This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
This summer was the hottest ever recorded, and 2023 is on track to be the hottest year in history. Next year is likely to be even warmer thanks to a strengthening El Niño, a cyclical weather pattern that contributes to above-average temperatures across much of the globe. The extreme heat has made the consequences of more than a century of reckless reliance on fossil fuels impossible to ignore.
As it gets hotter, more people will succumb to heat-related illnesses. The average number of heat-associated deaths that occur every year in the U.S. rose 95 percent between 2010 and 2022. That data doesn’t include this year’s record-breaking summer. The good news is that heat-related illness is highly treatable. The key is to get the right resources to the right places in time to save lives.
A first-of-its-kind initiative called the Climate Health Equity for Community Clinics Program aims to fight back against the rising tide of heat-associated illnesses in the U.S. by getting resources and training into the hands of doctors and the communities they treat. The program, announced last month by the global health and development nonprofit Americares and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is the result of a year of research on the climate-related health threats that clinicians across the nation face on a daily basis. Heat, the primary cause of weather-related deaths in the U.S. in 2022, quickly floated to the top of the list of clinicians’ concerns, followed by wildfire smoke. Americares and Harvard, with $2 million in funding from Johnson & Johnson, the multinational pharmaceutical company, partnered with 10 clinics in Florida, Louisiana, and Arizona. The program aims to expand to 100 clinics by 2025.
The idea behind the program is to ensure that medical professionals at free clinics and community health centers, which work closely with disadvantaged, uninsured communities, identify which of their patients are most vulnerable to extreme heat and arm them with the tools they need to avoid ending up in the hospital with heat-related illness or heatstroke. Providers at participating clinics will be able to type patient information, symptoms, and relevant environmental factors into an online tool and receive a tailored heat mitigation plan from Americares and Harvard. Clinics in the program will also be alerted when dangerous heat waves are bearing down on their area.
Families get free asthma screening inside a mobile clinic in North Long Beach, California. Brittany Murray/MediaNews Group/Long Beach Press-Telegram via Getty Images
“It’s all about preparedness and how we can help save lives when these heat disasters happen,” said Suzanne Roberts, chief executive officer at the Virginia B. Andes Volunteer Community Clinic in Port Charlotte, Florida. Her clinic, which has served its community since 2008, is one of the first 10 pilot clinics being funded by the new program. “We see our patients coming in with heatstroke, we see our patients coming in with nausea, and they don’t understand that it is related to the heat. We hope to learn the rules of the road so when this happens — and it will continue to happen — we will be prepared.”
Excessive heat erodes human health in a staggeringly wide array of ways. Heat affects our motor functions, appetite, quality of sleep, and our drug and alcohol intake. It puts stress on our bodies and exacerbates underlying conditions such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes. It damages our mental health and affects the medications people take to keep depression at bay. It worsens schizophrenia. It can cause third-degree burns from contact with pavement and hot surfaces. And when people are exposed to high temperatures for too long, heat causes their core temperature to rise. Many people, especially those without access to air conditioning, experience excessive sweating, goosebumps, headaches, dizziness, vomiting, shaking, fainting, and other symptoms of severe heat-related illness. The unluckiest — including more than 1,500 Americans last year — die.
Global health outfits like the World Health Organization and governments have long engaged in heat health action planning to prepare for the health impacts of elevated heat at the national level. Municipalities in the U.S. use this type of planning as well, but community health clinics are rarely looped in. The new program customizes this type of planning for individual clinics, providing funding for ice packs, saline drips, and nausea medication as well as recommendations for how the clinics can help their patients navigate heat outside the clinic walls.
The program also aims to bridge divides between clinicians and local public health officials and emergency management departments in order to make sure local resources are directed to the right places. “Clinics often don’t think of themselves as being an important entity when it comes to emergency response broadly,” said Nate Matthews-Triggs, associate director of climate and disaster resilience at Americares and the head of the project. “But now as we’re seeing more and more extreme weather related to climate change, they’re finding themselves on the front lines.”
A doctor treats an injured man inside a makeshift clinic and relief center in Rolling Fork, Mississippi.
CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images
For example, many cities set up cooling centers during heat waves to help keep residents without air conditioners cool, but those cooling centers often sit empty, even as hospitals fill up with patients suffering from heatstroke. That’s because a lot of people either don’t know about the cooling centers or don’t have a way to get to them. Many clinics, particularly in underserved areas, have contracts with non-emergency patient transportation — vans and buses paid for by the city or funded by the clinics to help patients get to their medical appointments. “Can they leverage those relationships to help their patients get to cooling centers?” Matthews-Triggs asked. That’s one of the interventions the program plans to try out over the next couple of years. Clinicians will also work with emergency managers to make sure air-conditioning units are being provided to those who need them most. Additionally, participating clinicians will teach community aid workers, like soup kitchen volunteers, to be able to identify symptoms of heat-related illness.
