The many faces of Houston |
If Greta Thunberg ever docked in Houston, it wouldn’t be for long. Freeways stretch to 26 lanes, flaring oil refineries light the night sky and sports stadiums are sealed against the humidity with year-round refrigeration. At an Astros baseball match, a poster bluntly reminds attendees ‘TODAY’S GAME IS MADE POSSIBLE THANKS TO NATURAL GAS & OIL’. Between quarters at a Texans NFL match, a handful of fans score Chevron gift cards – ‘You’re going home with extra gas money!’ The crowd roars. Welcome to oil country.
When fossil fuels enter Britain’s national conversation these days, it’s behind abstractions of net zero. Oil and gas are cast as an unfashionable throwback, distant industries shrouded in secrecy and corruption – despite the fact that more than three-quarters of our total energy demand is still met by them. The Gulf states at least turn oil into spectacle, conjuring cities from the sand, but it’s always refracted through the state, as if royal Emirati generosity is the source of prosperity rather than, er, geology. Houston is an outlier. With ten refineries churning 2.6 million barrels of crude oil every day (enough to power Britain’s consumption twice over), it makes no apology for what keeps its lights on and its AC constantly whirring.
A friend told me Texans live the way everyone imagined they would when they were teenagers, before restraint set in. Within hours of........