The Cowtown Chronicles

You may have heard that the City Council approved Chesapeake Energy’s plans to drill on their site along the Trinity River Trail.

There are a lot of comments on the story’s web page, and I’m bothered by the tone of some of the comments. It seems that a few people have decided (probably because of the one-sided coverage by the S-T), that this argument was always all about the trees.

People who look at it from that perspective are really missing the point. While the trees became the rallying point, the real issue was the fact that this site was just not right for the city as a whole. If our goal is to encourage people to use our public parks and trails, slapping a gas well so close to the jewel in the crown of our trail system is not the way to do it.

Several people argue in the comments that gas drilling is an economic benefit for the city. Any economic benefit from gas drilling is more than offset by companies and residents that move out or don’t come because there’s a gas well (or rig) too close to their house or place of work. As for benefits, only ONE group will benefit from this particular well; Chesapeake Energy (which last time I checked was HQ’d in Oklahoma City, not Fort Worth).

How about this: Instead of digging holes all over the planet to find more dino juice, how about employing all those people in that industry to find sustainable solutions to our energy problems? NO ONE talks about alternatives when this stuff is covered in the media. Why? Instead of attracting more companies that won’t or can’t change from a totally unsustainable business model (namely sucking a finite resource out of the ground), why aren’t we focusing on attracting companies that are working on getting past that? North Texas (and Texas as a whole) has been a world leader in energy technologies for nearly a hundred years. If we can’t see past oil and natural gas, that position of leadership is soon going to be just as extinct as the dinosaurs that gave us this bounty.