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…
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…
