DISH, Texas is Ground Zero for Barnett Shale activists who take offense at being poisoned by natural gas drilling.
So the town makes perfect sense for hosting tonight’s anti-pollution rendezvous, when Downwinders At Risk begin a 30-day sprint to seek cuts in gas pollution in the next Dallas-Fort Worth ozone plan.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) is set to vote on the ozone plan on June 8. Tonight, the DISH Town Council, led by Mayor Calvin Tillman, is expected to pass a “Fair Share” resolution calling on TCEQ to use the D/FW plan to reduce drilling pollution that includes carcinogens such as benzene and formadehyde.
The meeting is at 7 tonight at DISH Town Hall, 5413 Tim Donald Rd.
“Despite the fact that the gas industry now emits more smog-forming volatile organic compounds, or VOC’s, than all the cars adn trucks in D/FW combined, and that the state needs to fill in a big hole in the region’s ozone plan with additional VOC cuts, Austin is going out of its way to avoid recuding this kind of pollutino in this new air plan,” said Downwinders At Risk director Jim Schermbeck.
“All the other major sources of this kind of pollution have been forced to make some kind of cuts over the last 20 years — except the gas industry,” he said.
D/FW has been in violation of the federal ozone standard for 20 years.
Are you saying that, if every car and truck in the Metroplex stopped running we would still be out of compliance with EPA minimum standards just because of gas drilling operations? That’s what I thought you said.
Wow!
Typical environmentalist reaction: overstate the facts, dramatize what little truth may exist, and plain lie about the outcomes. The truth is pollution is being driven by substantial increases in population. This population requires food, energy and jobs. You need better arguments than you’re making to stop the inevitable. Nobody believes that drilling is as toxic as you pretend and the TCEQ has limited authority over gas. The railroad commission oversees gas and oil and law specifically denies the TCEQ the ability over-react
You mean the railroad commission protects gas and oil.