“Pay attention, the barrel-bottom of the Robbery is that our lords take all creation as their own dominion. The fish in the waters, the birds in the air, that which grows on the ground, all must be theirs. But to the poor, they say: ‘God has commanded, Thou Shalt Not Steal!’ They fill the wellsprings with wrath, so that the commoners become their enemy … how can that end well in the long run?” — Thomas Müntzer, peasant revolutionary, 1524
“What this movement is saying is that the right to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live in a community that is not contaminated should be a right all of us enjoy.” — Robert Bullard, father of environmental justice, 1991
Isn’t it funny how, when it comes to one’s own backyard, everybody’s an environmentalist?
Those who propose building water-guzzling data centers or toxic waste-dumping factories or groundwater-contaminating oil wells seldom seem to live near the proposed sites.
Perhaps this also explains why landfills are so often placed on the “other side of the tracks.” Or how that Monsanto apologist refused to sip a glass of the glyphosate-based pesticide Roundup despite saying, “You can drink a whole quart of it and it won’t hurt you.”
Sure, it won’t hurt us, but he set a higher standard of safety for himself.
Closer to home, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has recommended a ginormous “superhighway” of 765-kilovolt transmission lines to handle the state’s growing electrical demand. But even the notoriously pro-industry Texas Public Policy Foundation called for slamming the brakes on the overhasty revamp.
“Landowners are already putting up stiff opposition over the routing of the western lines,” the right-wing group wrote in a letter to the Public Utility Commission of Texas filed last September. “The eastern lines will run through much more populated areas that will invite even more such conflicts.” The organization therefore recommended that “the Commission pause ERCOT’s process and open a docket on those projects to allow for broader public input.”
Privatization zealots advocating for “broader public input?” Signs and wonders.
Together with the massive rollout of new AI-catering data centers, ratepayers will be expected to fork over approximately $33 billion in coming years. Artificial intelligence “will probably most likely lead to the end of the world,” Sam Altman, the CEO behind ChatGPT, once said, “but in the meantime, there will be great companies created.”
Reminds me of the post-apocalyptic Tom Toro cartoon depicting a man in a tattered suit and tie sitting around a campfire with three dumbfounded children.
“Yes, the planet got destroyed,” the caption reads. “But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”
A sizable data center can consume millions of gallons of water daily to cool down its fire-prone servers. Before Winter Storm Uri in 2021, there were less than a dozen such facilities in the state. Now there are more than 100 with nearly 1,000 in the works.
And while Gov. Greg Abbott’s 2025 State of the State speech promised a “generational investment in water,” evidently the 20-year, $20 billion commitment voters approved for the Texas Water Fund back in November is woefully deficient.
“If strategies are not implemented over the next 50 years, approximately one out of four Texans in 2080 would have less than half the municipal water supplies they will require during a drought of record,” the Texas Water Development Board revealed this month. The board added that “a severe drought could cause an estimated $91 billion in economic damages in 2030 … projected to increase to $177 billion per year by 2080.”
The water emergency Corpus Christi is currently going through could become the new normal for many of us.
So, how much would the board’s water plan cost the state? How about $174 billion? At least that’s what Perry Fowler, director of the Texas Water Infrastructure Network, recently told the Houston Chronicle.
”This figure validates concerns that $1 billion a year is not going to be sufficient to meet the infrastructure needs to ensure our water supply,” Fowler said. And that doesn’t include the costs of repairs to aging infrastructure.
In addition to predictable shortages, the state’s also not taking care of the water we have. Texas regulators are legally obligated to protect potable groundwater for both environmental and public health reasons.
“Polluting groundwater today limits supplies for tomorrow,” journalist Martha Pskowski leveled with readers of Inside Climate News earlier this year.
Midland is still cleaning up contamination an oil company left decades ago, for example. In 2010, after the Texas Railroad Commission asked for a full investigation of the discovered plume of pollution, the company took less than a week to file for bankruptcy reorganization.
“Chapter 11 is a bailout for oil and gas companies,” an energy finance analyst told Pskowski of the filing. And that’s only one of “more than 500 active cases of groundwater contamination attributed to oil and gas activities,” the article noted.
The Railroad Commission’s list of wells slated for plugging currently identifies more than 11,000 as orphaned — or, as West Texas-serving District Attorney Sarah Stogner prefers, “zombie wells.”
Across the US, the fossil fuel industry produces more than a trillion gallons of wastewater annually.
“That’s enough to form a line of waste barrels to the moon and back 28 times,” science author Justin Nobel wrote for DeSmog, before going on to say that there are “roughly 11 injection wells for every Starbucks.”
That’s reason for concern, because the effluent waste “can contain toxic levels of salt, carcinogenic substances, and heavy metals, and often far more than enough of the radioactive element radium to be defined by the EPA as radioactive waste,” Nobel added.
Lax enforcement of disposal wells nationwide represents a “financial giveaway” to the oil and gas industry, as Amy Mall, director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Nobel, even though experts have “known for generations” about the method’s environmental damage.
It’s not all gloom and doom, however.
In February, San Antonio City Council voted 11–0 to block funding for the aquifer-threatening wastewater treatment plant at Guajolote Ranch in northwest Bexar County.
Beyond that, cross-partisan opposition to AI data centers in particular has written an inspiring new chapter in the history of environmental advocacy.
And that kind of collaboration has happened before. A must-read piece this month by scholar Scott Stern recounted the populist efforts of 1970s anti-pollution fighter Rex Braun — a Texan no less.
“Today Rex Braun is an obscure figure, but for a brief period, from his first legislative campaign in 1966 until his early death in 1975, he was perhaps Texas’s leading environmental crusader,” Stern wrote. “Over three terms in the state house, representing the most polluted district in Texas, he fought to win a ‘right’ to a clean environment and then translate it into better conditions on the ground. To Braun and his constituents, as well as a largely forgotten cohort of environmental populist politicians, the battle against pollution was inseparable from the fight for industrial safety regulations, a minimum wage, and public health.”
In a January article in Scalawag, João Victor chronicled the key role churches can play in defending the right to clean water.
“Long before national headlines called it an ‘environmental justice crisis’, we were living it,” Victor wrote, citing persistent lead levels detected in his home state of Mississippi. “Drinking water that tasted like old coins was normal in my childhood.”
If everyone’s an environmentalist in their own backyard, it’s high time we took the God of Abraham’s advice and recognized, this Earth Month, that it’s all our own backyard.