Houston’s energy elite thawing to No. 1 gadfly
Environmental lawyer’s warnings finally being heard
Climate change is a touchy topic in Houston, even if hardly anyone doubts the climate is changing. The really huge storms — and not just 2017’s Hurricane Harvey — keep arriving with a size and frequency that meteorologists once insisted was impossible.
But say “climate change” too loudly, though, and you’ll get some looks. Many Houstonians still feel like they’re in a standoff with environmentalists who would love to put the Oil and Gas Capital of the World out of business. With a population up 11 percent since 2010, Houston is destined to overtake Chicago as the United States’ third-largest city — unless something goes horribly wrong.
Something horrible like the worst environmental disaster in American history, which is just one of the looming catastrophes that Jim Blackburn won’t shut up about. The environmental lawyer and Rice University professor shows up everywhere in Houston — at society events, on
the radio, in op-eds and at government hearings — and blurts out what the city’s elite, its oil and gas executives, only whisper in their board rooms: Climate change is an existential threat to Houston, putting in real danger both its physical survival and its economic future.
In his Texas twang, Blackburn, a 72-year-old native of the Rio Grande Valley, warns a $23 billion to $32 billion coastal barrier proposed by that the Army Corps of Engineers barrier is insufficient to protect the region. Flood maps are wrong, making new infrastructure, designed to last decades, obsolete the day it’s finished. Without creative thinking, the fossil fuel industry will collapse, and Houston will turn into a warmer, wetter rust belt.
“There’s a void in Houston right now of leadership,” Blackburn says. “That’s what allows a voice like mine to resonate a bit. I’m saying things that other people are not saying.”
He’s backed by hydrologists, weather modelers, engineers, and ecologists, at Rice University and elsewhere, who produce a steady stream of terrifying research. The main takeaway is that the state’s politicians and businesses are still operating on data from the past century, an era before the weather went berserk. Powerful people are finally listening — or at least pretending to.
The prophet of Houston’s doom can sound upbeat, even chipper, talking about the opportunities for a greener future. He has two different projects to shrink the state’s giant carbon footprint by storing CO2 naturally in marshes and ranchlands. The ideas have the advantage of being cheaper than high-tech alternatives and creating a new climate constituency among the private landowners who sign up to get paid for their “ecological services.”
Blackburn is full of other notions, too, including ways to deal with flooding in urban areas, and shore up the local economy by stimulating ecotourism on the coast.
Blackburn’s secret, says former Mayor Annise Parker, is he is translating his uncompromising environmentalism into a language that Houston’s establishment understands: money. “If you can make a business argument,” she says, “the business community will hear you out.”
Not so diversified
Texans will tell you their state’s economy has diversified beyond fossil fuels. Yet the Texas Oil and Gas Association, a trade group, boasts the industry still directly or indirectly accounts for 30 percent of the state’s economy. Surveying the edges of Houston’s Ship Channel — a knot of refineries, railyards, chemical factories, plastic plants, and storage tanks — that estimate begins feeling rather low.
For decades as a lawyer, Blackburn battled these facilities and anything else that threatened to foul the air, water or land. Over the years, his lawsuits have helped close landfills, re-routed pipelines, and got refineries to cut emissions and compensate communities they polluted. He has negotiated settlements that saved thousands of acres from development, and protected endangered whooping cranes.
Still, he’d often lose. He dealt with disappointment through the occasional, and then frequent, drink. When he started attending Alcoholics Anonymous in 1986, he struggled with the idea of relying on a higher power — until he realized Galveston Bay and the other Texas Coast waterways could be his guiding force. When he wanted another drink, he’d launch his kayak into a marsh and fish alongside reddish egrets and tricolored heron.
“If this storm comes, this will be the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history,” Blackburn says.
He’s not alone in that assessment. “This is a very real threat,” says Bob Harvey, president and
CEO of Greater Houston Partnership, the region’s main business organization. “We need to be doing something. We need to be doing it now.”
A barrier down on the coast isn’t enough to prevent it, according to models from Rice University’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education, and Evacuation from Disasters, or SSPEED, Center, of which Blackburn is co-director. A hurricane could create an unprecedented surge within the bay even if you block water from the Gulf. What’s needed, Blackburn says, is another barrier in Galveston Bay, a string of new islands, created by dredging, that would absorb a storm surge while creating acres of nature and parkland.
Blackburn’s solution
“Five years ago, I was the environmental nut. Today, they’re very concerned that I may be absolutely right.” Jim Blackburn, environmental lawyer and Rice University professor
follows advice from the Dutch, who have learned to protect the low-lying Netherlands with “multiple lines of defense,” says Charlie Penland, the director of civil engineering at Walter P. Moore, who helped come up with the plan. “If something fails, we’ve got to have all these backups.”
Getting serious
Years after major European oil companies proclaimed they were getting serious about climate change, the big American firms now say the same thing. Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Occidental Petroleum have signed onto the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, or OGCI, promising to reduce methane emissions and pitching into a $1 billion-plus fund for emission-cutting technologies. One of OGCI’s initiatives would make the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana into a hub for carbon capture, utilization and storage, or CCUS, a method of capturing CO2 from smokestacks and other emitters and then injecting it into the ground.
Many environmentalists are skeptical, to say the least, of oil-and-gas’s new climate-friendly pose. Fossil fuel companies still spend just a tiny fraction of their research-anddevelopment budgets on green technologies. In fact, most spending on carbon capture goes to “enhanced oil recovery,” which is pumping carbon dioxide into the ground to make oil wells more productive
“They’re not thinking creatively,” says Blackburn. “We’re going to have to find the solutions and basically put them on a plate for the industry.”
One such solution is regenerative agriculture. The world’s topsoils hold more carbon than the atmosphere. Many environmental groups and scientists believe better farming techniques could pull far more CO2 into the ground, while also enhancing productivity and biodiversity. Blackburn’s idea, Soil Value Exchange, is a marketplace to match ranchers, and perhaps eventually farmers, with companies that want to offset their carbon footprints.
Take all of Blackburn’s Texas-friendly climate reforms together and you get something he likes to call the “Green New Deal for Red States.” A big part of his plan is Texas Coastal Exchange, the latest of many local nonprofits Blackburn has helped found over the years.
The organization, which was granted taxexempt status in November, asks Houstonians to cover their personal emissions. The price is $20 per ton, and the average Houston family of four creates 27 metric tons of CO2 each year, excluding air travel. That works out to $540. The money goes to landowners of coastal wetlands threatened by sea level rise, giving them an incentive to maintain and even expand marshes that are very effective in pulling carbon from the air.
Kirksey, a 160-employee architecture firm in Houston, figured it was responsible for 1,300 to 1,400 metric tons a year. After offsetting about half of its footprint with renewable energy and contributions to local tree planting, the firm decided to make up for the rest, 772 tons, through paying to protect 386 acres of marshland on the nonprofit exchange. “It’s really not just writing a check to make yourself feel good,” says Kirksey President Wes Good. “It’s tangible. It’s local.”
Shifting mood
Even as more businesses pay attention to Blackburn, he’s still fighting an uphill battle to get Houston to take climate change as seriously as he does.
“Somehow we always find a way to disappoint Jim,” Harvey, of Greater Houston Partnership, says ruefully. “But the fact that we perhaps don’t respond as aggressively as we might shouldn’t be interpreted as hostility.”
Blackburn may criticize Houston’s business establishment but he’s not ready to give up on his neighbors. He feels Texans’ mood shifting.
“Five years ago, I was the environmental nut,” he says. “Today, they’re very concerned that I may be absolutely right. There is a bit of horror associated with it.”