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…
The young people today like memes. What is a meme? I think it’s a picture with big white words on it, John. Kids, look at these cool memes brought to you by FrackFeed, a new website created by North Texans For Natural Gas. Obama’s interior secretary is definitely going to…
Now that Texas has passed a law says cities can’t ban fracking, it’s a fitting middle finger to fracking bans that an energy company would get to work in Denton, the city where voters passed the historic regulation that started this all. Vantage Energy resumed drilling in Denton on Monday…
You have a big coal plant in Texas and you want to make sure the states says you’re following the Clean Air Act, so you don’t get in trouble. How can you ensure that Texas regulators will give you the clearance you need? By telling them what to do. Correspondence…
The Texas Supreme Court ruled that an oil and gas company can go ahead and sue an anti-fracking activist for defamation, because of course it did. Steve Lipsky is the Parker County homeowner famous for being able to light his water on fire after Range Resources started fracking near his…
The Texas Railroad Commission has ordered companies running two wastewater disposal wells near Azle to prove that the wells should remain open. The decision comes on the heels of a team of SMU researchers saying last week that Azle’s 2013 earthquake swarm was likely caused by oil and gas drilling…
DFW is one of 17 areas identified in a United States Geological Survey report released today as having a high risk for “induced seismicity.” That means we’re doing something that’s making the ground shake, namely injecting wastewater byproducts from energy gathering activities back into the ground. “This new report describes…
The 2013 earthquake swarm that centered around the town of Azle in Tarrant County was likely the result of natural gas drilling and wastewater injection, according to a report published Tuesday in the Nature Communications journal. According to Matthew Hornbach, an SMU associate professor of geophysics and lead author of…
Texas’ rapidly expanding renewable energy industry owes much of its success to, of all people, a Republican state senator from Horseshoe Bay, one who is now trying to stop cities from banning fracking. Ten years ago Senator Troy Fraser authored legislation that required that Texas get 10,000 megawatts of its…
The swarm, it seems, is still with us. Thursday, North Texas earth quaked three times. Each of the tremors struck near a two-mile line connecting Irving and West Dallas that SMU researchers Heather DeShon and Brian Stump identified in February as the start locations of numerous temblors that have inflicted…
There is nothing wrong with the way that Mansfield regulates fracking, according to the people who run Mansfield. “City leaders say the gas drilling ordinance in Mansfield is one of the most progressive and balanced ordinances in the Barnett Shale,” city leaders say in a not-so-modest news release. But some…
Newly minted Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, conveniently oblivious to the mountains of scientific evidence that people are slowly but surely turning the planet into a scorching greenhouse, isn’t sure if he believes in climate change. But he’s damn sure about the best way to address it. “I’ll leave it in…
The notorious radioactive waste dump in West Texas once run by late, politically-corrupt connected Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons could soon begin a new, more extreme phase of waste-dumping. On Friday, Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the company will seek a license to temporarily — up…
When Unfair Park’s attention was first drawn to Connect Dallas Now, a nascent marketing campaign we’ve now learned is intended to promote the Trinity toll road, we weren’t sure it was real. The effort’s Twitter account still has just four followers — including an apparently hate-following Angela Hunt — and…
The khapra beetle, considered the world’s most destructive insect, has popped up in DFW luggage screens on five different occasions in recent months. In each instance, the beetle has been found in dried food a passenger was attempting to get past customs, despite not declaring the packages of rice, dried…
SMU’s initial report of data collected from seismometors placed in Irving is interesting, provides a bit of useful context for the recent rash of quakes and promises further action. It does not, however, fill us in on what we’re all so curious about — whether or not the resource extraction…
