Environment
How Texas Lawmakers and Industry Have Weakened Citizens’ Rights to Fight Pollution
At the behest of the industry, legislators have chipped away at the environmental permitting process in Texas, stacking the deck against concerned people protesting industrial projects.
In 2008, Chase Power Development LLC, a Houston-based energy company, made plans to build a coal-fired power plant in the coastal Texas city of Corpus Christi. ...Read More
Texas Relaxed Environmental Enforcement During the Pandemic, State Data Show
Even as the agency reduced enforcement, it continued processing permits that allow businesses to pollute up to certain limits at about the same rate that it did last year.
This story was originally published by Grist. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) is one of the largest and most influential environmental prot...Read More
Editorial: Air Pollution Was Already Killing Us. Then Came the Coronavirus. Why Won’t the EPA Act?
By refusing to strengthen particulate matter standards, the EPA is putting more people at risk.
Brett Perkison suffers from asthma. It’s mild, but it’s part of his life. A physician who practices in suburban Houston, Perkison said that when he goes for...Read More
City Nature Challenge Can Help Us Find Resilience and Mindfulness at Home
This year, researchers are asking residents to become citizen scientists in their own backyards in hopes of collecting vital data in otherwise overlooked areas.
This month, as we continue to struggle with the realities of a global pandemic—and the cooped-up existence it’s brought forth—the arrival of the annual Ci...Read More
Lessons on the Long Game from Goose Island’s Whooping Cranes
Cranes are survivors. Facing the century’s first global pandemic, they might be the sort of collective totem we need.
Word came on March 10 from my daughter’s Houston middle school: Their spring break learning trips had been canceled. For her 7th grade class, the original pla...Read More
COVID-19 is Buying Time for Gulf Coast Towns Fighting Oil and Gas Projects
In Surfside Beach, Port Aransas, and elsewhere, contentious new infrastructure projects may be stalled by the accelerating pandemic.
Surfside Beach, a village of 560 people an hour south of Houston, is known for a few things: It has one of the state’s handful of drive-on beaches, attracting...Read More
COVID-19 Could Be a ‘Double Whammy’ for Those in Pollution Hotspots
Texans who breathe polluted air are more likely to have preexisting health issues. That means they're at a higher risk of getting seriously ill from the coronavirus.
Air pollution across the globe has sharply dropped, an unintended silver lining of COVID-19. But as coronavirus continues to spread, Texas environmental advocat...Read More
Coronavirus is Exposing the Faulty Foundations of the Texas Fracking Industry
The oil and gas sector was already having problems, but the fear and uncertainty around a global pandemic could end the Texas energy boom.
For the past few years, Texas has reaped the rewards of a huge oil boom centered on the shale formations in the Permian Basin. Companies gobbled up acreage acro...Read More
In Big Spring, a Rural Community Braces for Another Oil Bust
As oil prices plummet, the petroleum industry’s benefits and drawbacks for small towns are on full display.
Sometimes Big Spring is a boomtown. Sometimes it’s a bust. And usually, the defining factor is one simple number: the price of a barrel of crude. The commun...Read More