People keep asking

Why did I learn about this in the New York Times?

Read the letter in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.  So, what's the answer?

Seeking full disclosure\

A warm, nostalgic article in Friday's Texas editions of The New York Times informed me that the Star-Telegram is shuttering its fabled Austin bureau, once the workplace of Molly Ivins, Ken Bunting, Sam Kinch and Karen Potter, who broke important news stories on state politics. The bureau's end apparently means the departure of Davey Joe Montgomery, who has covered politics from the nation's capital to the Texas Legislature. Farewell to another fabled journalist.

Why did I learn about this from The New York Times? Earlier last week, the Star-Telegram informed subscribers it was eliminating several syndicated advice columns and squeezing the comics onto fewer pages. Belatedly, Executive Editor Jim Witt, in a Sunday column, glossed over the bureau closing.
I also learned, from an associate at a nonprofit that Melinda Mason's duties were being eliminated. Mason writes the Fort Worth Social Eyes column and during more than three decades at the newspaper helped the Star-Telegram team with community groups on events. Is the newspaper dropping this function as well?

How about full disclosure to better prepare readers as the daily newspaper we faithfully subscribe to continues its gradual and inevitable decline into the digital age?

-- Hollace Ava Weiner, Fort Worth

WHO's talking

About Texas air quality?

WHO isn't?

Read the New York Times article.  YOU can't afford to miss it.

Don't miss the connections...

Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston are the only Texas cities currently considered in "nonattainment" for ozone, meaning they do not meet Environmental Protection Agency standards. Nonattainment can cause a loss of federal highway money, though this has never happened in Texas.

On Friday the E.P.A., citing emissions from drilling activities among other factors, wrote to Gov. Rick Perry to propose including Hood and Wise Counties in the Dallas-Fort Worth non-attainment area.

Hitting the nail on the head

Is what the New York Times keeps doing.

(This story, "As Thailand Floods Spread, Experts Blame Officials, Not Rains", originally appeared in The New York Times.)

On the other side of the world, yet it sounds so familiar...

As some of Thailand’s worst flooding in half a century bears down on Bangkok — submerging cities, industrial parks and ancient temples as it comes — experts in water management are blaming human activity for turning an unusually heavy monsoon season into a disaster.

The main factors, they say, are deforestation, overbuilding in catchment areas, the damming and diversion of natural waterways, urban sprawl, and the filling-in of canals, combined with bad planning. Warnings to the authorities, they say, have been in vain.

Those who tried to warn them have been called crazy.

Ain't so crazy now, is it?

WHO owns YOUR news?

The fracing war is being waged from Texas to New York.

Read about the fracing war the New York Times is facing. 

WHAT happened to "news"?  Oh yeah, most sold out. 

Read about it on ReaderSupportedNews.org.  Bravo, NYT.

Superb investigative journalism by the New York Times has brought the paper under attack by the natural gas industry. That campaign of intimidation and obfuscation has been orchestrated by top-shelf players like Exxon and Chesapeake, aligned with the industry's worst bottom feeders. This coalition has launched an impressive propaganda effort carried by slick PR firms, industry-funded front groups and a predictable cabal of right-wing industry toadies from cable TV and talk radio. In pitting itself against public disclosure and reasonable regulation, the natural gas industry is once again proving that it is its own worst enemy.

In an era when few papers or news outlets are still willing to take on very powerful interests, The Times has pursued very difficult questions about one of our country's richest and most aggressive industries. At a time when accessing documents through open records requests faces an obstacle course of daunting roadblocks, the series has spent nearly a year using these flawed tools to collect and publish an extraordinary trove of original documentation. Archives published by The Times include thousands of pages obtained through leaks and/or public records requests. The Times reporters provide page-by-page annotations explaining the documents so that the reader can sift through them in guided fashion.

Among the revelations uncovered by The Times' admirable reporting;

Sewage treatment plants in the Marcellus region have been accepting millions of gallons of natural gas industry wastewater that carry significant levels of radioactive elements and other pollutants that they are incapable of treating.

An EPA study published by The Times shows receiving rivers and streams into which these plants discharge are unable to consistently dilute this kind of highly toxic effluent.

Most of the state's drinking water intakes, streams and rivers have not been tested for radioactivity for years - since long before the drilling boom began.

Industry is routinely making inflated claims about how much of its wastewater it is actually recycling.

EPA, caving to industry lobbyists and high level political interference reminiscent of the Bush/Cheney era, has narrowed the scope of its national study on hydrofracking despite vocal protests from agency scientists. The EPA had, for example, planned to study in detail the effect on rivers of sending radioactive wastewater through sewage plants, but dropped these plans during the phase when White House-level review was conducted.