The Climate Health Equity for Community Clinics Program, with just 10 clinics in three states, is tiny right now. There are tens of thousands of health clinics across the U.S. with varying degrees of preparedness for the health impacts of climate change. Even when the program expands to its expected 100 clinics, its efforts will just be a drop in the bucket. Heat-related illnesses pose a threat to communities in every state in the nation — hundreds of millions of Americans. But experts not involved in the program told Grist that the initiative seems promising.
“Anything that can help better identify who is in need of what and where the resources are, and connect those two things, is going to be helpful in managing the response to any sort of crisis event,” said Samantha Penta, an associate professor in the department of emergency management and homeland security at the University of Albany. Clinicians, who are often seen as trustworthy by the community, are well-positioned to coordinate resources and bridge gaps between local officials and aid groups once the heat has descended. Americares and Harvard plan to use the information they gather between now and 2025 to bolster community-level responses to extreme heat, first in the U.S. and later in middle- and low-income countries around the globe.
“If they find this is a useful resource, then it’s probably something that we want to see spread,” Penta said. “Everything has to start somewhere.”
Sewage collecting in crudely dug trenches. Failing septic tanks that send waste bubbling into backyards. These are some of the common sights across Alabama’s Black Belt, a strip of 24 continuous counties blessed with deep fertile soil but long plagued by inadequate wastewater infrastructure and the commensurate parasitic disease.
It’s a problem, advocates say, that the state has the resources to address.
The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, opened a civil rights probe last week into the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and its implementation of a federal program designed to boost water infrastructure in communities across the country. The decision comes after advocates filed a complaint in March alleging that, for years, the state has hindered Black residents in rural areas from obtaining federal funds to update their wastewater systems.
It’s a region where children play on sewage-laden soil and an overwhelming stench envelops some neighborhoods for weeks on end.
“It’s really disgraceful and painful that people endure this, especially when we have the opportunity to fix it,” said Aaron Colangelo, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defence Council who has been working on the issue.
The March complaint was filed under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin under any program that receives federal funding. At issue is the state’s distribution of money from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, a federal program that provides financial assistance for states to carry out water infrastructure projects.
In urban areas, that usually means funding updates to municipal wastewater treatment plants or controlling sources of toxic pollution. But in Alabama’s sparsely populated Black Belt, where a disproportionate number of residents are Black and live in poverty, it entails providing financial support for people without access to a centralized sewer system to build onsite septic tanks. The Black Belt gets its name from its soil, a dark earthen clay that drains water very slowly, making it difficult to set up septic systems. Many of the ones that do exist are antiquated and in dire need of repairs — at least 50 percent in one rural Alabama county, according to a U.N. report from 2011.
In theory, federal dollars from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund should help. But in their March complaint, attorneys at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Southern Poverty Law Center alleged that state regulators designed a system that makes it impossible for rural residents to access this crucial financial assistance.
One of the ways that the Alabama Department of Environmental Management does this, the complaint states, is by only allowing public bodies to receive funding, ruling out rural homeowners and community groups (in contrast, other southern states like North Carolina and Arkansas give high priority to onsite sanitation systems).
“The result is stark: Alabama has distributed more than one and a half billion dollars in Clean Water State Revolving Fund money since the program’s inception in 1987, but it has never awarded any money” to support individual households’ onsite sanitation needs, the complaint read.
A lack of wastewater infrastructure can have severe public health consequences. One study from 2017 found that one-third of residents in Alabama’s Lowndes County are dealing with hookworm, an intestinal parasite that can cause anemia and stunt children’s mental development.
The direness of the wastewater situation across the Black Belt has been well documented for more than a decade. In 2017, a U.N. poverty official toured the region and remarked that he’d never seen anything like it in the First World. A 2021 civil rights probe by the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services into the conditions in Lowndes County concluded in May with the state agreeing to identify homes with inadequate sanitation systems and updating them.
Colangelo, the lawyer at the Natural Resources Defence Council, called that settlement “remarkable,” but added that it will only solve the problem for one of the Black Belt’s counties. The EPA’s probe this week will hopefully address the issue statewide, he said, requiring regulators to accept individual household bids for onsite sanitation funding and to conduct outreach to communities that are not aware that the financial assistance exists.
Earlier this summer, the EPA dropped a high-profile civil rights complaint in Louisiana’s primary industrial corridor, where more than 100 industrial plants dump toxic pollution into the air of predominantly Black neighborhoods. While that decision prompted advocates to consider whether the agency would fail to follow through with other Title VI complaints, Colangelo told Grist that he does not expect a similar situation in Alabama.
“It’s on EPA to see it through, but we’re confident that they will,” he said.
