Commentaries at the San Antonio Report provide space for our community to share perspectives and offer solutions to pressing local issues. The views expressed in this commentary belong to the author alone.
The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel about a climate change-driven dystopia, opens with a brutal account of a deadly heatwave in India. The protagonist spends a harrowing day trying desperately to find air conditioning to escape the deadly heat, which is made worse by the warm Indian Ocean pumping humidity into the air.
The scenario sounds like science fiction, but it is not hard to imagine for Houston residents who endured power outages paired with extreme heat after Hurricane Beryl. Extreme heat, especially with high humidity, is a deadly weather phenomenon, deadlier than spectacular meteorological hazards like hurricanes and tornadoes. Extreme heat making conditions “uninhabitable” for more parts of the world is a scenario that keeps climate scientists awake at night.
As an atmospheric scientist who studied weather patterns in Texas for over a decade, I can attest that our state is getting hotter at an alarming rate. Data from the Texas State Climatologist’s office projects that 100-degree days will occur four times as often in 2030 as in the 1970s and 1980s. This isn’t just a matter of discomfort — it threatens public health and our way of life.
During my time at Southwestern University, I taught students about the far-reaching impacts of climate change, such as extreme heat. When paired with high humidity, extreme heat makes conditions outside unsafe and puts those who work outside or cannot access air conditioning at risk. Extreme heat kills more people annually than any other weather hazard. It can even affect mental health, with emergency rooms reporting increased visits due to depression, anxiety and violence during heatwaves.
Extreme heat is a problem for Texas in other ways, too. It makes droughts worse by drying out the soil, making wildfires more likely and dangerous. The Edwards Aquifer, for example, is currently at a 34-year low due to drought, which threatens the health and safety of all San Antonians. Some of Texas’ most iconic imagery depends on regular rainfall — herds of cattle, vast cotton fields, and orderly rows of pecan trees, to name a few. But if temperatures continue to rise, these stunning spectacles could disappear.
What is causing these extreme conditions? And what can we do about it?
The mix of gases in our atmosphere has always included some greenhouse gases, which trap enough heat to keep the earth’s temperature in a range compatible with life. However, an excess of these greenhouse gases causes climate change, and they come from human activities, like burning fossil fuels for electricity or transportation. Carbon dioxide is the most common greenhouse gas, but another gas, methane, is responsible for about 30% of the rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution.
The oil and gas industry is the largest industrial source of methane. At well sites, methane can be emitted during normal operations, through leaky equipment, and from upset conditions. It leaks from pipelines and valves and is transported from wells to refineries. When excess methane gas is flared or burned, uncombusted methane leaks into the atmosphere. Sometimes, flares are not lit, allowing straight methane to vent directly into the air. This is not only a big problem for the climate — pollution from oil and gas operations also causes poor air quality, which is unhealthy for people who live nearby.
Stretching across South Texas is the Eagle Ford shale basin, a swath of land hosting dozens of oil and gas production sites that leak methane. In 2020, a study showed that Latinas living in this area had a 50% chance of giving birth prematurely due to high levels of methane in the air.
In addition to causing serious health problems, the warming potential of methane is staggering — 80 times that of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. However, there’s a silver lining: methane’s atmospheric lifespan is much shorter than that of CO2. This means that if we act now to reduce methane emissions, we can make a difference in climate change and its impacts, like extreme heat, in the short term.
Methane releases are not inevitable. We have the technology to capture excess gas instead of venting or flaring it, and we also have new tools to detect and measure where methane emissions occur. Recent federal legislation provides both carrots and sticks—incentives for companies that mitigate their methane emissions and fees for big polluters that don’t. The Environmental Protection Agency recently finalized new rules to sharply reduce methane and other harmful pollution from oil and gas operations.
We are at a critical moment to mitigate climate change by drastically reducing industrial methane emissions. The future of Texas depends on a safe and stable climate. Extreme heat threatens the health of the state by making outdoor conditions unsafe, worsening drought, and making wildfires more likely. We have the tools and the funding to mitigate methane emissions. It’s time for Texans to demand that oil and gas operators clean up their act.