Similar studies in the past had been narrowed by industry pressure, leading to widespread exemptions for the oil and gas industry from environmental laws.

The Times revealed an ongoing and red-hot debate within the EPA about whether the agency should force Pennsylvania to handle its drilling waste more carefully and strengthen that state's notoriously lax regulations and anemic enforcement.

The Times investigation also explodes the industry's decade-old mantra that a "there is not a single documented case of drinking water being contaminated by fracking." The Times investigation of EPA archives exposes this claim as demonstrably false.

A second round of New York Times stories showed that within the natural gas industry and among federal energy officials, there were serious and disturbing reservations about the economic prospects of shale gas:

Government and industry officials made sure that all of their reservations were discussed privately and never revealed to the American public. Internal commentary by these officials is striking because it contrasts so sharply with the excited public rhetoric from the same agencies, lawmakers, industry officials and energy experts about shale gas.

Same song and dance

Any of this starting to sound familiar, yet?

Texas in the New York Times...again.  

Eminent Domain Fight Has a Canadian Twist

Randy Thompson, a Nebraska landowner, is challenging the assumption by TransCanada that it can seize land for an oil pipeline. 

 
 By LESLIE KAUFMAN and DAN FROSCH
    Published: October 17, 2011 

 A Canadian company has been threatening to confiscate private land from South Dakota to the Gulf of Mexico, and is already suing many who have refused to allow the Keystone XL pipeline on their property even though the controversial project has yet to receive federal approval. 
 
Randy Thompson, a cattle buyer in Nebraska, was informed that if he did not grant pipeline access to 80 of the 400 acres left to him by his mother along the Platte River, "Keystone will use eminent domain to acquire the easement." 

Sue Kelso and her large extended family in Oklahoma were sued in the local district court by TransCanada, the pipeline company, after she and her siblings refused to allow the pipeline to cross their pasture. "Their land agent told us the very first day she met with us, you either take the money or they're going to condemn the land," Mrs. Kelso said. 

By its own count, the company currently has 34 eminent domain actions against landowners in Texas and an additional 22 in South Dakota. 

“It was a hard decision whether I wanted to fight and spend all this money even though I could lose the thing,” Ms. Fairchild said in a weary drawl. “But somebody needs to fight them. I decided it would be me.” 

"Inaccurate and Misleading"

No we're not referring to our politicians or local "news". 

Seconds after the back to back real newspaper articles (New York Times) concerning natural gas drilling might just be the Ponzi scheme many have warned about for years, the drillers started their spin.  Yeah, no one saw that coming.

Gas drilling companies called the information (which came from industry insider emails) "inaccurate and misleading".  Isn't that what the Times articles said about their propaganda, just in a more professional way?

As usual, local "news" jumped on the spin wagon. 

Here's a copy of what a local concerned citizen sent to the local paper.  Since you won't see the letter in the paper, we'll share it here.  Think they'll get a response?

You might tell your friends in the business that people are wary of propaganda pieces like this one masquerading as news. If Aubrey wants to put forward something that people will not consider to be "inaccurate and misleading" hype from the business end of the industry, then they need to get their most credible geophysicist and petroleum engineer to write a piece explaining how refracking can be made to work sufficiently well to keep these wells productive for 30-50 years. Oh, and the article needs to be signed and stamped with a Professional Engineer's seal so that his career is on the line. Also please stop putting out the hype about there being no chance of raw gas invading the aquifers because the fracking is done 7000-8000 feet below the surface and an aquifer is typically only a few hundred feet deep.

That dog won't hunt any longer. Look at any flagstone patio or sidewalk. You've never seen one without cracks. That's what happens in the wellbore at the interfaces between the cement and the casing and between the cement and the rock wall. There's the conduit for transporting the raw gas up the wellbore to the aquifer.

I'd be ashamed to be writing propaganda for CHK. If you want to do that then go to work for them. Hey, they'd even pay you more than the S-T does.

Both Barrels Loaded

The New York Times has done back to back stories on gas drilling not being the PR dream the industry created for the sheep. 

WHO made the map?  Fort Worth, WHO else.  We're the poster child of what not to do when it comes to gas drilling,  our water and eductation.

Read about the BS in the BS in the New York Times here and here.

WHERE did they get their info?  Industry insider emails.  

Here's a thought, if they spent as much on safety measures as they do on shilling the BS, wouldn't we all be better off?