Future Heist

Texas, we have a significant problem.

Worth noting (from Texas) that taxpayers paid for a report to uncover how bad flaring is and the plan to make it better, and our state oil regulator went crying to Attorney General Ken Paxton's office when a civil society group tried to get them to release it. (He obliged.)

If you're at all interested in climate or energy not paying attention to the Texas Railroad Commission — our state's confoundingly-named oil and gas regulator — I don't even know what to tell you. Except that things are getting *crazy* there in a way that are a serious risk for Texas Republicans.

Texas all having a minor constitutional crisis over oil regulation www.texastribune.org/2026/09/15/t...

So the bad news about methods of cooling data center that use less water: they rely on forever chemicals. "In “two-phase immersion cooling” systems, servers are immersed in a pool of Pfas with a low boiling point." www.theguardian.com/environment/...

No matter how high the price of oil climbs, the actual price is far, far higher

"In doing so, they inadvertently gave the public a free lesson in how to bring the U.S. oil and gas industry to its knees." Intrigued? @saulelbein.bsky.social has the details at @emorwee.bsky.social's Heated

Texas is proposing to allow frackwater (complete with benzene and radioactive elements) to be discharged into waterways and spread on crops. Sound like a horrible idea? Here's what you can do to stop it.

Every one of these wells is a potential source of chemicals that interfere with children's development and never go away.

What are zombie oils wells, and why does it matter that there are 50x as many at-risk wells in Texas as we thought? Read below.

Texas has hundreds of thousands of old oil and gas wells that were plugged decades ago and then forgotten — many now under neighborhoods grew on top of them. We read the state's own records against the scientific lit. We found 25,000+ now at risk of going zombie. tinyurl.com/zombie-wells

@saulelbein.bsky.social's climate watchdog @futureheist.bsky.social turns public data into (very cool) tools the public can actually use. This map shows the sheer extent to which Texas has been penetrated by the fossil fuel industry. It's a visual primer on oil power you have to see to believe

Texas pumps billions of barrels of oil waste underground annually, often down the nearest old well. But when the plugs fail, a hole everyone thought was dead leaks upward again — and people living over "zombie wells" rarely know it. Check @futureheist.bsky.social's new map to see if that's you.

Good message: “Scientists have made clear that the elevated heat, along with vast fires, was being significantly amplified by the human-caused climate crisis, accelerated by the burning of fossil fuels.”

And as a counterpoint of how not to write a headline: may we submit this piece www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Worth saying they're also looking to seize land from hundreds of landowners and at least three Texas state parks for the Wall, too.

The attack on data represents media savvy by the pro-fossil camp: it doesn't just stop climate science, it also closes off a data pipeline that translates directly into artifacts that journalists can quote, and numbers that can become memes. It leaves the question of: how do you cover an absence?

The data centers, the Big Bend wall, and the rush to put fracking fluid on crops are interesting choices for an election year. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Underappreciated trend of the last two years is pro-fossil movement in Texas watching the rise of renewables and concluding that the problem is a free market. insideclimatenews.org/news/0608202...

Worth noting that in farm regions, pesticides a bigger cause of cancer than cigarettes. There's a significant political opening here — polling shows most Americans aren't with MAHA on vaccines or even seed oils, but they *do* agree on environmental chemicals. thehill.com/policy/energ...

Chevron and Williams are explicitly pitching investors on their ability to sell to data centers — making data centers a "lifeline" to a fossil fuel industry increasingly outcompeted by solar + storage. wired.com/story/chevro...

The crazy part of this isn't just that the drought in Central Europe is so bad that Romania had to sink ships to keep water levels high enough to run nuclear — it's that doing so just buys them *days* apnews.com/article/roma...

Califronia alleges that everal DuPont spin-off companies [created] a “fall guy” company designed to take the financial hit stemming from several multibillion-dollar pollution lawsuits while keeping the companies’ most valuable assets out of reach." latimes.com/science/stor...

"Still, he acknowledged it’s getting harder to find a home for produced water," which is to say, the toxic wastewater that comes out of the oilfield at 4x the volume of oil — minimum. "Reuse [putting it on crops and in rivers] has to be introduced at some point." www.mrt.com/business/oil...

"Developers must win every permit. If they lose only one, it’s likely that it’s game over." Great advice here on organizing in general. "Your neighbors have jobs, children and livestock. They will act only if acting is easy and the ask comes from someone they trust. dallasnews.com/news/watchdo...

"This is pretty simple. It’s fossil fuel companies destroying our future for a quick buck." Only thing we'd add: and if they *stop* destroying our future in a way that slows the flow of quick bucks, the shareholders get to sue them. Only way out: changing the structure in which they operate.

What Texans need to understand is that these projects aren't subject to Greg Abbott's state pause, because they *don't connect to the grid.*

What's particularly startling about this story is that this is happening in Southern France and the U.K., which are at the same latitude as, respectively Maine and Newfoundland. Imagine, please, what this means for Texas.

Not just a lot of money for batteries, but a lot of money for Austin, TX manufacturing (and, by the way, non-software tech) www.canarymedia.com/articles/bat...

Government regulators "said the staffing loss has also led to a loss of institutional knowledge and experienced people." The thing to remember is: this year we may scrape by, as the El Nino wind shear rips apart Atlantic hurricanes before they can form. But what about after that?

What's particularly startling about this story is that this is happening in Southern France and the U.K., which are at the same latitude as, respectively Maine and Newfoundland. Imagine, please, what this means for Texas.

You might think that combined brutal heat wave, calls of "climate emergency" in Spain and France ... added to clear evidence that fossil reliance exposes you to wild out-of-control price swings would cut the value of fossil fuel companies. This is not the case. Market valuations post-Iran up $600B

What Texans need to understand is that these projects aren't subject to Greg Abbott's state pause, because they *don't connect to the grid.*

Sneaky move from Greg Abbott: this only applies to those projects that aren't building their own natural gas plants. Which ... a lot are.

To be clear: the coal plant is not closing. Developers argue that the solar project (and it is MASSIVE) will cancel it out. grist.org/energy/this-...

There's an interesting parallel here: salt caverns are what holds oil and gas; the oil right loves to hold up nuclear (looking at you, Landman) as the thing we're all gonna switch to soon so no need for renewables; also oil and gas waste itself often radioactive

what if I were to tell you that a substance isn't PFAS if — stay with us here — it would be inconvenient for CropLife America* *the actual name of the pesticide lobby phys.org/news/2026-07...

This is, in every sense of the word, wild.

There's a big fight over expanding Texas' grid — something analogous to jump from the old federal highways to Interstates — and fascinating to find the oil hard right (TPPF)and the mainstream oil and gas industry (TXOGA) at daggers drawn over it thetexan.news/issues/energ...