The Alabama Department of Environmental Management has 30 days after the EPA’s announcement to respond to its probe in writing. After that, the federal agency could choose to bring all parties to the negotiating table to work out an agreement or conduct an investigation of its own.
Over the past 20 years, extreme weather events globally, like hurricanes, floods and heat waves, have cost an estimated $2.8 trillion, according to a new study. The study authors estimate the cost of the extreme weather damages from 2000 to 2019 to average around $143 billion, which breaks down to around $16.3 million per hour.
The researchers analyzed studies that used a methodology known as Extreme Event Attribution (EEA), which connects human-related greenhouse gas emissions and changes in extreme weather events. They compared these analyses to socio-economic costs from extreme weather events to determine how much of the socio-economic costs of extreme weather events are linked to climate change.
Using this method, the team identified a dataset of 185 extreme weather events from 2000 to 2019. During these events, they found a net of 60,951 human deaths that could be linked to climate change.
The researchers noted that human-related climate change could be linked to a net of $260.8 billion in damages from the 185 studied events, or about 53% of total damages. The majority of the climate change-related damages were connected to storms like hurricanes, while 16% of damages were linked to heat waves. Flooding and drought each made up 10% of net damages, and wildfires were linked to 2% of damages.
In total, the researchers found climate-change attributed costs of 185 extreme weather events from 2000 to 2019 to total $2.86 trillion, averaging $143 billion annually. Per year, the costs ranged from the low of $23.9 billion in 2001 to the highest annual cost of $620 billion in 2008. The team published their results in the journal Nature Communications.
While the figures are already significant, they are likely lower than the actual totals. Ilan Noy, study co-author and a professor at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, told The Guardian that for some extreme weather events, data was limited.
“That indicates our headline number of $140bn is a significant understatement,” Noy explained, noting that heat wave data on human deaths was only available in Europe. “We have no idea how many people died from heatwaves in all of sub-Saharan Africa.”
Further, authors Noy and Rebecca Newman, graduate analyst at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, wrote in the study that there are also immeasurable effects from extreme weather, such as trauma, loss of educational access, and job loss that would further increase the costs.
The study authors are encouraging policymakers to use their methodology to help determine how much money to target for a fund that could help countries rebuild after extreme weather events, a plan that was set at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) last year.
“This attribution-based method can also increasingly provide an alternative tool for decision-makers as they consider key adaptations to minimize the adverse impact of climate-related extreme weather events,” the authors concluded in the study. “This type of evidence can also fill, potentially, an evidentiary gap in climate change litigations that are attempting to force both governments and large emitting corporations to change their policies.”
This story was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
State regulators on Monday released their draft rules for what to do with all the hazardous oilfield waste that’s left over once a well is drilled. The announcement gives the public one month to comment on the new rules — while some industry representatives started giving input more than two years ago, documents and interviews show.
Oilfield waste executives and consultants helped write the regulations beginning in 2021. Oil and gas business advocates also gave feedback to the Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates the industry.
The effort was initiated by a commissioner who has investments in oilfield waste companies. Jim Wright, one of the agency’s three elected commissioners, ran for his seat with an eye on rewriting what’s known as Rule 8. Wright owns stock in several hazardous waste management companies in Texas, according to statements filed with the Texas Ethics Commission.
In an interview, Wright brushed off critics who suggest his involvement in the industry makes him a biased regulator. He said that he had little to do with re-writing the rules after he became commissioner, and that, if anything, his position on the Commission has hurt his businesses rather than helped it. Few companies want to risk doing business with companies associated with regulators, he said.
Cows roam on the Pilsner family’s Nordheim property in DeWitt County on Sept. 10. The family’s land sits next to a drilling waste disposal facility, visible in the distant background.
Julius Shieh/The Texas Tribune
“For those who think this is my rule — what Jim Wright wants — that couldn’t be further from the truth,” Wright said. “Even before I came to office, [commission] staff knew we really needed to take a hard look at Rule 8.”
Wright said he believes the new rules will benefit all Texans, not just the oilfield waste industry.
Supporters of industry’s early involvement say the rules, which haven’t been significantly revised since 1984, needed to be changed to make the permitting process more efficient and to allow new waste recycling technologies to be permitted. Critics say the revised regulations would benefit the industry over the public.
“There’s an obvious conflict of interest if the industry gets to rewrite their own rules to their own financial benefit, and they end up writing rules that make people sick or contaminate groundwater and put our collective future at risk,” said Virginia Palacios, executive director of Commission Shift, a watchdog group that advocates for stricter financial policies for commissioners.
Michael Lozano, who does communications and government affairs for the Permian Basin Petroleum Association, which provided input on the draft rules to the Commission before they were released, disagreed.
“With all due respect to our friends on the environmental NGO side, they don’t know what the field application is; they don’t understand what operators are literally doing day in and day out,” he said. “We all want robust environmental standards.”
