Last week the Senate Natural Resources and Economic Development (SNRED) committee gathered for a hearing on five different interim charges (a complete list of Texas Senate interim charges is available here). Thursday, June 13 the Senate Natural Resources and Economic Development committee met to discuss five of those charges, including the one called “Overcoming Federal Incompetence.” The charge read:
“Consider the impact to the Texas economy from federal interference including, but not limited to, restricting liquified natural gas exports, supply chain limitations, a net-zero carbon agenda, and other air emission provisions. Report on what impact these federal interferences will have on the Texas economy and workforce, and make recommendations to minimize the damage to Texas.”
A recording of the entire hearing is available here. Discussion of the “Incompetence” charge begins at 3:00:00.
On the first panel of witnesses for the Incompetence charge were a staff member from Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office, two personnel from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and one of the three Texas Railroad Commissioners, Wayne Christian.
The Texas Railroad Commission is the agency charged with overseeing the oil and gas industry in Texas. There are three elected commissioners.
Commissioner Christian made several claims about climate science which required contextualization. Here are nine things you need to know about his testimony (in bold)..
- Commissioner Christian opens his testimony by talking about how oil and gas have been a gift to Texas and the world. “We Texans sometimes take for granted oil and gas. We take for granted what the good Lord has given us in abundant supply.” He continued that oil and gas from East Texas helped the Allies win World War II.
It is true that the oil and gas industry has been a major economic driver for Texas and the United States. It is also true that oil producing countries have a strategic advantage on the international stage. It is also true that products like plastics, which come from petroleum, have benefited us. Many products like lifesaving medical devices or cell phones and computers would not be possible without plastics.
The World War II story he refers to is the construction of the Big Inch and Little Inch pipelines, which allowed crude oil from Texas to be transported to the US East Coast. Previously oil was transported on tanker ships, which were vulnerable to German submarine attacks. The pipeline allowed efficient, reliable transport of Texas crude oil to supply the US Military, aiding in the success of the US during World War II.
Commissioner Christian’s characterization that contemporary efforts to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, now that we are aware of the harm they cause, are an attack on the leadership role the US plays in the world is inaccurate. He cited a 2021 World Economic Forum speech by then Greenpeace International executive director Jennifer Morgan, who he says called for a return of the international order to a pre-World War II state, where the US is not a superpower.
The theme of the World Economic Forum in 2021 was “The Great Reset” and the idea was to use the disruption of the global economy from the Covid-19 pandemic as an opportunity to rebuild in a more equitable way that facilitates international cooperation on things like infectious disease mitigation and supply chain issues. I could not find any explicit mention of returning to the pre-World War II state of world affairs.
I was not able to find an online recording of Jennifer Morgan’s speech, but here is an interview with her from the 2021 forum in which she calls for ambitious climate action from the international community including the United States. Her comments are in line with others calling for the United States to be a leader in climate action, just as we have been in other moments in history including the ones Commissioner Christian mentioned. Our leadership in the international community does not depend on our fossil fuel production, but rather our leadership, ideals, and integrity.
- “Every country that has oil is richer than every country that does not; every richer country is cleaner than every country that does not have oil. If you want a cleaner country, have oil.”
Fossil fuel producing countries do often have a higher standard of living and more developed infrastructure than countries that do not. This is more a signal of wealth, not an inherent good of fossil fuels themselves. Extraction, processing, and burning of fossil fuels create significant environmental problems, and that the claim that they make Texas or the US “cleaner” is false.
The lifecycle of fossil fuels, from extraction to end use, is inherently dirty. Fossil fuel operations like mining, fracking, and drilling cause tremendous environmental damage.
The Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 leaked 210,000,000 US gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The accident killed eleven workers and injured seventeen others. The resulting oil slick polluted 1100 miles of coastline and devastated the fishing and tourism industries.
