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For the second time in a row, the “Real Estate Writer” for the Dallas Morning News has written a feature article about a nice, new expensive development where there are gas leases and permits already being requested, and yet failed to mention anything about those pesky gas wells. From what we can tell, the Real Estate Writer seems to be a DMN position paid for by Real Estate developers. Last month it was the West Dallas area surrounding the new Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, where the city has leased its own land out for multiple gas leases. Today it’s the “Cypress Waters” planned community being built by Lucy (Crow) Billingsley around North Lake, where there’s already a gas pad permit in the pipeline, so to speak. But you’d never know it from reading the article. “We have 82 acres on LBJ Freeway that we have saved at the project’s
primary entry point so that we can have retail to service the
development,” Billingsley said. “We will also have restaurants on the
lake.”  And if the wells get permitted, those diners will be getting lots of items off the official menu. We know she’s a Crow. We know its a big development. But really? To be this much of a shill is embarrassing. UPDATE 11:30 AM: Dallas Area Residents for Responsible Drilling’s Raymond Crawford e-mailed the DMN writer, Steve Brown and asked him if he knew about the wells slated for this development. Brown’s reply was as enlightening as it was brief: “Yes, they’ve set aside six drill sites on the master plan for the project...I’m thinking that they consider this not a problem for rental housing but of course it would be a factor for people buying homes.” Yes, of course, because homeowners have lungs, whereas we’re not even sure if renters are a higher life form at all. Amazing isn’t it? 

Via the Texas Tribune, we see where former Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Chairman Buddy Garcia has been appointed by Governor Perry to fill the seat on the misnomered Railroad Commission vacated by Eizabeth Ames Jones, who’s running for a state Senate seat in South Texas. In his time with TCEQ Garcia distinguished himself by, well, let’s see, how did he stand out? He didn’t. He’s one of a series of inter-changable Rick Perry clones that have inhabited TCEQ Commissioner positions over the last decade and voted in lockstep with whatever their mentor wanted. Now that’s he’s been reassigned to the RRC, Garcia has access to the kind of Oil and Gas money helpful for running for whatever it is that Garcia will be running for after his stint at the candy counter is over. He prepared tirelessly for the job by being a salesman for various energy industry front groups, like “Balanced Energy for Texas,” which you might not be surprised to learn actually is quite heavily lopsided towards oil, gas and coal. Perhaps because its sponsors include Peabody Coal, Luminant Energy, and American Electric Power. among others. Congratulations Commissioner Garcia. We know you’ll like this position much better than your last government job. It’s all about drilling and much, much less concerned about environmental quality.  

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. 

For many years now there’s been a entire theory of crime that blames a large part of the rise in anti-social behavior over the last 40 years on the exposure of millions of kids to lead paint and soil. Now comes a new study from Tulane lead expert Dr. Howard Mielke that concludes levels of airborne lead dust in cities have lead to spikes in the rates of aggravated assaults. So what does sunny suburban Frisco have in common with Chicago, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, San Diego, Atlanta? Thanks to the Exide lead smelter, they all have elevated levels of airborne lead. After controlling for other possible causes such as community and
household income, education, policing effort, and incarceration rates, Mielke and his fellow researchers found that for every 1 per cent increase in tonnage of environmental lead
released 22 years earlier, it raised the present rate of aggravated assault
by almost half a percent. This latest information points “to a growing body of evidence that childhood exposure to lead dust causes permanent damage to regions of the brain that govern mood regulation, executive control and judgement.”  Meanwhile, it’s been three months since citizens THOUGHT the Frisco City Council was on track to amortize the almost 50-year old Exide smelter. But nothing has happened. No Board of Adjustment hearing per the usual course of action. On the other hand, Dallas has had no problem scheduling it’s own Board of Adjustment hearing on April 18th concerning the slaughterhouse that dumped pig’s blood in the Trinity River. Dallas is acting quickly to deal with its public nuisance. Frisco is not. with so much on the line, citizens should be asking questions.  

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.

Ever noticed that the companies with the worst environmental records also don’t seem to give a darn about their employees either? It’s no coincidence. The same thinking that makes it OK to gas downwind populations also makes it OK to gas your own workers. That was the story at Exide’s Frisco lead smelter that received a catalogue of violations from both the state and EPA over contamination issues that endangered public health, then promptly got written up by OSHA for risking their own employees health. And that’s the story at Magnablend, the chemical mixing operation in Waxahachie that exploded in a huge ball of fire last December. Last week the company was cited by OSHA with seven serious violations that are defined as a “substantial probability that death or serious physical harm
could result from a hazard about which the employer knew or should have
known.” The Ellis County Right to Know group has all the details and you can see Channel 8’s Brett Shipp chase Magnablend’s CEO into a building trying to make him answer questions. Good times.