First: Ron Pilsner stands near the cistern where he stores well water on his property near Nordheim. The land has been in his family for over a century and sits next to a recently-built oil waste facility. Last: For the past few years, a citizen’s group has been checking the water and soil quality in the area with testing kits. Julius Shieh/The Texas Tribune
In an email, Railroad Commission spokesperson Patty Ramon said soliciting very early industry input is typical for the agency’s rulemaking process. Ramon said that at least one member of the public who had protested a facility’s permit in the past was also invited to provide early feedback.
The obscure rules govern the disposal of massive amounts of waste. Companies drill thousands of wells every year in Texas. They typically pump mud into the ground as they drill; rocky soil and a salty liquid known as “produced water” then comes up along with the oil and natural gas. All that waste has to go somewhere.
That’s where Rule 8 comes in.
The Railroad Commission uses Rule 8 to decide how companies should handle that material. Unlike most hazardous waste, the toxic muck from the oilfield is exempt from federal regulations. The state regulations govern how waste can be recycled or dumped — typically in pits near the well or in commercial hazardous waste pits.
The pits can leak toxic chemicals and radioactive materials and pollute surface or groundwater if not properly managed.
In recycling, the mud can be cleaned and used for more drilling, rocks and gravel can be used to build roads and some of the less-contaminated water can be removed for other uses. However, “produced water” is most often injected back into the earth under a different permit, a method that has caused an increase in earthquakes across West Texas.
The rule change would impose new environmental standards such as restricting where waste pits can be located; allow companies to suggest new forms of oilfield waste recycling; and limit who can protest permits, which environmental groups warn could limit public input. However, Ramon wrote that filing a protest is “not a cumbersome process” and that the changes would prevent competitors from filing protests.
Texans have until 5 p.m. on Nov. 3 to give feedback on the draft changes by filling out an online form or attending a meeting at 10 a.m. Oct. 26 at the Commission’s office or 9 a.m. Oct. 27 online at adminmonitor.com/tx/rrc. There will then be another formal proposal and chance for comment later.
Residents want more protections; new rules would allow industry-created pilot programs
Throughout the state, Texans for years have tried to stop oilfield waste dumps from moving into their communities — a fight that some say is already an uphill battle.
Sister Elizabeth Riebschlaeger, a longtime activist and opponent to Nordheim’s drilling waste facility, stands at a meeting hall near the city park on Sept. 10. The hall is where Riebschlaeger first gathered to meet with other opponents to the drilling waste facility.
Julius Shieh/The Texas Tribune
Southeast of San Antonio, outside a tiny city called Nordheim, drivers haul waste to a commercial pit facility next to 63-year-old Ron Pilsner’s family’s farm. His father and grandfather grew up there. A ranch-style home anchors the property, surrounded by Black Angus cattle, oak trees and grassland.
Pilsner says the facility ruined their sense of peace: Bright lights shine from it at night. There’s constant beeping from vehicles backing up and often the wafting stink of petroleum, insecticides and what he describes as a smell like skunks. He no longer wants to open the windows and he worries about the waste pits’ liners leaking and contaminating the area’s groundwater.
Nordheim residents tried to stop a San Antonio-based developer from building the pits in 2014. Pilsner’s parents, Marvin and Bernice, joined the protesters, who put up “DON’T DUMP ON NORDHEIM” signs with a skull and crossbones. The couple went at least once to Austin to ask the Railroad Commission not to approve the project.
The agency approved it anyway; a lawsuit by residents seeking to overturn the decision failed.
After Petro Waste Environmental began construction and operations, the nuisance grew bad enough that Pilsner’s dad stopped renovating the farmhouse, where he planned to retire. A typically frugal man, he spent $16,000 on new furniture, Pilsner said. He moved into a nursing home before he ever got to sleep on the new mattresses. He died last year.
On a scorching, triple-digit September afternoon, Pilsner toured the waste pit’s perimeter with Sister Elizabeth Riebschlaeger, an 87-year-old Catholic nun who had family who lived in Nordheim and who supported the residents in their fight. Riebschlaeger argued the commission needed to give citizens more of a say.
“Of course we’re defeated,” Riebschlaeger said, “but we’re still making noise.”
Waste Management, which acquired Petro Waste in 2019, said it was in compliance with the current Rule 8 and did not expect to need to make any changes based on the draft rules.
The company said it did stop accepting some materials in 2021 that smell and was investing in reducing truck traffic at the facility. “At WM, safety is a core value and we are committed to being a good neighbor,” the statement said.
Under the draft rules, only people like the Pilsners who own land adjacent to a proposed waste pit or recycling facility would be notified of a company’s intent to locate its facility there.
