Why Texas’s fossil fuel support will ‘spell disaster’ for climate crisis
The state – which leads the way as US output of oil and gas is forecast to rise 25% in the next decade – is intensifying its production pipeline by pipeline
The state – which leads the way as US output of oil and gas is forecast to rise 25% in the next decade – is intensifying its production pipeline by pipeline
In the same month that Greta Thunberg addressed a UN summit and millions of people took part in a global climate strike, lawmakers in America’s leading oil- and gas-producing state of Texas made a statement of their own.
Texas’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Act went into effect on 1 September, stiffening civil and criminal penalties specifically for protesters who interrupt operations or damage oil and gas pipelines and other energy facilities.
Within a couple of weeks, two dozen Greenpeace activists who dangled off a bridge over the Houston ship channel became the first people charged under the new law, which allows for prison sentences of up to 10 years and fines of up to $500,000 for protest groups.
The new Texas law is emblematic of the unyielding loyalty of conservative lawmakers to the fossil fuel industry in a state stacked with influential climate science deniers or skeptics such as the US senator and former Republican presidential hopeful
Ted Cruz and which named a pipeline tycoon to its parks and wildlife conservation commission.With kindred spirits in the Trump White House, Texas is now intensifying its support of the fossil fuel industry and, pipeline by pipeline literally laying
the groundwork for production to ramp up even more in the next decade.The scale of new production is “staggering”, according to an analysis by Global Witness, a campaign group, with Texas leading the way as US output of oil and gas is forecast to rise by 25% over the next decade
