While Kuff is getting in touch with Mother Nature, I’ll add an occasional aggregation of other stories that might be somewhere close to the sort of thing Kuff might add to the blog in order to keep things a tad more timely. Yeah, so it also gives me an excuse to sorta break my own hiatus from blogging on current events. I got no complaints.
And since we’re early into Kuff’s Thoreau-esque expedition, much of the Houston-centric news is covered fairly well for today. So for the first guest-aggregation blogpost, it gets very DFW-like. Suffer patiently with it. Tomorrow’s posts might all be from the greater Ottawa metroplex for all you know.
» FWST: Drilling dispute has hidden conflict: Who’s going to run Texas? (Mitchell Schnurman)
Schnurman offers the think-piece on the topic of drilling, with a pivot of the attention from the spill still ongoing in the Gulf to the way we manage hydraulic fracturing in the Barnett Shale. The hook is a recent EPA hearing, where over 600 residents turned out to voice their opinions.
One particular item that caught my attention:
The scope of the EPA study is a bit unnerving, given the amount of fracking that’s already occurred. Plus, it won’t be completed for 21/2 years.
Some questions listed by the EPA: How are well casings constructed? How is dirty fracking fluid managed? What are the gaps in current knowledge?
Sounds like basic stuff — facts that really should have been settled long ago.
The Barnett Shale has about 14,000 gas wells, and we’re now asking what we don’t know about the environmental impact?
Parker County Judge Mark Riley, one of dozens of speakers at the hearing, blamed the states and the gas industry for the current crisis in confidence.
“The states just haven’t been responsive to citizens,” Riley said.
Parker County is not exactly known for being a hotbed of liberal environmental activism and Judge Riley is of the Republican persuasion. So those concerns should reverberate a little bit. If nothing else, it should be interesting to see if there’s something faster than a tectonic shift in voting habits that go with the frustration that people have with the changing energy landscape encircling them.
» DMN: Flower Mound gas drilling plan pits property rights against safety concerns
» FWST: New lines for wind energy spark anger in North Texas
Consider this the case of two transmission lines. In the case of Flower Mound, the situation is part and parcel of the above concerns with drilling in the Barnett Shale. But in both cases, the lines are starting to bump up against more developed areas. In the case of Wise County (second article), the complaints are reported as more aesthetic.
As a point of reminder, Flower Mound has just come out of some contentious city elections with drilling issues at the top of the worry list. It wasn’t a runaway win, by any means, but the candidates favoring stricter local controls on drilling did manage to win. Carrying over from the final point above, it’s not necessarily a given that these translate into more partisan splits. Or, even if there is an electoral shift within the locales immediately impacted, there’s still a lot of other areas that may have a corresponding reaction that balances it out. “Wait and see” may be the operative set of instructions, but to borrow the words of the wise sage, Ted “Theodore” Logan … “Do you know when the Mongols ruled China?” strange things are afoot underneath the Flower Mound 7-11.
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And in news that Kuff might not have bothered to comment on, new samples of Stryper songs from their next release are now available.