A home across the street from an entrance to the oilfield waste disposal facility has a sign reading “DON’T DUMP ON NORDHEIM.”
Julius Shieh/The Texas Tribune
And only people who can prove they would suffer “actual injury or economic damage” from a waste pit would be allowed to protest a new facility permit — a definition that would limit environmental groups’ influence in stopping new pits from being built. Those people would have 15 days to file a protest, from the time the company filed the application or last provided public notice, and the company would then have 30 days to either withdraw its permit application or request an administrative hearing to settle the dispute.
The draft rules also introduce an option for companies to create pilot programs for their waste: Instead of dumping it in pits or recycling it, companies could propose alternative recycling methods not covered by the rules.
The change addresses the industry’s concern that the current regulations aren’t flexible enough to include new technologies. But environmental groups worry that new methods could get a fast-track to permits with little oversight.
The new rules otherwise update existing standards, adding detail and codifying what was internal guidance used by Railroad Commission staff. For example, under current rules the pits are required to have a plan to manage stormwater runoff, including during intense rainfall events, and cannot be located in a floodplain. Under the new draft rules, such pits also can’t be located on a beach, barrier island, or within 300 feet of wetlands, rivers, streams or lakes. Nor can they be located within 500 feet of any public water system well or intake location.
The old rules said liners for waste pits must “reasonably” prevent pollution but didn’t include specific standards. The draft rules say pits must be lined with a plastic strong enough to resist damage from crude oil, salts, acids and alkaline solutions. Critics of the commission said the new liner standards aren’t much stronger than the internal guidance used by the agency.
Critics also point out that the draft rules don’t spell out the penalties when pits leak or operators violate the rules of their permit. Ramon, the commission spokesperson, said that more details on fines would be available in the formal rule proposal and would likely be similar to existing regulations.
Fines can be determined on a case-by-case basis and could be reduced if a company demonstrates “good faith;” critics say that would give companies more wiggle room to contest fines.
Industry drafts the rules
The draft rules fulfill a goal and campaign promise for Wright, a Republican from South Texas who was elected to the Railroad Commission in 2020. Wright first tried to influence the agency’s regulations years ago, when he was part of the oilfield waste services industry.
Railroad Commissioner Jim Wright (far right, sitting with his fellow commissioners) says the proposed rules for oilfield waste disposal will be good for all Texans, not just industry as critics have claimed
Dimitri Staszewski for The Texas Tribune
Wright was the CEO and president of a Corpus Christi company called Environmental Evolutions, which hauls hazardous waste, and has investments in other hazardous waste companies, according to state filings. Along with some of his customers, Wright wanted to help guide the commission’s staff on how to more consistently apply the regulations affecting them, he said.
At the time, one commissioner agreed to give the group access to commission staff members, according to an interview Wright did on a podcast, but none of the staff actually wanted to work with them on the rules at that time. A 2019 bill to formalize a commission-appointed oil and gas advisory group failed to pass.
So Wright decided to run for a seat on the Railroad Commission.
Wright received campaign donations from the oilfield waste industry, according to campaign finance reports. NGL Water Solutions Permian LLC, the oilfield waste division for Tulsa-based NGL Energy Partners, is one of Wright’s top donors and has given him $226,000 since 2019; a company executive gave an additional $2,500. The company has also donated to the campaigns of the other two commissioners, Christi Craddick and Wayne Christian.
In an interview, Wright said that campaign fundraising was a “necessary evil” to be in politics, but that campaign donations don’t impact his decisions on the Railroad Commission and that he makes that clear to donors.
After he defeated the better-funded incumbent Ryan Sitton in an upset, Wright’s staff turned to the waste rules, internal documents show. An investigative watchdog group called Documented obtained copies of the documents through public records requests and shared them with the Tribune.
Wright’s former director of public affairs, Kate Zaykowski, helped facilitate the formation of a regulatory task force that included at least seven people from oil and gas and oilfield waste companies, including Pioneer Natural Resources and Waste Management, Inc.
Beginning in early 2021, the task force went page-by-page through a years-old attempt to revise the rules, using it as a framework to define more clearly how permits can and can’t be approved, said Kevin Ware, an environmental engineering consultant who chaired the task force. The task force then gave its proposal to the commission.
Commission staff then invited powerful oil and gas lobbying groups to take part in an “informal review” of the task force’s recommendations. Representatives from major companies such as ExxonMobil, Apache Corp. and Chevron were invited to attend commission meetings about the rules. Those companies and at least one lobbying group sent feedback and questions.
Mark Henkhaus, a consultant and former Railroad Commission employee who chaired a regulatory committee for the Permian Basin Petroleum Association, sent an email in August 2022 to a commission staff member raising concerns that an oil waste company may have been trying to craft the rules to its benefit.
