Burton Knight is declaring a qualified victory in his battle with City Hall over his water-friendly lawn.

"I was able to negotiate keeping the cactuses and not the boulders," Knight said. "I think that I'd rather have the biodiversity and the pleasures that cactuses bring than the rocks, even thought the rocks were an important part of the design."

The Landmark Commission approved the compromise yesterday, a month-and-a-half after requiring Knight to replace his meticulously xeriscaped yard with grass, which they deemed more appropriate to the Junius Heights Historic District.

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City of Dallas

Burton Knight didn't set out trying to pick a fight with the city of Dallas. He just wanted a xeriscaped lawn, so he pulled up the green turf in front of his Abrams Road home and put in drought-tolerant cactus, mesquite, yucca, agave and dotted the landscape with large, roughly hewed boulders. Knight, who has a horticulture degree from Texas A&M, was pleased. So, he says, were his neighbors.

"We can't stand out in the front yard without somebody walking up to visit the yard," he says. "Everyone loves it. People will honk, people will applaud me from across the street. ... I have no lack of people gushing about it."

But then the city's Landmark Commission ruled that Knight's lawn was not historically appropriate for the century-old Junius Heights neighborhood, which is one of the city's 20 historic districts. Houses back then would have had grass, city staffers argued, not rocks and cacti.

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First, the good news. According to a report just released by the American Lung Association, the air in Dallas-Fort Worth has gotten considerably cleaner in recent years. The average number of days with unhealthy levels of ozone has been cut in half over the past decade, and the concentration of harmful airborne particulates has plummeted to the point that levels no longer pose a significant health risk. The Morning News pointed this out yesterday.

And now for the bad: The region's smog levels, while much improved, are still very, very high. High enough to pose a risk to the young and the elderly, to cause wheezing, coughing, shortness of breath, and asthma attacks. Also, the ALA study cites research linking elevated ozone levels to premature death.

DFW's air is bad enough to get an F from the ALA and earn the No. 8 spot on the ALA's list of smoggiest cities. And while things improved overall this decade, they've actually gotten slightly worse in the last two years. After years of dramatic declines, the number of days of dangerously high ozone ticked up slightly in that time period.

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With North Texas' population exploding and near-perennial drought seeming more and more like a certainty rather than a fluke, state water planners have been scrambling to secure new supplies, going further and further afield in search of waterways that haven't been tapped out.

Several years ago, that quest took the Tarrant Regional Water District to Oklahoma, where they hoped to purchase rights to 150 billion gallons from the southeastern part of the state to pipe to its customers in 11 counties. Oklahoma wouldn't mind. The state has 10 times the water it needs. Certainly it wouldn't deny a thirsty neighbor a mere sip.

Oklahoma's response was less than neighborly. It viewed the water district's request as an attempt to grab the state's natural resources, and the legislature passed laws putting a moratorium on out-of-state water sales. TRD sued in 2007 to stop the laws, and the two parties have been locked in a legal scuffle ever since.

The dispute has now made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in the case on Tuesday.

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Peter Ryan

Back in March, the Keystone XL pipeline's approval looked practically assured. Construction of the 1,179-mile leviathan, connecting Alberta's tar sand mines with Texas Gulf Coast refiners, was already well underway in Texas. The State Department said Canadian tar sands production would proceed apace, with or without the pipeline. By rail or by barge, the stuff would get to market, the draft environmental report concluded, so why not by pipeline? Why not to the Gulf?

Well, there's the lunar landscape tar sands mining has created in Alberta's boreal forests. There's 81 percent more greenhouse gas created by tar sands on a well-to-tank basis than by conventional crude. Theres the grassroots opposition from landowners who don't want their land seized for an oil pipeline.

And then there are the spills: 819,000 gallons of diluted bitumen (lightly processed tar sands) ruptured from a pipeline in Michigan in 2010; 5,000 barrels of diluted bitumen flowing through a neighborhood in Mayflower, Arkansas, from an ExxonMobil line in March.

In other words, there is no shortage of reasons to deny the project, and the industry keeps supplying the opposition with new ones.

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Last summer, Texas, Big Oil interests, the automotive industry and other assorted industrial polluters were dealt an unambiguous defeat in a legal challenge to dismantle greenhouse gas regulations. The Feds, a federal appeals court panel ruled, were "unambiguously correct" for setting limits on carbon dioxide and other pollutants -- an affirmation that greenhouse gases and the climate change to which they contribute are threats to human health.

Abbott and the other challengers claimed the data the court relied on might have been "manipulated" somehow, but the full appeals court declined to rehear the case in December. The win signaled a significant victory for climate activists (and future, Earth-dwelling generations, you might say).

Greg Abbott, the litigious Texas Attorney General who has turned the office into an outsize expression of his political ambition, is now appealing to the highest court in the land.

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The West Nile virus is officially back. Public health officials got their first confirmation of that last week when mosquito pools in Richardson tested positive for the disease. Today, Highland Park announced a positive test of its own. Dallas County is already urging residents to use insect repellant, drain standing water and dress in long sleeves and pants.

This is all happening very early. Last year, the tests didn't start coming back positive until well into May, and that wound up being the worst West Nile season in Dallas County history, killing 19 people and sickening 398. It's enough to call up flashbacks of planes dosing the city with clouds of possibly toxic chemicals and make you wonder: Is this the new model? Is 2013 going to be just as bad as 2012? Is West Nile now like the professional baseball season, with the end of the World Series bleeding into spring training with barely a pause?

"Not having a crystal ball, there's no way to know," says Dallas County Health and Human Services Director Zachary Thompson. "I think we know that there will be positive mosquitoes, as we've already found. If that's the case, we could have West Nile human cases."

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Joe Barton, wearing a patriotic shirt.

Joe Barton, the Republican Congressman representing Arlington and its environs, has never been shy about expressing his skepticism about global warming. As chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, he launched an investigation into a pair of studies that documented a dramatic spike in global temperatures, sparred with Al Gore and recently referred to carbon dioxide as a life necessity, not a pollutant.

Even after 2012 clocked in as the hottest year on record and a scorched Texas suffered through a historic drought, Barton wouldn't acknowledge the possibility that humans might have had something to do with it. And why would he? He's got the Bible on his side.

At least, that's what he indicated today during a hearing Wednesday. The bill would give Congress the authority to approve the Keystone pipeline, and as Buzzfeed reports, Barton took the opportunity to once again stake out his position against the mountain of scientific evidence indicating that human beings are heating up the planet.

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Congressman Steve Stockman represents what the evidence tells us is an especially crazy swath of Texas in the suburbs of Houston. There's really no other way to explain why voting-age Americans could choose to send such an individual to Washington as their duly elected representative.

Last month, it was the Ted Nugent invite to the State of the Union. Now, via Gawker, it's this:

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@MarkW_KVUE

Austin's plastic bag ban has been in effect for three weeks now, and the city has so far managed to avoid economic Armageddon. Austinites, it seems, are still able to buy groceries, go shopping, and order restaurant takeout. They just have to carry their purchases in reusable bags.

It's an admittedly blunt instrument. A more market-based approach might be more palatable, say factoring in environmental costs into plastic bags' price or making customers pay for each one they use, but an outright ban seems to be the only realistic policy option for cities awash in polyethelene totes. Like Dallas, where such a measure is more or less inevitable.

Opponents have cobbled together a number of arguments against plastic bag bans: they increase greenhouse gas emissions; enable shoplifters; and generally tread on our God-given freedoms.

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