Dallas Residents at Risk's road show on fracking in Dallas continues its tour with a stop at 7pm Thursday night, May 3rd, at the North Hills Prep School at 606 E Royal (near L.B. Houston Golf Course and the now famous drilling pad-in-a-park endorsed by none other than the President of the Dallas Parks and Rec Board). If you've seen the map of gas drilling leases on city owned land, you know that Northwest Dallas is a hotspot of activity. Along with West Dallas and Mountain Creek, it's one of the most densely leased areas of the city. Come see a basic explanation for why the activity is hazardous to neighborhoods, talk to some of the good guys who were on the City's gas drilling task force and find out what's being done to write a better gas drilling ordinance. Information is power. Don't be powerless.   Read More

Word comes today that the recent updating of a national Canadian Greenhouse Gas emissions inventory shows all industrial and commercial sectors holding steady or making progress in 2010, save one: Oil and Gas. Canada had to perform the inventory under the terms of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Unfortunately, the dramatic rise in emissions from oilsands (Re: Keystone) and gas development more than off-set the progress in the rest of the economy. This is the money quote from the Canada.Com article: "Canada's official report last year generated controversy because of a decision to exclude a breakdown of oilsands emissions from the inventory, even though this emissions breakdown was included in the previous year's inventory. The missing details eventually revealed that the booming sector's pollution was dramatically rising to levels that would make it difficult for the federal government to meet its own annual emissions target of 607 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by 2020." Now, come south to Dallas. We know City Hall is sitting on a similar updating of Greenhouse Gas pollution emissions being emitted by both City of Dallas operations, and the metropolis as a whole. This pollution inventory was required by the 2005 Mayor's Climate Change Agreement, of which Dallas is a signatory. Cities pledged to cut 2012 GHG pollution to 1990 levels. We'll see how close or far Dallas is to accomplishing that goal when the numbers are released. But here's the real number you need to keep an eye on - the amount of Greenhouse Gas pollution emitted by industrial sources in Dallas. The last time the city did such a survey, it totaled only 25,000 tons a year from all large industrial facilities combined. By contrast, a single gas compressor can easily spew 25,000 tons a year of the same kind of pollution. Gas fields have multiple compressors. It's not unusual for large compressors to emit up to 50,000, 75,000, even 90,000 tons or more of air pollution every single year. Without mitigating or off-setting this tidal wave of air pollution from gas drilling, Dallas will never be able to meet its obligations to reduce its Greenhouse Gas pollution, and in fact, it will be responsible for making local air quality much worse. A vote to allow unfettered drilling is a vote for immediately doubling the industrial GHG pollution coming from Dallas, and in the long run, a vote to increase it by probably a magnitude or two. Why should you care if climate change doesn't get you excited? The same GHG pollution making it impossible for Dallas to reduce its carbon footprint is the same air pollution that makes our smog worse, and its the same air pollution that makes it 66% more likely for you to contract cancer if you live within a half-mile of a gas well. It's all inter-connected. Dallas is poised to reverse years of air quality progress if it doesn't do something to address the large increases in air pollution caused by gas drilling.   Read More

The new oil and gas air toxics rules that over a hundred people came out to support this last summer at an EPA hearing in Arlington are under heavy fire as they're getting closer to getting implemented. These are rules, that for the first time would clamp down on the Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) released by gas drilling that cause smog, toxic air pollution and make global warming worse. EPA recently announced a two-week delay in their being brought on line and there's a campaign by industry to gut the rules entirely by limiting their scope in a ridiculous way. Sharon has all the details in how you can urge the EPA to get a backbone and go through with their modest reforms, and The Hill has a good article explaining the effort to roll back the rules. Whether these rules are implemented in their original form or not, the struggle over their creation and scope argues for why more local governments should be looking at regulating these emissions through the lens of Greenhouse Gas pollution (GHG), as Downwinders and others are suggesting Dallas do in its new gas drilling ordinance. Lack of federal and state action on GHG pollution allows local governments to fill in the gap and level the playing field to reduce air pollution that would otherwise fall through the cracks and loopholes of current law. Even if the new EPA rules were to come on stream in their original form, they still wouldn't cover 70-75% of the VOC emissions causing so many problems. This is why local governments must act out of self-defense. In this case, no other level of government is making sure that new gas pollution doesn't contribute to already bad regional ozone problems, doesn't blow open a city's commitment to reducing its carbon footprint, as Dallas has pledged to do under the 2005 Mayor's Climate Change Agreement, and doesn't poison a city's neighborhoods. If the as industry was treated like other industrial polluters, it would have to mitigate or "off-set" these air pollution increase with air pollution decreases elsewhere in the same area. Gas operators do not have to do this. Local regulation could make them. It could force gas operators to decrease air pollution as much as they increase it in Dallas by paying for projects that reduce the same kind of GHG pollution as they emit. It would also act as a automatic incentive for the gas operators not to release as much air pollution to begin with - stopping it before it starts. EPA is not going to save the residents of the Shale from the gas industry. They'e got to do that themselves. Here's a way that could help.   Read More