“I want to make sure that the waste handlers are not using the Commission to further their business, if you know what I mean,” Henkhaus wrote. Henkhaus declined to comment.
Aaron Krejci, Wright’s director of public affairs, said that while Wright had reactivated the task force and requested their input, he was not involved in the group’s deliberations or suggestions to agency staff.
“The task force was helpful in getting the proverbial rulemaking ball rolling,” Krejci wrote in an email. But he added, “The rule which was just released is not a product of the task force, but rather the Commission staff who have been working internally on these updates for quite some time.”
And Wright said that if the regulations were simply to benefit the waste management industry, they wouldn’t change at all — the status quo is almost always better for business.
Instead, he characterizes the draft rules as a step forward in the Railroad Commission’s ability to better regulate an industry that’s dramatically changed over the last four decades and protect water resources from pollution. He points out that the rules include new setbacks from surface water and better standards for lining waste pits.
“I think it benefits Texas, not just industry,” Wright said. “I don’t see [how this rule] was formulated for the benefit of industry at all.”
Carla Astudillo contributed to this story.
Disclosure: Exxon Mobil Corporation and Permian Basin Petroleum Association have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
With their heads bowed, eyes shut, and hands locked, the Southwest Crossing Community Initiative starts every meeting with a prayer: “Please, protect us from a deadly explosion.”
“And please, cover us … and ease our minds.”
Southwest Crossing is an aging community in Houston where nearly 20 percent of residents are over 65. They know, as it is, the average American is expected to live only a decade after retirement. It’s even less for Black people, and much of the disparity concerns the daily stress of racism.
Since 2021, the group has been in a life-draining fight with CenterPoint Energy, a $40 billion company. That year, CenterPoint, the only investor-owned electric utility company in Texas, quietly announced a plan to build a facility holding 300,000 gallons of liquid propane against the neighborhood’s back wall.
“It’s environmental racism, that’s obvious,” said Southwest Crossing resident Marilyn Rayon. “It’s also mental warfare. We’ve all suffered from lack of sleep, anxiety, mental issues.”
While environmental justice activists often focus on elevated cancer risks and respiratory illnesses caused by fossil fuel infrastructure, chemical exposure, and pollution, these residents have shifted their attention to the mental health impacts.
The small group of Black Southwest Houston residents argue that the movement to ensure environmental parity should factor in these sometimes invisible harms.
Kenneth Burgess and Marilyn Rayon examine cracks in the ground where a proposed CenterPoint natural gas pipeline may run in their Southwest Crossing neighborhood in Houston.
Adam Mahoney/Capital B
The group’s mental health struggles stem from what it feels were deceitful actions used by the energy company to place the facility in the neighborhood and the daily worry of a leak or explosion. For some, it has rehashed trauma from the disasters that have defined parts of their life, from experiences in the U.S. military to explosions at neighboring chemical plants. The group of mainly retirees says they can barely sleep and require therapy and anti-anxiety medication to get through the days.
Their fears have merit. Propane — a fossil fuel-based energy source that is the byproduct of natural gas processing and petroleum refining — has been touted as a more reliable energy source during winter months, but it comes with risks. Because propane is heavier than air, if it leaks, it settles quickly and lower to the ground, leading to an even greater risk of ignition, fire, and explosion than natural gas. A 2014 report says there are about 300 fires and explosions annually at such facilities.
While CenterPoint allowed the legal minimum of 18 days for residents to object, city officials confirmed that COVID-19 precautions and mail delays denied the neighborhood a chance to fully voice its objections to the facility. So last November, it became operational, but the fight just began.
Now, once again, with little engagement, CenterPoint is trying to run a new natural gas pipeline through their properties.
Residents say they became aware of the plan to build the new pipeline only after noticing company employees surveying their property without permission. Because the pipeline is for gas distribution to CenterPoint customers from a CenterPoint-owned gas facility and not a transmission line between two facilities, it does not require a new operating permit from the state of Texas.
In a statement to Capital B, CenterPoint outlined various points of communication with Southwest Crossing residents since 2021 and said the company is “committed to open communications with our customers and community members.” The outline did not mention any communication regarding the pipeline.
Based on the proposed map, CenterPoint may likely distribute the gas to Houston’s quickly growing, majority-white suburbs just west of Southwest Crossing. CenterPoint declined to share where the gas would be transported.
According to residents, CenterPoint has offered homeowners $9,500 to purchase pieces of their undeveloped land to run the pipeline. As residents attempt to stifle the plan — roughly two dozen households have declined the offer — the use of eminent domain is looming in the predominantly Black neighborhood.
Scientific studies dating to the early 2000s have called for greater attention to the mental health struggles of living near industrial sites. It has been connected to insomnia, increased levels of depression and anxiety, and even the fear of venturing outside your home.
