Eleven communities are on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s “high priority” water list, meaning there is a risk they could run out of water within six months or do not know how much water they have remaining. Use our map to see where each community is located and how many days of water it has left.

Terrence Henry of KUT News and NPR's StateImpact Texas spoke with one longtime resident of Corpus Christi trying to get families to speak out about the health problems they've faced living on what some call Refinery Row.

We'll be liveblogging throughout the weekend from the Texas Tribune Festival's energy and environment track — which includes panels on the coming crisis over water, big oil and national security, and whether green energy is an oxymoron.

Even as the Obama administration delighted conservatives last week by pulling back on a broad regulation to combat ozone pollution, the controversial "cross-state" rule that would also reduce smog-forming pollutants in Texas remains on track.

Texas is summoning all of its political firepower to do battle against the Environmental Protection Agency. A newly announced task force of state and federal lawmakers will try to prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases and abolishing the state's flexible permitting system for refineries and other big plants.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced a new national standard this week that will require coal-fired plants in Texas to reduce mercury emissions. As Erika Aguilar of KUT News reports, the tighter regulations could prove costly for Texas' electric companies.

Texas leaders aren't talking about secession, after an outbreak of conversation a couple of years ago. But the germ of the idea remains in the anti-federalist talking points that fueled Gov. Rick Perry’s re-election campaign last year and provided the outline for his book, Fed Up!

The Environmental Protection Agency is developing new drinking-water regulations for a toxic rocket-fuel ingredient found in 26 states — including Texas.

The politics and rhetoric of the Environmental Protection Agency's multi-front battle with Texas make for a grand spectacle. Behind the scenes, however, there are signs that big industrial plants are trying to move past the stalemate on their own, talking with federal regulators and, in some cases, preparing to meet the demands of the agency.

In Texas, the largest oil producer in the United States, the demand for carbon dioxide is soaring, because it can help squeeze oil out of formations deep in the earth. That's why the idea of of capturing it and pumping it underground is gaining traction in the power sector. It sounds like an exercise in environmental idealism: Take the heat-trapping gas — belched prolifically from coal plants, which generate 45 percent of the nation’s electricity — and bury it, benefiting the atmosphere and combating global climate change. Of course, it is something of an environmental conundrum that stowing the greenhouse gas underground can also help to produce more fossil fuels.

With a panel of state legislators set to decide the future of a number of Texas agencies, the state's environmental agency seems likely to get the green light to operate for another 12 years, but with some changes. As Erika Aguilar of KUT News reports, environmentalists are calling the situation a mild victory.

Hu on the Perry-Bush rift, Ramshaw on the adult diaper wars, Ramsey's interview with conservative budget-slasher Arlene Wohlgemuth, Galbraith on the legislature's water agenda (maybe), M. Smith on Don McLeroy's last stand (maybe), Philpott on the end of earmarks (maybe), Hamilton on the merger of the Higher Education Coordinating Board and the Texas Education Agency (maybe), Aguilar on Mexicans seeking refuge from drug violence, Grissom on inadequate health care in county jails and my conversation with Houston Mayor Annise Parker: The best of our best from November 15 to 19, 2010.

Texas has fired off another volley of legal challenges against federal environmental regulators.

According to a study commissioned by the town of DISH, which sits in the heart of the gas-rich Barnett Shale region, a permanent air monitor recently installed by the state is giving false readings.

At a lunchtime debate on Thursday in Austin, federal and Texas pollution regulators aired their disagreements over the state's controversial permitting program for large plants.

No other place in Texas has received as much attention from the state's environmental agency as the natural-gas-rich Barnett Shale — and that includes the tiny town of DISH, a spokesman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said today.