It's one of the most frustrating shortages grassroots activists face. Not money. Not lawyers. Doctors willing to say in public what they say in private. We can't count how many times physicians in the DFW area have reportedly counseled their Midlothian-area patients to move out of close proximity of the three cement plants there, but declined to issue even the mildest warnings to the public at large. We know the same thing must be happening now with the proliferation of gas drilling. A lot of private doubts, but few public condemnations.  According to health professionals themselves, the subject of environmentally-caused disease and illness just doesn't come up in medical school. Doctors are woefully underprepared to deal with patients that may be harmed by industrial pollution. It doesn't make any sense, but on any given day there are many citizen activists in DFW that are more authoritative sources on environmental health issues, more current in their knowledge of the field, than the vast majority of the thousands of doctors practicing here. That's why it's encouraging to find reports like this one out of Houston that tracks the activism of Dr. Wesley Stafford in Corpus Christi over a local power plant that would burn pet coke - a nasty fuel. More of this please.  Read More

Whew. There's quite a story from today's Guardian involving the British Government, the Environmental Defense Fund, and right-wing Texas elected officials. The year was 2009. Her Majesty's Foreign and Commonwealth Office gave 13,673 Pounds (about $21,000) to Texas EDF to "influence climate security policy and legislation in Texas." How did EDF use this money to accomplish that goal? By organizing voters in key Texas districts? No. By arranging the elected officials to meet Texas victims of climate change? Nope. "The money was used to fly two Texan state politicians, including the climate sceptic Republican Troy Fraser, to the UK to receive a briefing with climate scientists and government officials. A Conference was also held in Austin in which a video of Prince Charles personally addressing Texan politicians on the subject of climate change was shown." The article doesn't say so, but it's obvious what the strategy at work here was. Unable to persuade Texas lawmakers of the righteousness of their cause with only local speakers of the Queen's English to do the work, EDF was at a loss. If only we could impress the importance of global warming on Fraiser and Co. by using people with authoritative British accents to explain it to them. Brilliant! And it would have worked too, except no one could understand what the Prince was actually saying on that video. Of course, when Governor Perry found out about all this, he was rightfully indignant, taking the position that the English had no business interfering with his plan to devolve state government into a a giant polluter oligarchy. That's what the EPA is for. There was some other stuff too about how Texas has a great (cough) record of clean air accomplishments (cough) and how global warming is really just a vast left-wing conspiracy, yada, yada, yada. But you expect that from the Guv. What's EDF's excuse? EDF's Texas Director Jim Marston explained that "There are people in Texas, including Governor Perry, who are uneducated [on this subject]. This was the period leading up to the Copenhagen climate summit. We wanted to get it away from the theoretical and move it to a country where the Kyoto [protocol] had already been ratified. We wanted them to hear it from the best scientists from the UK, a country that Texans tend to respect." See, British accents make everything infinitely more respectable. And how grateful was Senator Troy Frasier after his London Homesick Blues junket? Marston says "he came back very enthused. Sadly, his enthusiasm has decreased since, partly because the issue [of climate change] has become so politicized."  That, plus the power of an English accent tends to wane when it's not constantly reinforced. As Texas grassroots environmental activists, should we be more disappointed in the British for being so condescending about our environmental fights when they're building breeder reactors and stopping wind turbine farms that ruin Donald Trump's view of the ocean, or EDF for being so wasteful and naive? We report. You decide.    Read More