“You work all your life and give and go through so much,” said Rayon, “and at the end of your life, after you’ve worked to keep the community nice, they just drop something in your neighborhood that they know is dangerous.”
Southwest Crossing resident Angela King raises questions about CenterPoint’s projects. “If you look at where these five new [propane storage] plants are, four are in Black and [Latino] neighborhoods,” she says. “Why is that?”
Adam Mahoney / Capital B
Several members of the collective, which includes about a dozen residents, say therapy and counseling sessions have helped, but it solves nothing if the threat of disaster remains imminent.
The added infrastructure to their community compounds risks they’ve struggled with since the housing tract was built in the 1980s. The neighborhood is less than 2 miles from an air pollution hotspot where the cancer risk from air pollution is four times higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s limits.
Within 1 mile of the community, there are already three pipelines carrying natural gas, crude oil, and other highly volatile liquids.
Climate change and a growing city
The environmental justice crisis ruminating in the backyards of the Southwest Crossing neighborhood is the product of climate change and an unstable energy grid that has failed to accommodate the nation’s second-fastest-growing metropolitan area.
It exemplifies a growing worry across many of the South’s largest and quickest growing cities, like Dallas, Atlanta, and Jacksonville, Florida. When a city grows, infrastructure — sewage and drinking water systems, streets and highways, and electric grids — struggles to keep up. Construction follows, but throughout U.S. history, infrastructure build-out has routinely caused displacement and increased environmental burdens for cities’ most marginalized communities.
The fatal winter storm Uri in 2021 created a flashpoint for Texas’ struggles. After an estimated 700 people died and 5 million Texans lost power, the energy sector explored options to strengthen the grid.
For CenterPoint, that led to a $40 billion spending plan to strengthen its position on the electric grid. The plan included retiring coal plants and building out more solar power generation, but also nearly $20 billion in national gas expansion.
Increasing their natural gas and propane storage capacities is key to that expansion. The Southwest Houston facility is CenterPoint’s fifth built in Houston since 2019; four facilities are in neighborhoods that are majority people of color.
CenterPoint said the company is “committed to the safe, reliable delivery of natural gas” and the new facilities will help ensure “enough supply to keep natural gas flowing to customers during those times of peak demand, such as during the 2021 winter storm.”
During emergencies, when the demand for electricity spikes, stored propane and natural gas can be rapidly inserted into the pipeline system. This significantly decreases the likelihood of service disruptions for customers in need.
However, environmentalists contend that the practice is an extension of the environmental racism that has plagued Black communities like Southwest Crossing for generations and limits investment into more renewable and reliable energy sources such as wind and solar power.
“If you look at where these five new [CenterPoint propane storage] plants are, four are in Black and [Latino] neighborhoods,” said resident Angela King. “Why is that?”
The trend is found nationally. Despite goals to move on from fossil fuels, the U.S. is growing its natural gas capacities like no other. Between now and 2050, the U.S. is expected to be responsible for more than one out of three of the world’s new oil and gas projects.
Last Christmas Eve, a leak at a similar CenterPoint propane facility in Indiana sent half a dozen people to the hospital. The company initially blamed the leak on its customers’ appliances before a state investigation found the company at fault and fined CenterPoint more than $100,000.
In Southwest Crossing, “people pack a bag and carry it in their car just in case they need to go because of a leak or explosion,” King said.
‘Boom, we’re gone’
Brittney Stredic said she and her neighbors are closer than ever, they “talk and text and share time all the time now.”
As their relationships have grown over shared meals and gatherings in each other’s living rooms, they’ve taken the fight to legislators. They say they haven’t had much success with their city council representative, Martha Castex-Tatum. As she runs unopposed for reelection this November, 15 percent of her corporate donations have come from CenterPoint.
However, at the state level, with support from state Sen. Borris Miles, they’ve been able to help draft four bills related to environmental permitting. One bill passed unanimously through the Texas House of Representatives. It would’ve increased the time allotment for impacted residents to submit opinions for polluting sites like the one in their backyard, although it was never brought to a vote in the state’s backlogged Senate.
Kenneth Burgess says the CenterPoint Energy pipeline project has resurrected memories of past industrial disasters.
Adam Mahoney/Capital B
However, Stredic knows their growing bond is rooted in trauma and disappointment.
As the pipeline battle continues, the community’s options dwindle. If CenterPoint were to request the use of eminent domain, more likely than not, Texas’ conservative courts would support it. In recent years, as other states have attempted to restrict the use of eminent domain, Texas has sharply increased the number of entities allowed to use it.
The group has considered bringing a civil rights complaint to the Department of Justice or EPA. Still, they know the process typically takes three years to offer results, and CenterPoint could easily build the pipeline within that time.
“There’s so much land in Texas, why here? Why in the neighborhood?” Stredic said. “This situation has become my greatest fear.”
