Houston can be a leader, or a casualty
Taking a top role in the energy transition could bring hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
Historians have pondered over the years whether it takes a war for a president to be ranked among the greats. It’s a debatable proposition, of course, and yet wartime presidents usually head the list. That’s why President Theodore Roosevelt was consumed with envy that Woodrow Wilson, the man to whom he lost in 1912, was in office during World War I.
At the state and local level, elected officials don’t conduct wars, but their reputations usually are made by how they respond to crisis, often natural disasters. Today, elected officials at every level are serving at a time of two major crises — a shape-shifting, worstin-a-century pandemic and, as we learned from a troubling new United Nations report last week, the increasingly urgent crisis of global warning. (Teddy Roosevelt should have been so lucky.)
With Texas at the epicenter of both crises, state officials are failing to respond. In the battle against COVID-19, a pandering governor more concerned about his re-election prospects is actively thwarting mayors, county judges and school officials who are desperately trying to contain the spread. On climate change, he reflexively, and lucratively , panders to the all-powerful oil and gas industry. That’s not “wartime” leadership from Gov. Greg Abbott.
Instead of trying to curtail voting in Texas, instead of hindering the work of local officials combating COVID, Abbott could have been reading last week’s report on the devastating impacts of climate change. It deserves more attention than it has received. The 4,000-page document from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. affiliated scientific group, concludes that we cannot escape some of the devastating effects of climate change — extreme drought, severe heat waves, catastrophic flooding, to name a few — but we still have a narrow window of opportunity to curb the most drastic potential effects.
We know why it’s happening; we know who’s responsible. “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land,” the report says in its summary for policymakers. “Human-induced climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe.”
We also know what to do, but we are running out of time to do it. Each of the past four decades have been successively warmer than the previous one. Last month was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared last week.
Heat waves on land have become significantly hotter since 1950 and oceanic heat waves that are devastating to marine life have doubled in frequency during the past 40 years. The rate of sea-level rise has doubled since 2006. All of these developments are already affecting our daily lives, our health, our well-being.
No matter what steps we take, drastic or otherwise, we are in for at least three decades of worsening climate impacts. Other impacts will continue far into the future. The enormous ice sheets at both poles will continue to melt at least through the end of the century. The rate of sea-level rise will continue to increase for centuries.
Environmentalists have struggled for years to find a way to jar governments, industry and individuals into action without inducing abject surrender. Given the immensity of the challenge, governments — and individuals, for that matter — are particularly good at avoidance. It’s easy to distract, postpone, delude. And yet if we fail to act, “the hellscape we leave to our grandchildren will be unrecognizable,” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson warns. That’s not hyperbole.
Houston, the energy capital of the world, a city that employs nearly a third of the nation’s jobs in oil and gas extraction and is home to headquarters for virtually every segment of the fossil fuel industry, must play a leading role.
We cannot meet the global warming challenge without drastic industry changes. Government at all levels must apply the pressure for transitioning to green energy (with support from consumers). While carbon capture technology is a step in the right direction, American companies can’t make it their sole approach. Our Energy Corridor neighbors must diversify their portfolios by investing in renewable energy rather than relying on emerging technologies to largely buttress their current business models.
A recent report from the International Energy Agency found that in 2020, the oil and gas industry as a whole spent just 1 percent of capital expenditures outside their core business areas on clean energy.
Climate-change activists celebrated key victories earlier this year, including the replacement of three Exxon Mobil board members with activist shareholders — a direct challenge to the company’s oil-centric portfolio. They also applauded a ruling from a Dutch court ordering Royal Dutch Shell to lower emissions. Despite their excitement, there’s this reality: Unless governments and consumers around the world make dramatic changes — triggering a rapid shift in corporate plans — oil and gas companies aren't on track to shift their investments as rapidly as analysts insist the planet requires.
The industry contends that cutting production too early — before the world’s demand for oil has actually decreased — would send prices skyrocketing and leave companies scrambling to provide sufficient supply. To avoid the worst of these consequences, demand must be curtailed through massive changes in the way we live. Namely, generous investments in renewable power, widespread adoption of electric vehicles, and, of course, the political will and international cooperation to make the necessarily disruptive policy changes.
If we’re looking for good news in these apocalyptic times, it could be that what’s good for the planet is also good for the bottom line. A few weeks ago, the Greater Houston Partnership presented a blueprint for positioning Houston as the nation’s Energy Transition Capital. The 15-page strategy document lays out a stark economic choice for the region: Either Houston takes a “business as usual” approach, resulting in the loss of approximately 270,000 jobs (on top of 125,000 jobs lost in the oil and gas sector since 2014), or the city takes the lead in the energy transition. The latter approach likely would bring between 400,000 and 560,000 new jobs to the area, with annual revenue approaching
$210 billion.
“The global energy transition can either be viewed as a huge threat or as an extraordinary opportunity for Houston,” said GHP President and
CEO Bob Harvey at an energy transition conference in June. “We choose to view this as a tremendous opportunity to enhance the long-term economic future and global competitiveness of Houston.”
Mayor Sylvester Turner seems to agree. As chair of Climate Mayors, a bipartisan coalition of nearly 500 city executives banding together on climate change action, Turner has been at the forefront of Houston’s energy transition. Last year, while Abbott was downplaying electric grid concerns and falsely blaming solar and wind energy for the winter storm blackout, Turner was releasing Houston’s first Climate Action Plan and resilience strategy, as well as committing all municipal facilities to 100 percent renewable energy, making the city the largest green power user of any local government, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Progress hasn’t been perfect: municipal emissions make up only 6 percent of community-wide emissions. It will take a lot more partnerships and, advocacy at the federal and state level to even dream of reaching Paris Agreement targets.
Meanwhile, Europe may have hit its hottest temperature on record one day last week — 119 degrees on the island of Sicily. More than 150 million Americans were under some form of heat alert. Fires raged around the world. With or without an eager Teddy Roosevelt, we already are at war.