A visit to the real 'Gulf of America'
Welcome to Corpus Christi, where the indifference is as toxic as the air.
Hiya new readers! Thank you for subscribing to The Shrieking Cactus. I write about trauma, personal growth, systemic forces that worsen mental health, and everything in between, from my home office in Austin, TX. My spirit plant is the prickly pear.
A little off topic, but this week I’m feeling prickly about the staggering levels of pollution in my hometown, and Trump’s toxic obsession with fossil fuels.
On a recent evening in Corpus Christi, concerned citizens who live on the south side of town took to social media, Reddit, and 911. Northward, the night sky was seemingly on fire, pulsating with bright white and red light. Was the city engulfed in a California-style disaster?
A local EMS station tried to reassure these concerned folks with not-exactly reassuring information: It wasn’t wildfires, but merely the fiery glow from the LyondellBasell petrochemical refinery, which was flaring off waste gases some 25 miles away. On the Facebook page of Corpus Christi Crónica, residents who live closer to the industrial part of town agreed: It’s just the refineries being refineries.
A handful of these commenters seemed (rightfully) depressed at the city’s “Refinery Row,” a smelly industrial hellscape you can’t avoid as you drive into town. As one person noted, “Its called poisoning our neighborhoods. Lyondell continues to be reckless and dangerous to farmland, humans, animals and communities.”
But these folks were the exception. Most of the post’s 350+ commenters were complacent about the refineries and their frequent flaring, which is done to burn off excess gas and stabilize pressures within the refinery.
A sampling of the unbothered:
“Get over it, those flare ups have been going on for years.”
“If y’all like your phone, vehicle, anything you use that contains plastic y’all better quiet down and deal with the beautiful glowing sky.”
“This is not news. This is not a problem. Do some research.”
Not a problem? Not a problem? Flaring is very much a problem!
Oh right, it’s the Gulf of America
And then it hit me: This is a coastal town located on the “Gulf of America,” in a county where fossil-fuel-loving Trump won 55% of the vote. Here, science and cold hard facts need not exist, not when indifferent statements like “get over it” are preferred to reality. Gotta keep that economy churning at all costs! Even if the energy industry doesn’t employ very many people compared to the top employers in town!
The ignorance serves corporate interests well. Flaring has been a problem for a long time, but they know that it’s easier to get away with it when Republicans are in power. For example, one of the biggest polluters in Texas—Cheniere LNG—keeps getting state permission to increase flare pollution. Another frequent offender, Dutch-owned LyondellBasell, at least got fined* by the US DOJ and EPA in 2021 for excessive flaring, but, per the typical outcome, the penalty didn’t make the problem disappear: It was their refinery that was flaring last week.
Birth defects and cancer clusters
The lasting impact is devastating. Kids in Nueces Country are more likely to be born prematurely, with higher rates of birth defects and a higher risk of asthma. Among adults, cancer clusters are common. Turns out a life spent immersed in atmospheric benzene, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, particulate matter (soot), sulfur dioxide and god-knows-what other chemicals will do that to you.
Dwindling water supplies
The water supply is under threat from industrial pressures, too. Already scarce drinking water in this arid part of the world is being wantonly sucked up by Elon Musk/Tesla’s lithium plant, ExxonMobil, Saudi Basic Industries Corp, and all the others. Local residents are told to severely conserve water while industry doesn’t have to do jack shit.
Perhaps the most egregious example of corporate malfeasance being when Ergon Asphalt & Emulsions Inc, an asphalt company associated with petrochemical giant Valero, released a mysterious chemical into the water supply in 2016, creating chaos. Due to lax and outdated regulations around chemical composition proprietary data, no one knew (or knows) the health hazards of the contaminant. Fun!
A very bad beach trash problem
You can’t escape these horrors when trying to get away from it all at one of the local beaches or bays, which are notoriously littered with plastic and chemical pollution, thanks to Taiwanese-owned Formosa Plastic and others. Formosa egregiously dumped billions of tiny plastic pellets into area waterways. Called “nurdles,” this type of pollution is worldwide, but especially bad on the Texas coast. In 2019, the company was finally forced to pay $50 million in fines for Clean Water Act violations.
This microplastic pollution is compounded by oil tankers, oil rigs, cargo ships, and poor sewage management from other states and countries. It’s not rare to find buckets of toxic waste, which because of oceanic currents, disproportionately drift ashore to Texas. (A weirdly common problem is plastic vinegar bottles that wash up from the Dominican Republic, often riddled with bites from sea turtles.)
As a result, the state’s beach trash is the worst in the country.
(And don’t even get me started on the coastal impacts of abundant offshore drilling. Two words: Deepwater Horizon.)
Meanwhile, guess who wants to make all this worse?
People who will never live near any of this pollution.
People who don’t give a fuck about the disproportionately marginalized people of Corpus Christi.
People who would rather torture small animals than be told what to do by people smarter than themselves.
People like Donald Trump, who declared a “national energy emergency” (pro tip: there isn’t any emergency) in his first week of office, setting in motion a lot of poorly thought-out energy policies that will harm us, our children, and the environment.
He also announced the stupid, wasteful rebranding of the Gulf of America. In Trump’s mind, this effort is “in recognition of the gulf’s flourishing economic resource and its critical importance to our Nation’s economy and its people.”
Flourishing? Don’t you mean flaring?
For fuck’s sake, I’ve already seen the Gulf of America, and it’s nothing to brag about.
*Lyondell agreed to a $3.4 million civil penalty and to make upgrades to six of their facilities that would cost upwards of $50 million. $53 million sounds like a lot, but it totals a mere 2.5% of their annual profit of $2.12 billion.
Growing up in Pittsburgh, I experienced a continual conflict between air quality and economic interests. This struggle is still evident today, especially since Shell built its billion-dollar “cracker” plant just downriver from the city, and there is still one steel mill operating in nearby Braddock. To stay safe, we monitor air quality daily and have air purifiers set up around the house.
Wow, what a round up of information. “If y’all like your phone, vehicle, anything you use that contains plastic y’all better quiet down and deal with the beautiful glowing sky.” --- Yikes. Quiet down, suck it up, drink the poison, and keep doing what you are doing...terrible advice! Beautiful glowing sky?? These people!