These stressors and fears, she said, can contribute to poor health outcomes. A key member of their coalition, Eugene Pack, died unexpectedly last year.
Since then, King finds herself up at 2 a.m. daily reading about the climate and health impacts of gas facilities and pipelines. Down the street, Zachary Petitt is lucky to get 30 minutes of rest at a time.
Kenneth Burgess can barely talk about the trauma the experience has caused — and resurfaced. He worked at a chemical plant for 30 years, surviving three explosions. In 1989, he witnessed 23 of his co-workers perish.
“I decided to live 30 miles from where I worked for a reason,” he said, “and then they still brought it to my neighborhood.”
For Rayon and her husband, Leo, it has brought up the trauma of war abroad and at home.
“My husband was drafted for the Vietnam War. He was in German territory,” Rayon recalled. “And when he saw [CenterPoint Energy] building that gas storage tank, he almost had a heart attack because he said it reminded him of a bunker in Vietnam.”
Rayon fears her neighborhood will become the target of a hate crime. Since 2016, the number of hate crimes in Texas has risen from 167 to 549 in 2022. Anti-Black attacks made up the largest share of crimes by far.
If someone wanted to target the 80 percent Black neighborhood, she said, all they’d have to do was shoot at the storage tank and “boom, we’re gone.”
This story was originally published by Canary Media.
For years, grid batteries couldn’t get much respect from the U.S. electricity sector. But this summer, the up-and-coming clean energy technology notched several big wins that signaled its arrival as a serious player in the industry.
Battery developers built more new grid-storage capacity in the second quarter of 2023 than in any previous quarter, according to newly tabulated data from the American Clean Power industry group and research partner Wood Mackenzie. That constituted a return to form for the industry after two quarters of declining installations hindered by lingering Covid-related supply-chain constraints.
Those new installations, heavily concentrated in California and Texas, meant more batteries than ever were online this summer to help the grid survive a gauntlet of seemingly unending heat waves and weather-related emergencies. No less than The Wall Street Journal lauded the technology’s role in avoiding blackouts in Texas, a state that set 10 different records for electricity demand this summer. Texas grid battery capacity surged from 275 megawatts in 2020 to 3,500 megawatts as of this summer, per a Texas Tribune article — meaning the fleet grew 13 times larger in just three years.
California, which helped kick off the modern era of grid batteries a decade ago by mandating that utilities install them, enlarged its grid battery capacity by a factor of 10 in just the last three years. Batteries now make up 7.6 percent of the nameplate capacity for the power system overseen by the California Independent System Operator, reinforcing the grid in the crucial evening hours when solar production fades.
But the summer headlines weren’t all positive — New York state cooked up the wrong kind of Hot Battery Summer when three different storage plants caught fire in the course of two months, drawing higher levels of scrutiny from storage enthusiast Governor Kathy Hochul. Those three projects, which dropped offline for repairs and investigations, proved to be outliers in a national battery fleet that otherwise spent the summer doing exactly what it was supposed to do: keeping the grid humming along.
The clichéd understanding of grid batteries is that they store clean energy to supply the grid when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. The reality is a little more complicated.
Some battery plants charge directly from solar panels, an arrangement that allowed battery developers to tap into the federal solar tax credit before Congress authorized a similar credit for stand-alone energy storage in the Inflation Reduction Act. Now, bolstered by that incentive, a growing array of stand-alone batteries charge from the grid, which constantly fluctuates in carbon-intensity. In the solar-rich regions where most of the U.S.’ grid battery fleet is concentrated, economics line up nicely with climate imperatives: Profit-seeking battery owners have every reason to charge up when surplus solar generation drives prices down, and then sell power back to the grid in the expensive, largely fossil-fueled hours of peak electricity demand.
Right now, the volume of electricity stored in batteries and returned to the grid in California and Texas is just a drop in the bucket of those states’ ample consumption. But the value batteries provide isn’t so much from bulk-shifting clean energy; it’s in delivering bursts of power at key moments with lightning-fast response times. Battles with grid outages, much like modern presidential elections, are won or lost on the margins. The few thousand megawatts that batteries can instantly contribute to those states in moments of crisis spell the difference between rolling blackouts and a control room full of sweaty but relieved grid operators.
In terms of the transition to clean energy, this means that batteries are taking on more of the role served by fossil-gas peaker plants, which don’t run all the time but fire up for several hours at a time in response to high demand. Lithium-ion batteries today can only keep up their full-strength discharge for a few hours; that’s why numerous startups and the Department of Energy are pushing to commercialize long-duration storage technologies.
If those newer technologies radically reduce the cost of storing electricity, they could shift clean energy en masse into hours when the grid is dirtier. But until then, batteries have proven they can help the electrical system with critical reliability problems it faces today, while nudging it in a cleaner direction.
