By Matthew Johnson, the Lone Star Chapter's Polical and Communications Director
As the Presidential and Congressional races grab most of the election-related headlines, I wince a little bit, worrying that Texas voters won’t pay enough attention to incredibly important races at the state and local level. It’s understandable. There’s a lot on the line at the federal level, especially for under-represented communities that face significant harm from the top of the ticket.
Turnout suffers even more for state legislative elections because, despite being a huge and complicated state, Texas convenes its legislature only once every other year. So memories of incredibly consequential bills can feel distant and less important in moments like this, when the last Texas Legislature ended more than a year ago… and so much has happened since then.
There’s a lot at stake in State House and State Senate races this year though, and a very important statewide race. Our state legislature can do a lot of good or a lot of bad, starting in January (less than three months away, y’all).
In 2015, the polluting industries applied maximum pressure on the Texas Capitol to explicitly overturn the will of the people in protecting themselves from the dangers of fracking within their communities (HB 40 - House record Vote). In 2015, the Texas Legislature made it easier for companies to obtain permits to pollute our air and water (SB 709 - House record vote) by cutting down on public interventions. In 2019, state lawmakers passed a bill that will likely lead to state-issued permits to dump treated fracking wastewater into our rivers and streams (HB 2771 - House record vote).
State elections have serious repercussions.
Find out who your State Rep is and then click on the bill links to see how they voted.
These bills are just a few examples of how our state senators and representatives can do real harm to people, especially low-income communities of color, who are disproportionately affected by pollution. But there are candidates (incumbents and challengers) running for the Texas Legislature who acknowledge that environmental racism is real, and that no neighborhood or community (or the entire Texas coastline) should be treated as a “sacrifice zone” to the worst pollution our country creates so that more affluent communities can breathe cleaner air and drink cleaner water.
In addition to these legislative races, there is an important race for one of the three statewide commissioners that run the mis-named “Railroad Commission of Texas,” the Texas agency that regulates oil and gas, as well as coal mining and uranium exploration. Many have called this the most important race on climate in Texas, since the Railroad Commission is the agency that currently doles out permits for flaring methane pollution, as well as permits for oil and gas drilling, waste injection, and coal mining permits and clean-up.
As Hop Hopkins, Sierra Club’s Director of Strategic Partnerships, stated earlier this year, when explaining why we can’t address climate change without addressing white supremacy, “You can’t have climate change without sacrifice zones, and you can’t have sacrifice zones without disposable people, and you can't have disposable people without racism.”
To be clear, the next legislative session will be brutal, as special interests representing large corporate polluters will try to flex their muscle again to make it easier to dump pollution on communities of color to return to a boom cycle (I’m tired of boom-and-bust cycles, aren’t you?). They have already been going to the Railroad Commission for regulatory “relief” and we can expect more there as well.
The concessions they will try to get from the Texas Legislature and state agencies will be framed as economic recovery, but make no mistake, the people of Texas have a choice in how we recover from this recession. We can continue to sacrifice the health and environment of Black and Brown communities to prop up big companies’ profits until the boom-and-bust cycle turns over again, or we can elect leaders who are not beholden to polluting special interests, who will work to find other ways to advance an economic recovery with solutions that do not poison communities.
As Hopkins concludes, “...if climate change and environmental injustice are the result of a society that values some lives and not others, then none of us are safe from pollution until all of us are safe from pollution. Dirty air doesn’t stop at the county line, and carbon pollution doesn’t respect national borders. As long as we keep letting the polluters sacrifice Black and brown communities, we can’t protect our shared global climate.”
If you haven’t voted yet, please look up who is running for the Texas Legislature. You can find our endorsements at TurnTexasGreen.org.