Archive for May 2012
“Drilling in Dallas” Community Meeting: Northwest Dallas on Thursday Night
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.
1, 2, 3 Many Dr Als
What made it possible for someone like Dr. Armendariz to become a Regional Administrator? Years of experience as an environmental engineer? Check. Desire? Check. But also opportunity. Before Downwinders selected him to be our scientist to help enforce the Holcim Cement settlement, he’d never done work for a grassroots group in DFW. He was a blank slate. We were considering other, better-known, more traditionally citizen-friendly candidates in other parts of the country but two factors influenced us greatly. We wanted someone local who could respond quickly in case of an accident or “upset” at the Holcim plant. And we wanted to develop local scientific expertise. We wanted to grow our own. And boy did we. As if some dormant civic DNA had been activated, Dr. Al took to his new public policy-making role like a Polisci major. He outgrew us quickly and became the air pollution expert of choice for a wide variety of groups. All of that work led to him becoming a logical consensus choice for Regional Administrator among the Texas environmental community. And whatever role he assume now, he’ll be a formidable force for good for the foreseeable future. But that all begins with a grassroots group with a garage-sale-size budget taking the leap of faith on an unknown local SMU scientist with no history of environmental advocacy. We keep trying to develop and deploy local expertise as much as we can. Last year, we persuaded UTA Prof. Melanie Sattler to write the first report of its kind detailing how much more profit gas operators could make in the DFW area by installing off-the-shelf air pollution control equipment. What we and other grassroots groups need are more opportunities to be able to pay and cultivate this expertise. Only the fact that Holcim was covering Dr. Armendriz’s tab as part of the settlement agreement with Downwinders allowed us to hire him in the first place. We have to find ways to institutionalize this kind of intellectual agricultural locally. Groups have to seek local expertise out. Funding sources must allow for it in their grants. Not every story will turn out to be as dramatically successful as Dr. Armendariz’s, but we won’t be able to repeat his success unless we’re out there trying.
Lisa Jackson in Town to Rally the Troops
That’s the word according to at least one EPA Region 6 employee. No reports yet on what kind of pep talk she gave the staff after just witnessing the four-day public lynching of their former boss, but one wonders whether she might be handicapped by her tepid response. Despite internal assertions that she wanted Dr. Armendariz to stay, her public remarks were less than supportive. She’s no stranger to disappointments from this Administration – she was mugged by the OMB over the new ozone standard – but so soon after the events in question, it’s hard to tell whether, or how much, she contributed to this heartbreaker, and also hard to have any confidence in this administration’s ability to stand up for itself. Strange for a White House that’s boasting what guts it took to pull the trigger on Osama, to be so cowed, so fast, by a bunch of old guys without a clue.