"The Texas Attorney General’s office filed a lawsuit Friday afternoon against Dow Chemical Co., North America’s largest chemical manufacturer, describing hundreds of water pollution violations from its industrial complex on the rural Gulf Coast in Seadrift."
"When one couple’s water turned toxic, state oil regulators delayed key tests that could find a source of contamination. The state didn’t tell the couple for over a month that tests showed their drinking water was contaminated with high levels of barium, which can cause heart problems."
"Josh Courville has harvested crawfish his whole life, but these days, he’s finding a less welcome catch in some of the fields he manages in southern Louisiana. Snails. Big ones."
"More than 500 enormous oil tanks dot the floodplains of the Guadalupe River and its tributaries where they cross one of Texas’ leading oilfields, an Inside Climate News investigation has found, posing risk of an environmental disaster." "Lack of a state floodplain policy in Texas enabled oil companies to build in areas hit by an epic inundation less than 30 years ago."
"A federal district judge on Wednesday declared a 2021 law restricting state investments in companies boycotting the fossil fuel industry unconstitutional, calling it “facially overbroad” and citing First and Fourteenth Amendment concerns."
Two flourishing nonprofit programs teach young writers the basics of journalism and environmental reporting — mentoring and paying students, who publish enterprise and public records stories, personal essays and narrative features. Read more about Florida Student News Watch with CD Davidson-Hiers and Indiana’s climate solutions-focused Youth Environmental Press Team with Jim Poyser, in the new EJ Academy.
"As freezing temperatures swept over West Texas last week, leaky pipeline systems in the Permian Basin of West Texas began to suck in air, spoiling their products, risking an explosion and leading operators to release or burn off vast volumes of gas."
"An Oklahoma state senator has introduced legislation to strengthen regulations on how oilfield wastewater is injected underground following an investigation by The Frontier and ProPublica."
"Texas is responsible for more greenhouse-gas emissions than Saudi Arabia or the global maritime industry. Its oil, gas and petrochemical operations discharge tens of millions of pounds of toxic pollutants into the air each year, comprising almost one-fifth of such releases in the United States. It is the nation’s top emitter of the carcinogens benzene, ethylene oxide and 1,3-butadiene."
"Over the past 30 years, federal and state agencies in Texas have allowed hundreds of oil and chemical barges to amass in a once-tranquil section of the San Jacinto River, just east of Houston." "People who live on the San Jacinto fear chemical releases and explosions from the vessels. It’s unclear who’s policing the buildup."
