Last week, one of the biggest annual fossil fuel conferences known as CERAWeek took place in Houston, Texas. If you ask climate advocacy organizations, they’ll tell you it’s a conference of “climate hell.”
At this year’s CERAWeek, an annual summit put together by S&P Global, executives from BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell met to discuss their plans for expanding their industries even as climate change worsens and communities suffer from increasing pollution.
Outside the conference, more than 100 protesters gathered to reject oil and gas expansion while linking the industry’s varied practices of extraction: from poaching oil in the Global South, to polluting air and water in the Gulf South, to U.S. attacks on Venezuela and Iran — two oil-rich countries.
“We see the problems of being so dependent on fossil fuels, and having fossil fuel folks in the White House pushing an agenda where we will shut down alternatives like wind farms and solar buildout and start a war that will benefit American companies,” said James Hiatt, a former lab analyst at Citgo Petroleum. “A few do well. The rest of us around the world, not just Americans, are suffering because we are so dependent on this.”
While CERAWeek takes place each year, this year’s protests are part of a growing resistance to the fossil fuel industry as the Trump administration rolls back climate protections to benefit polluters.
People are taking to the streets to demand Big Oil retreat from their communities already burdened by landfills, oil refineries, and petrochemical plants.
“We want to show them our power,” said Chloe Torres, regional coordinator for Texas Campaign for the Environment.
“We want to show them that we’re no longer going to accept being sacrificed.”
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