Environmental Changes In Houston Texas

Houston, Texas is a city that has grown and thrived off of the energy industry. The city that has been endearingly termed “the petrochemical capital of the world”, is home to oil refineries that produce a quarter of the oil in the entire United States (Ngai & Sims, 2017). Some of the country’s largest oil companies like Valero, ExxonMobil, and Marathon, have chosen to establish refineries in the booming city. These refineries together produce about 2 million barrels of crude oil per day (Blum & Blunt, 2018). Houston is also home to the WA Parish Generating Station, the largest coal power plant in the state of Texas. The economic opportunities that have followed the migration of these energy companies have drawn massive amounts of people to

CO2 emissions introduce many alterations to the earth’s climate that negatively affect humans. Some of these alterations include the shrinking of water supplies, which has become more and more crucial as the demand for water increases with the rapid growth of the earth’s population. This effect on the water supply has shown that it can in turn effect agricultural production. Major changes in food production as a result of climate change will cause food prices worldwide to increase, posing major economic challenges to people everywhere. Finally, there is the issue of increased incidence of natural disasters. Many climate and environmental scientists attribute the growing frequency of devastating natural disasters such as droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes to climate change. The last of these was the one that specifically affected Houstonians this past year with the Category 4, Hurricane Harvey, that tore through the city in late August of 2017. The ramifications of this hurricane were felt throughout Houston, dealing $125 billion dollars’ worth of damage and claiming 88 lives (Allen & Davis, 2017). Geert Jan van Oldenborgh of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute was one of the central figures in noting that Hurricane Harvey and the torrential rainfall that came with it were direct result of climate change. The manipulation of ocean currents, and the retention of water in clouds caused by warm weather, both facilitated the production of the brutal tropical storm. Some estimates claim that the increase in rainfall at the hands of climate change were anywhere from 15 to 38 percent (jan van Oldenborgh, van der Wiel, & Sebastian, 2017). Van Oldenborgh noted that while the “likelihood of a Harvey-like storm was perhaps once in every 3,000 years in the past, now it’s once every 1,000 years or so”