People who live and work adjacent to oil and gas infrastructure have issued repeated complaints about the environmental harm done by these industries. A recent report on hydrogen sulfide by the Houston Chronicle details the frustration of residents who have been unsuccessful in getting the TCEQ to better enforce air quality standards around oil and gas facilities. A summer camp in West Texas has complained to the TCEQ about a retainment pond which holds water contaminated by fracking adjacent to the camp which leaches benzene into the water supply and into the air, threatening the wellbeing of the staff and children at the camp.
Burning fossil fuels coal and natural gas releases CO2 as well as volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and oxides of nitrogen (NOx), and particulate matter (PM), all of which contribute to air pollution, causing health impacts to vulnerable populations. The skies in large US cities like New York, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Houston were once persistently obscured by smog due to industrial and transportation emissions. The federal Clean Air Act, enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency, has been key in improving air quality in the United States. Better air quality makes our cities both more beautiful and safer, healthier places to live. Recently announced federal regulations on methane and particulate matter are designed to build upon those successes, further improving air quality while also mitigating climate change.
- “Let me tell you about the zero carbon agenda. Right now carbon dioxide is 0.0004% of the atmosphere. Of that you ask how much of that is manmade? It’s 3-6% of that is manmade. In other words it is so minute how much CO2 is part of the environment, I use the analogy from East Texas, it’s like a grasshopper passing wind in a hurricane. It makes absolutely no difference.”
Here is an article from Skeptical Science which puts the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is measured in parts per million, in perspective. The fact that something tiny could not possibly have an effect on something large is easily refuted anytime a person takes an ibuprofen for a headache. By mass, a 200 mg Ibuprofen tablet taken by a 60 kg person is 3 ppm. Current atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is over 420 ppm. It’s not the concentration of the greenhouse gas that matters, it’s the way the gas affects the earth system.
The amount of CO2 contributed to the atmosphere by human activities is small when compared with the amount of CO2 that exists naturally in the atmosphere. The problem is that unlike naturally occurring CO2, there is no natural means of removing that CO2 from the atmosphere. The long residence time of atmospheric CO2 means that over time the CO2 contributed by human activities accumulates. That is how the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has increased from 380 ppm in preindustrial times to over 420 ppm today. All that extra CO2 traps a massive amount of energy in the earth’s system. This is what leads to climate change.
Commissioner Christian then quotes several people who he says refute the science of climate change.
- “Let me give you some quick statements that this is not settled science. The founder of Greenpeace, former Greenpeace co-founder Mr. Moore, Patrick Moore, says this whole idea is a total scam.”
Patrick Moore was a member of Greenpeace around the time of its founding, but was not a Greenpeace founder. Greenpeace rejects Moore’s claim in a statement on their website, which also notes that Moore “has been a paid spokesman for a variety of polluting industries for more than 30 years, including the timber, mining, chemical, and aquaculture industries.” Media Matters also profiled Patrick Moore and his ties to the fossil fuel industry after he made multiple appearances on Fox News claiming that there is no scientific proof that humans cause global warming and representing himself as a founder of Greenpeace. The Guardian posted a rebuttal by climate scientists and oceanographers after Moore published a column on the opinion page of an Australian newspaper which claimed that ocean acidification was made up by climate scientists in 2015.
- “The Nobel Prize winner 2022, John Clauser, said ‘The popular narrative about climate science reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world economy and the well-being of billions of people.”
John Clauser has a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University and won the Nobel Prize in 2022 for his work on entangled photons according to the climate disinformation database on Desmog.com. However, he has not done research or published in the field of climate science. Clauser is on the board of the climate denial organization CO2 Coalition.
Skeptical Science, a trusted climate information blog, also discredits Clauser’s statements on the role of CO2 in climate change and outlines the scientific evidence linking human emissions to the observed increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. Summarizing the current scientific consensus which says “There are many lines of evidence that clearly show that atmospheric CO2 has increased to the highest levels seen in 800,000 years due to human behavior. Observational evidence indicates that this increase is caused by humans because the rise in CO2 levels is consistent with recent industrial trends and emissions are largely linked to the burning fossil fuels.”