Sharon already caught all of this, but it’s important to note its relevance to what’s going on in the re-writing of the Dallas drilling ordinance. We really wonder if most of the members of the Dallas gas drilling task force knew what a compressor station was and did, or spoke to anyone that’s lived within 500 feet of one. Because on the very last day of the Task Force, and without taking any public input, they decided to let compressors sit on well pads that could be as close as 500-1000 feet from a home, school, hospital or other “protected use.” Why is that a bad idea? Compressors are some of the largest and most polluting kinds of facilities in the natural gas fuel cycle. They routinely emit tens of thousands of tons of air pollution. They are very loud. Their low-decibel noise output can cause serious health effects. And, oh yeah, they can explode, like this Williams Company compressor did in a Pennsylvania township last week:  “An explosion at a natural gas compressor station in Susquehanna
County on Thursday morning blew a hole in the roof of the complex
holding the engines, shaking homes as far as a half-mile away and
drawing emergency responders from nearby counties. The 11 a.m. blast at the Lathrop compressor station off Route 29 sent
black and gray clouds billowing from the building for several hours,
but the damage was contained to the site and no one was injured, said a
spokeswoman for Williams Partners LP, which owns the Lathrop station.”  A half mile is more than twice the distance of the elastic 500-1000 foot buffer zone the Dallas task force recommended. The compressor station pressurizes and dehydrates natural gas from the local Marcellus Shale for transport to market. It was moving 365 million cubic feet of gas PER DAY. In reports on the day of the accident, Williams and its partners sounded very contrite. But then this happened: “A damaged Susquehanna County natural gas compressor station restarted
operations last week despite state regulators’ request the facility
remain shut down during an investigation, the Department of
Environmental Protection said Wednesday.Williams Partners turned on some of the seven compressor engines at
the Lathrop station without permission Friday evening after the state
denied the company’s request to begin operating in a limited capacity,
regulators said.” And so besides demonstrating why 500-100 feet might be a bit too close to put a compressor to your children’s swing set, this story also shows why we also need every local government to have its on gas enforcement infrastructure that watches these gas operators like hawks, not ostriches. 

Really, the headline from the New Jersey Spotlight says it all: For Smog Control at Incinerator, Public Pressure Played Key Role.” At issue was the kind of air pollution controls to require on the largest garbage incinerator in the state, run by Essex County itself. And see if this doesn’t sound vaguely familiar. In 2009, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection issued a new air permit renewal for the incinerator but failed to give proper public notice. The state failed to even notify the groups that were already suing over the incinerator’s violations of its former permit. Feeling a little hurt, the groups filed a petition with EPA to revoke the state’s new permit and have a complete re-do of the whole thing, using evidence of permit violations of Particulate Matter and Sulfur Dioxide by the facility as leverage to force an agreement. When a public hearing was finally called on the proposed permit, hundreds of residents attended and demanded that air pollution from the incinerator be reduced. So the state relented and demanded the incinerator install controls that will be at least 50% better at collecting PM pollution and use modern diesel engines to reduce Sulfur Dioxide emissions. William Schulte, an attorney for the Eastern Environmental Law Center,
which represented the community organizations, was quoted in the article as saying that “Without the
public, DEP could never had made that deal.” Public participation doesn’t always guarantee victory for a grassroots group, but you can’t win without it. That’s how Downwinders won our historic settlement with Holcim Cement in 2006. That’s how we forced the cement plants and Chaparral Steel Mill to add controls.  That’s why Governor Perry and his friends want to limit your ability to even know about permit changes in Texas – to the extent that Ash Grove can re-build its entire cement plant under a “permit amendment” that requires no public notice. Ditto with the permit the state gave TXI last June that gives the company permission to turn its cement kiln into a giant garbage burner. No public notice required. No public hearing required. No public participation wanted. That is one thing we should all be working to change in Texas. Meanwhile, here’s to another win by people power. 

Titan Cement is trying to build a huge new cement plant near Cape Fear in North Carolina. People who live there are putting up quit a fight to prevent them from doing that. In order to get these people to settle down, Titan sued a couple of local residents, Kayne Darrell and pediatrician David Hill, who made comments at a County Commissioners’ meeting that went like this: “…we know from numerous studies that if we build this
thing, more children will get sick, a handful of them will die. We also
know from the adult studies that more adults will get sick and quite a
few more of them are going to die as well Which ones? Can’t tell you.
That makes it difficult, but there will be some.” Quite right. We know all these things because numerous scientific studies show a very straight-forward relationship between the kinds of crud put out by cement plants and rates of asthma, heart attacks, strokes, etc. There is nothing the least slanderous or libelous about saying so. And yet Titan sued in hopes of intimidating not only the two citizens it sued, but everyone else who wanted to speak up but now would be afraid of getting sued. That’s how SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Agains Public Participation) suits work. No one ever expects to win a case. If you’re a company, you win just by filing because it shuts people up, or a least that’s the intent. Well, today comes word that Titan and the citizens have “settled” the case and Titan now “recognizes that reasonable minds have the right to disagree, and respect both Dr. Hill and Ms. Darrell’s right to do so.” Isn’t that precious? The Greek Multinational Cement Giant agrees that the quaint American First Amendment is still the law of the land here. In organizing, we often say it’s all about relationships and the Titan press release onthe matter seems to bear this out. “Prior to today’s mediation,
we had not personally met and spoken with Dr. Hill and Ms. Darrell,”
Titan said in a statement. “Having done so, we do not believe that
either Dr. Hill or Ms. Darrell intentionally made any false statements
about Titan or our plant in New Hanover County.” So you know, all it took was seeing that in fact these citizens were not horned devils for the company to change its mind. For his part, Dr. Hill would not comment on the resolution Wednesday except to say, “I
look very much forward to being able to focus all my energy on my
efforts to improve the health of children in this region.” Both defendants will release a statement in the next 24 hours according to their attorney. Meanwhile, Titan won its state air permit, but its’s still not a free and clear path to construction. 

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.