I tend to follow news in general, but especially if it concerns places where I live now and have lived in the past.
Houston is one such place, and I look back on my 10 years there with mixed feelings. In broad strokes, I hated the city but liked the people who lived there, and Texans in general.
There were invariably hidden depths there, and I always wondered how such interesting people could live in such an unremittingly dull and ugly place. Many other American cities are just as ugly, but at least nature provides patches of beauty all around them.
Houston holds the rare distinction of being equally ugly in its man-made and natural aspects. And the climate isn’t much help either.
For some seven months every year it’s what I called 95/95: the first number being degrees Fahrenheit and the second, per cent humidity. This is accompanied by at least one annual flood, one tornado, and a hurricane every other year.
The worst one, Hurricane Harvey, hit the city in 2017, leaving 80 people dead and 800,000 homeless. That was worse than Hurricanes Sandy and Catrina combined, which is going some.
In my day, Houstonians took disasters in stride. If they blamed them on anything, it was themselves for having incurred God’s wrath. But much has changed since 1984, when I last lived there.
God is no longer a consideration, but global warming is. All natural disasters are deemed to be the work of that wrathful deity, and in some quarters it’s even implicated in coronavirus.
I would have thought Houston would be the last place to succumb to that cult, and perhaps it was. But succumb it has, judging by the news.
Its mayor has announced a plan to move the city to 100 per cent renewable energy, with the long-range goal of making Houston carbon-neutral by 2050. Houston’s Climate Action Plan also includes a commitment to “developing more public transportation options”.
Now any public transportation would constitute an improvement over the Houston I remember. In my day, I vaguely heard of a bus route or two, but I never saw a single bus. One had to hop in a car to buy even a pint of milk or a pack of cigarettes.
Most streets had no pavements, on the correct assumption that the weather was usually so awful that no one would go anywhere on foot anyway. One moved from an air-conditioned house to an air-conditioned car, to an air-conditioned office, to an air-conditioned bar, to the air-conditioned car one was by then in no condition to drive, and then back to the air-conditioned house.
So yes, some public transport, provided it’s air-conditioned, would be an improvement. But the rest of it?
I’m not going to repeat my usual diatribes against foolhardy, ideologised attempts to phase out fossil fuels. I shall, however, comment on the staggering hypocrisy of pushing for that in Houston.
Amazingly, in commenting favourably on this development, our papers omitted to mention that Houston is the world capital of the oil, gas and petrochemical industry.
If there exists a major one-industry city, Houston is it. Oil courses through the city’s veins. You can wake any five-year-old in the middle of the night, and he’ll give you yesterday’s Brent price of crude to the last cent.
There are some 5,000 energy-related firms in the city, 17 of them Fortune 500, making the city the country’s top job provider. Even businesses that ostensibly have nothing to do with awl (that’s oil to all you Yanks and other foreigners out there) live off hydrocarbons and petrochemicals.
For example, I worked for an advertising agency, but all our accounts were related to the oil or petrochemical industry, and our competitors were exactly the same. Even the Johnson Space Center, where I had worked before, was built by Brown & Root, mainly known for designing and manufacturing offshore platforms.
Houston turning against awl and touting the virtue of renewables is like the City of London declaring that trade in securities is evil and committing itself to being speculation-free by 2050.
Except that, and this is where hypocrisy comes in, even if Houston turns itself into one giant solar panel and uses nothing but renewables to keep the thermostats low, it’s not going to wipe out its whole economy and perhaps 90 per cent of its jobs, is it?
Of course not. Houston will always be dedicated to supplying the world with sinful hydrocarbons, even if it itself switches to virtuous renewables. If you’ll forgive another simile, that’s like a ‘dry’, Bible-thumping town built around a brewery providing all the local jobs and exporting beer around the world.
I wonder what my old Houstonian friends are going to say about this plan. At a guess, “Those folks are so full of shit it’s coming out of their ears.”
Well, Lynchburg in the “dry” Moore County, Tennessee, is built around Jack Daniels whiskey brewery. Went on a tour at that brewery some twenty years ago. Hypocrisy exists in various places.
I think the consensus opinion is that Houston should have never been built where it was built. Too subjected to natural calamity on a clockwork basis. But once it is there no going back as they say.
The same is said of New Orleans. Year 1700 or so the land New Orleans sits on was one foot above sea level. Now much of the city is below sea level.
A. Boot, Bachian, Thomist, etc., in Houston, Texas? A Stetson too, no doubt? An odd couple if there ever was one!
A man proposes and God disposes. When I got out of Russia, I needed to survive, and Houston was where I found my first job. And then inertia kicked in and I stayed for 10 years. But no Stetson, no cowboy boots, no heavy belt buckle — hate to disappoint.
The famous Houston cardiology center of Dr. DeBakey had a levee built around it with a huge close-able gate in case of extreme flooding.
A friend of mine married Michael deBakey’s daughter, and I had the pleasure of meeting the old man. He and Dr Cooley, also of Baylor, were at the time the world’s best heart surgeons.