A team of researchers at SMU has reached a conclusion that may seem obvious to those who have felt the 20-plus earthquakes that rattled North Texas last month: The recent bursts of seismic activity could be linked to fracking. The researchers, led by recent SMU grad Ashley Justinic, took a…
Earlier this year, the city of Denton approved regulations that would supposedly stop gas companies from drilling new wells near homes. Yet recently, residents in the Vintage neighborhood began noticing some suspicious noises and vibrations. They were coming from an old gas well site nearby. Denton officials realized a company…
According to the natural gas industry, states are doing a really, really great job of keeping a tough eye on the natural gas industry. “State regulators have done an awfully good job,” says the CEO of one energy company. “States are doing a good job of regulating hydraulic fracturing,” adds…
Watchdog group Public Citizen and landowners along the Keystone pipeline’s route through Texas have raised serious questions about the frequency with which TransCanada excavates sections of its line for repair. TransCanada told Unfair Park last week that it had indeed replaced some 700 feet of the 485-mile project, set to…
In a matter of weeks, crude oil will begin flowing through the Gulf Coast portion of the Keystone pipeline in Texas. The question watchdog group Public Citizen asks: Is it ready? That’s because, with the help of landowners along the line’s course, they say they’ve identified 125 separate instances in…
Flexing the new muscle given to it by the Legislature last session, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission enacted sweeping new rules Thursday to halt the seemingly inexorable takeover of Texas lakes by zebra mussels. Since the Eurasian bivalves incursion into Lake Texoma in 2009, they’ve spread steadily southward, to…
Here’s another reason why Texas should secede: We’ll avoid getting in trouble for repeatedly violating the Clean Air Act. New data shows that North Texas is continuing its 16-year-streak of failing to be in compliance with the federal law. The Clean Air Act stipulates that ozone pollution doesn’t exceed 75…
Almost a year ago, I drove out to the East Texas pine country, where young men and women were fastening themselves to heavy excavation equipment, enduring scalding blasts of pepper spray from chuckling local sheriff’s deputies. Being there, you could almost believe that these kids were slowing the Keystone pipeline’s…
There’s a growing body of science that says injecting substances underground can cause earthquakes. Here in North Texas, we’ve had plenty associated with the injection of slippery frack water deep into earth. Motionless faults get lubricated into sudden shifting and a country not known for seismic activity suddenly gets active…
While other upscale suburbs are known for having clean air and being far from dirty factories, Frisco went against the grain. The affluent north Texas suburb last year had the distinct honor of being one of only 21 areas in the United States that failed federal air quality standards for…
When it opened last month, the Rory Meyers Children’s Adventure Garden received mostly glowing reviews, and understandably so. It’s hard not to be at least a little awed by a $62 million science playground that packs more than 150 interactive exhibits into eight prime acres at the Dallas Arboretum. For…
It was always the answer. What better way to pave over fears of spills and an unlocked ocean of carbon than by literally paving the soil above the Keystone XL pipeline with a bike path stretching from Canada to the Texas Gulf? The concept, rendered in hilarious detail by the…
Melba Ketchum, the veterinarian-turned-fulltime Bigfoot crusader from Nacogdoches has been riding high this month. First, she and her team released “definitive video and DNA evidence” of the creature’s existence and its kinship with human beings. Then, online animal nomenclature database Zoobank accepted her proposal to give sasquatch the scientific name…
Two months back, the Dallas County Medical Society petitioned the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to crack down on emissions coming from Luminant’s three coal-fired power plants in North and Northeast Texas, which are among the nation’s dirtiest. They based their plea on a white paper commissioned from a Rice…
The black rhino is teetering on the edge of extinction, and it has been for some time. Their numbers have dropped precipitously over the past several decades, dwindling from several hundred thousand a century ago to a couple thousand a decade ago, partly from habitat loss but mostly from poachers…
It’s fun to joke about the filthiness of the Trinity River. It’s even more fun to remind Houston that all that urine and feces and prescription medication we flush down our toilets winds up in their water glasses. By all means, this should continue. At the same time, it’s worth…
Localizing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most confident, depressing predictions yet is no mean feat for journalists. Which is why it helps when actual experts do it for you. Texas Climate News sought out the state’s finest climatologists, oceanographers and public-policy experts. If nothing else, their responses make clear…
At some point the Great Trinity Forest, that relatively untrammeled expanse of foliage in southern Dallas, will have reached capacity for grand, high-profile amusements. That hasn’t happened yet. In November, the Trinity Forest Aerial Adventure Park will make its debut on seven wooded acres off Dowdy Ferry Road just north…
Patrick, the Dallas Zoo’s recently departed lowland gorilla, was never quite a social butterfly, but he wasn’t always quite so angry, either. Embittered by his best friend’s death at the hands of Dallas police in 2004, he retreated further into himself, lashing out at his fellow primates — especially the…
Not long after UT-Austin published an “unprecedented” study (funded by the gas industry, whoops) claiming that fracking wells are safe from methane leaks, a bunch of investors are now accusing one gas company of being dishonest about its methane problem. The natural gas industry has aggressively fought off accusations over…
Dr. Melba Ketchum, the East Texas veterinarian turned Bigfoot-hunting geneticist, is at a loss to explain why the scientific community refuses to take her research seriously. “It’s been rather painful,” she explained in an exclusive, one-on-one interview with WFAA. “I was naive when I went into this. I thought science…
American Meteorological Society details the horrifying events that led to the death of Tim Samaras and others.