A 2023 article in the Washington Post quoted two well-known climate scientists who refute Clauser’s claim that global temperature is governed by clouds and that the net effect they have on the climate is cooling.
Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M said “Clouds amplify warming… The scientific community has spent the last century studying [climate change] and, at this point, virtually everything that’s happening has been predicted. John Clauser and his ilk ignore this because they are not advancing serious scientific critiques.”
Michael Mann of Penn State commented “that argument is “pure garbage” and “pseudoscience…The “best available evidence” shows that clouds actually have a net warming effect, Mann said in an email. “In physics, we call that a ‘sign error’ — it’s the sort of error a freshman is embarrassed to be caught having made.”
- You have Ian Pilmer who was one the original scientists between Al Gore’s founding of all this forty years ago says ‘I don’t have opinions I have facts. They are repeatable and validated. Fact number one, no one has ever proven that human emissions of carbon dioxide drives global warming.
The Geological Society characterizes Ian Pilmer’s books as “difficult to read and confused on fundamental issues” and notes that Pilmer is a member ofthe Australian Climate Science Coalition, a group that is skeptical of human-caused climate change.
- Alex Epstein… ‘the Green New Deal that would outlaw American fossil fuels won’t stop global CO2 emissions from rising but they will ruin America.
Alex Epstein was profiled by the Washington Post in 2022. His main argument is that fossil fuels are necessary for improved quality of life and that cheap electricity is necessary for people in developing countries to improve their quality of life. He calls the modern green movement “immoral” because the practice is “harming the poorest people in the world.”
Epstein does not seem aware that climate change is a major concern in much of the developing world because of the way it affects food and economic security and causes other impacts. Or that climate change is a primary driver of migration for people who cannot live sustainably in countries devastated by climate impacts. At the UN Climate Negotiations, it is developing countries who are leading the charge on fossil fuel phaseout and calling for stronger climate regulations and more emission mitigation in the developed world, including the United States.
- A letter came out just this past year that is signed by one thousand scientists that says there ‘is no global climate catastrophe. It is a scam.”
Here is an article about the letter. It came out in 2022 and was circulated on social media. The letter claims that climate change has multiple causes, both human-caused and natural and that climate models cannot be trusted. The organization which hosts the letter on their website has ties to the fossil fuel industry and many of the claims made in the letter are discredited by multiple lines of published scientific evidence. There are almost no actual climate scientists among those one-thousand signatories.
- Commissioner Christian closes his comments by bringing up the Section 111 Methane Rule, which he says will cause the 80% of oil and gas operators who are not associated with large oil companies to go out of business. He expressed concern that the state’s revenue for education and other projects depends on fossil fuels and wonders where that money would come from if not for oil and gas.
It is certainly true that oil and gas revenue is a major part of the economy of the state. But here again, two things can be true. It can be true that the state has benefited from oil and gas in the past and it can be true that we now recognize that fossil fuels are causing dangerous climate change around the world. And that includes Texas.
If I could speak to Commissioner Christianson, I would tell him several things;
- Texas is uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change. We already experience every type of climate-related natural disaster. Climate change is projected to make those natural disasters worse and more frequent. That includes hail, extreme precipitation, extreme heat, blizzards, droughts, hurricanes, and more. Our electrical grid also depends on stable climate conditions. Federal policy which uniformly limits emission of climate-harming gases nationwide benefits Texas.
- Methane emissions are not just harmful to the climate. Methane causes poor air quality, which is harmful to the health of vulnerable groups. A recent study in the American Geophysical Union journal “GeoHealth” found that methane emissions from routine flaring and leaky oil and gas equipment cost $7.4 billion in healthcare costs, lost productivity, and missed days of school nationwide. As the top oil and gas producing state in the nation, Texas bears a large share of those costs.
- Texas is a leader in renewable energy and there is significant potential for growth in that industry, including new jobs and investment in the state. With leadership and creativity, the energy transition has the potential to benefit Texas in a way that promotes a healthy environment.