Abbott says megafloods are “just part of nature.” The fossil fuel industry disagrees.
In leaked audio from a meeting last month, gas industry representatives acknowledged that extreme weather is getting wackier and more dangerous.
This is a special joint edition of HEATED and ExxonKnews, a climate newsletter written by reporter Emily Sanders. ExxonKnews specializes in covering fossil fuel industry disinformation, dark money, and lobbying, as well as efforts to hold the industry accountable. ExxonKnews is a project of the Center for Climate Integrity. Sign up here.
Less than a month before deadly flash floods devastated Kerr County, Texas, representatives of the oil and gas industry gathered about 100 miles away to discuss how to protect themselves from increasingly frequent and damaging extreme storms.
At the Omni hotel along the San Antonio River, the American Gas Association — a trade association and lobbying group for the U.S. gas industry — organized a group of industry and utility representatives, as well as members of the National Governors Association, the Department of Energy, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, to talk about how to prepare pipeline infrastructure and the energy grid “for high demand seasons and severe weather events,” according to a leaked agenda and audio from the event.
They heard from Matt Lanza, a meteorologist from Houston-based CenterPoint Energy, who discussed how warmer Gulf waters earlier in the season have caused more frequent, damaging hurricanes and tropical storms across the Gulf Coast and Southeast.
"When I started off in energy, summer was not sit-back-and-relax time from a weather standpoint, but you could kind of ease up a little bit," he said. "But like now you're just constantly on edge... if you look at the last 10 summers, I think all 10 of them are in the top 15 hottest from a cooling degree day standpoint."
While he predicted a slightly above-normal hurricane season for the Gulf Coast this year, he reminded the room: “It doesn't necessarily take a hurricane to cause issues, which I think we're all very keenly aware of.”
"It sounds to me more like we may have less extreme mega storms, but a lot more storm tantrums,” reflected Kimberly Denbow, vice president of security and operations at the American Gas Association. “Like a little tantrum that causes a big ruckus, which requires preparedness on all of our parts, because clearly there's consequences that come with those as well.”
Less than a month after that meeting, one of those “storm tantrums” hit Texas. It didn’t hit any oil and gas infrastructure, but it did hit a summer camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River, killing more than 100 people, at least 27 of them children or counselors.
How climate change intensified the floods
The severity of the flooding was both exceedingly rare and a convergence of very predictable circumstances: in a region called Flash Flood Alley, the combination of hills and nearly impermeable drought-parched soil made for an unstoppable deluge when more than a foot of rain fell fast.
It’s the type of climate-fueled disaster that’s becoming more frequent and severe all over the country due to fossil fuel pollution. As heat-trapping gases concentrate in the atmosphere, the Earth’s water cycle is intensified, leading to more severe torrential downpours when rainfall does occur. An analysis published Monday by research partnership ClimaMeter found that climate change intensified the rainfall that caused the flooding in Texas.
“We can see why it’s essential to decarbonize and electrify our economy,” wrote Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, this week. “The role of climate change is like steroids for the weather… Every weather event we see now carries some influence from climate change. Measuring the exact size takes careful attribution studies, but basic physics already tells us the direction: climate change very likely made this event stronger.”
While politicians deny, the fossil fuel industry prepares
The fossil fuel industry has been taking climate science seriously — at least when it comes to protecting its own operations — for a long time. Major companies including Exxon, Mobil, and Shell began preparing their own infrastructure for big storms and rising seas decades ago, even while battling regulations to curb the use of fossil fuels.
But when it came to protecting human lives outside their operations, the industry took the opposite approach. In the years to follow, internal documents show, the companies and their trade associations executed a plan to undermine and discredit those who drew connections between climate change and extreme weather, deploying yearslong PR campaigns and funding academic research to obscure the link.
Half a century later, many officials in Texas — the top oil-producing state in the U.S., home to Chevron’s and Exxon’s headquarters — are refusing to acknowledge climate change or fossil fuels as even a potential contributor.
“Ever since I have been governor, we have had weather events that were completely unpredictable,” said Gov. Greg Abbott, who received more than $1.1 million in campaign donations from the oil and gas industry in 2024. “And that is just a part of nature."
Blame and attention has quickly spread elsewhere. In the days following the storm, people have rightfully wondered: why didn’t leaders in Kerr County, where the majority of the flooding took place, install a flood warning system despite knowing the risk? Why didn’t local officials respond sooner? Others are pointing to how the Trump administration’s attacks on FEMA and the NWS might have impacted the response. Others still have peddled conspiracy theories about weather manipulation.
On the whole, less scrutiny has landed on how elected officials’ ongoing relationships with the fossil fuel industry could continue to cost lives.
“Abbott, Patrick and other GOP leaders deny climate change, choosing to do political favors for the fossil fuel industry,” wrote Houston Chronicle columnist Chris Tomlinson in a recent op-ed. “Every appointed state official knows they could be fired for acknowledging global warming, which is why you never hear it discussed at the Public Utility Commission, the Railroad Commission or even the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality.”
How oil money shapes the political narrative
An ExxonKnews analysis of OpenSecrets data found that members of Congress representing Texas who voted to pass President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” have together received at least $8.9 million in campaign donations from the oil and gas industry since 2019. The policy they voted for will axe clean energy incentives while giving fossil fuel companies massive tax breaks, opening up new access to federal lands and waters for drilling, and expanding tax credits for companies that use carbon capture to produce more oil.
The oil and gas industry is “deeply invested in shaping the narrative and electing politicians who will support their agenda” in Texas, said Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas. “It's not surprising that the legislature is handing out billions of dollars in subsidies to build new methane gas power plants and that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, where commissioners are appointed by the governor, are rubber stamping permits to build new petrochemical facilities and LNG terminals that will dramatically increase greenhouse gas emissions and pour fuel on the fire for the climate crisis.”
The industry is so invested in ensuring the lifespan of oil and gas in the state that the Texas Oil and Gas Association provides resources to Texas schools teaching kids about the supposed benefits of fossil fuels. Meanwhile, the Texas State Board of Education has weakened climate science education in recent years, instructing schools to instead highlight the “positive aspects” of fossil fuels.
If the fossil fuel industry is protecting its infrastructure in the face of extreme weather and elected officials are protecting their donors, who is accountable to the public? As Kate Aronoff wrote for The New Republic, “How many fewer homes would have been destroyed if Congressional Republicans hadn’t spent decades stopping bills to reduce planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions on behalf of their donors in the fossil fuel industry like ExxonMobil?”
Preventing future harm through emergency warning systems and better evacuation procedures is a crucial immediate step, said Metzger, who said he hoped the conversation would also turn to the forces continuing to fuel disaster.
“We need to take equally seriously: how do we prevent this from getting even worse? We've seen so many of these climate-fueled disasters in the recent years, whether it's Hurricane Harvey or the Wimberley floods, or the wildfires in the panhandle,” he said. “We can't just sit on our hands any longer.”
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I know I should not feign surprise. But I don't have a better word for it. I remain consistently surprised leaders / people / society are so cheaply bought off to "deny" climate change when they simultaneously know or, at a minimum, suspect their children's lives will be destroyed by their actions. Speechless to describe it. I'm glad people like Emily try to write about it.
As the song says, you don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Even oil execs understand that climate change is making extreme weather events more probable. Anyone who argues to the contrary at this point has their head buried in the sand.