It doesn't often work out this way, but three related stories came over the transom recently that so eloquently spelled out the case for Dallas regulating the Greenhouse gas pollution from the gas industry, that we could have written them ourselves. but we didn't have to. Downwinders and the Dallas Residents at Risk alliance support the idea of the City of Dallas requiring the  "mitigating", or "off-setting"  of new and large air pollution emissions that come with gas drilling. For every ton of Greenhouse Gas emitted by a new well, or compressor, or storage tank, the operators would have to fund a project that would reduce that same amount of pollution in Dallas, so that there would be no net increases in pollution. So why do this? ARTICLE #1: The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review covers a local permit for a gas compressor station that could emit between 20 and 90 tons of smog-forming Nitrogen Oxide, also a Greenhouse Gas. The state already has almost 400 such facilities because of its location in the Marcellus Shale gas play. According to the article, "The stations, which compress gas to get it to move through pipelines, release air pollutants that compound the state's long-standing ozone problem." Gas drilling brings large amounts of new air pollution that isn't covered under current regulations on either the state or federal level. Just one compressor station in Dallas could spew more Greenhouse Gas pollution than all the current industrial sources in the city combined. ARTICLE #2: The New Scientist gives voice to the growing perspective that the fastest way to affect climate change progress is to cut methane and soot emissions, not necessarily CO2. "Methane is a more important control on global temperature than previously realised. The gas's influence is much greater than its direct effect on the atmosphere," says Peter Cox, of the University of Exeter. Curbing methane, he adds, may now be the only way to prevent dangerous warming. "Oil and Gas sources in the US make-up 40% of all industrial methane pollution releases. Dallas has signed the US mayors agreement to reduce its Greenhouse Gas emissions. It won't be ale to keep that commitment if it allows gas drilling without some form of mitigation or off-setting. ARTICLE #3: A piece from the San Luis Obispo Tribune that details how a local county air pollution control board is now regulating greenhouse gases for new housing and commercial developments. What are they doing? Requiring mitigation. "The staff estimates that of 1,142 projects countywide over the next 10 years, 56 would be large enough to require mitigations. Mitigations usually come in the form of sidewalks, bike paths and other amenities that discourage the use of cars.Other developments could be exempted if they are covered by a qualified local emission reduction strategy...." Dallas wouldn't even be the first to think about GHG emission control on the local level, although it might be the first to apply it to the gas industry. Because that's what the biggest new threat to air quality in Dallas is.   Read More

So sad are the politics of climate change initiatives in the US that even ones that have no immediate impact and might never have an impact are applauded by advocates as if they were groundbreaking efforts. On Monday, the Obama administration's proposed, and court-ordered, rules for greenhouse gas pollution from large power plants were released. They call for a limit of 1000 tons of CO2 for every megawatt hour of power produced. Most analysts think that standard favors natural gas over coal - a good description of the current marketplace. The standards don't apply to the sources where they could do he most good - older and dirtier coal-fired power plants, and in fact according to this report out of Austin's KUT, could actually result in a rush to build more dirty coal plants in the next 12 months to avoid them. Other, more aggressive measures, if they happen at all, will have to wait until after November.    Read More

At the bottom of that same Politico article on the suspension of new rule-making at EPA are the results of a national poll on clean air regulations done by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Researched, paid for by the American Lung Association, conducted February 27th to March 4th with a margin of error of 3.5 points either way. The results are not a surprise if you've been following polling on this subject for a while - there are always overwhelming majorities in support of additional efforts to clean up air pollution. But if you live some place like Texas, and/or you've been closely following the GOP presidential nominating contest, you might get the feeling that most people think the air they're breathing is hunky-dory and want the EPA to permanently close-up shop. Nope. 66% of those polled strongly favor or somewhat favor the EPA's updating of air pollution standards with stricter limits vs. 28% who strongly or somewhat opposed that effort. 37% didn't think EPA was strict enough in its regulation of air pollution vs 11% who thought the agency was too strict (14% unsure and 38% "about right"). 78% favored stricter limits on Mercury, 72% favored stricter limits on smog, 70% favored stricter limits on Carbon Dioxide (CO2) and even 60% favored new tailpipe emissions and gasoline standards - knowing that these new rules could directly affect them. 73% think new limits on greenhouse gas emissions will have a positive effect on public health and air quality and even a plurality of 44% believe these standards will have a positive impact on the economy.  No, you're not crazy. You're not the anomaly - your elected officials are.   Read More