Environment
Report: As TCEQ Sits Idle, Polluters Double Illegal Air Pollution in 2018
Unauthorized emission incidents resulted in 135 million pounds of illegal air pollution, according to a new report by Environment Texas.
The oil and gas industry in Texas is largely responsible for doubling the amount of illegal air pollution in the state last year, according to a report released...Read More
Bald Eagle Numbers at Lake Buchanan Are Declining. No One’s Exactly Sure Why.
From 2015 to 2019, an average of four birds per year came to Lake Buchanan—less than half of the 10.4 average for the five years before that. Could the noise from hunters be to blame?
Tim Mohan is intimately familiar with Lake Buchanan, the northernmost of the six Highland Lakes that squiggle through the Hill Country toward Austin. The outdoo...Read More
How Katharine Hayhoe Stays Hopeful as the Planet Warms
The Texas Tech professor and lead author on the last three National Climate Assessments wants you to talk about how to live in a warming world.
Katharine Hayhoe loves talking to her Uber drivers—it’s one way she practices finding common ground on climate change with just about anyone. A Texas Tech p...Read More
As Port Neches Plant Smolders, Trump Rolls Back Safety Rules for Chemical Plants
After a deadly explosion in the town of West in 2013, Obama implemented stricter safety rules for chemical plants. Trump’s EPA has just undone them.
Early Wednesday morning, inside a chemical manufacturing complex just southeast of Beaumont, a building erupted in a ball of flames, injuring eight people and s...Read More
Joe Barton Resurfaces with a Blueprint for How to Bail Out the Oil Industry and Worsen Climate Change
As the former Texas congressman prepares to get into the lobbying game, the climate-change denier reflects on how he worked with industry to unleash a runaway drilling boom in the Permian Basin.
The legislation was marked with the number of the beast. Joe Barton’s staffers, perhaps sensing some irony, insisted that he reintroduce his 2015 bill that ...Read More
East Texas Rivers Could Become a Boiling Pot for Mussels
The humble bivalves may not look like much, but they act as crucial natural filters across the state's waterways—and they're severely threatened by climate change.
Where the Sabine River becomes shin-deep about 20 minutes north of Tyler, three biologists dismount midstream from a narrow metal boat. Lance Williams, a profes...Read More
The Long Battle to Stop the Kinder Morgan Pipeline
For months, locals and landowners have tried to stop the Permian Highway Pipeline, a piece of infrastructure connecting West Texas’ prolific oil fields to the state’s Gulf Coast refineries. But they’re running out of options.
In 1975, Terese Hershey, one of the state’s most influential conservationists, purchased a 1,561-acre tract of land in Stonewall, Texas. For years, she protec...Read More
Landowners Got One Hill Country Oil Pipeline Moved. But Can They Do It Again?
Rule No. 1 of averting pipeline routes: Always bring a high-powered, politically connected oil and gas executive to the negotiating table.
A month after news surfaced that a pipeline proposed by a Texas-based petroleum juggernaut would run across the Edwards Aquifer, the primary source of water for...Read More
Beautiful Ruins: ‘Anthropocene’ Is a Sobering Ecological Prophecy
In this visually stunning documentary, ingenuity is humanity’s fatal flaw.
One of the first shots of Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, a new documentary chronicling how humans have changed the earth, features a massive pile of severed ele...Read More