, especially not the federal government. Last week, Texas Attorney General Ken…
You know what this unusual season of heavy rain and flooding is really? It’s Mother Nature giving us a big wake-up call. She’s telling us we need to go all the way back to zero. We need to rethink everything we thought we knew about flood control, which is everything…
On the slick website of the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council, a lobbying organization for the local drilling industry, an anonymous man asks a question on behalf of his worried wife. “My wife is concerned about potential contamination of our 800-foot-deep well. Who will oversee the safe drilling of the well which…
Last summer, the seven doctors and scientists on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee unanimously recommended significantly strengthening federal smog standards. Current allowable levels of smog-producting ozone — 70 parts per billion — cause serious health problems (e.g. a “decrease in lung function, increase in respiratory symptoms, and…
Sometimes, in the giddy throes of class warfare (i.e. making fun of the Park Cities), one can occasionally lose sight of the bigger picture — namely, the basic human need to expel waste products from their bodies. We regret that, in gently ridiculing Highland Park’s crackdown on portable toilets last week,…
One would think that maybe, just maybe, that XTO Energy, faced with a peer-reviewed study by SMU researchers and a mountain of evidence that the company is causing earthquakes, consider shutting down its fracking and disposal wells in Azle and Reno. The SMU and federal research demonstrates pretty clearly that the…
