SpaceX 'Bombing,' Climate Collapsing, but did a Japanese Bank Just Got Queasy on South Texas LNG?

Hey y’all, I’ll never take a cool breeze for granted again. They’re starting to run through my neighborhood in Austin, which will get cooler much sooner than the Rio Grande Valley and its coast. I’m in Oregon as I write this, for the 2026 National Science Writers conference, which the organization kindly gave me a grant to attend (thanks y’all). It’s nice to be in a place that feels like fall when the Fall Solstice comes around, for however long that remains.

That being said, there’s nothing like sea-born winds, the tight-sail makers that stave off the daytime heat spells of the United States’ hottest region–the Rio Grande Valley. At least they used to. But I don’t think anyone should take those winds for granted either, less powerful as they seem. Because I’ve seen a handful of things in the last month that have reduced any naivete I had that the soulless among us wouldn’t warm the planet past 1.5 C. A new United Nations report warns the planet will, in fact, warm past 1.5 C, and that we are, in so many words, fucked.

Our only options now, collectively, are decreasing the harm, much of which the report says is completely transitioning away from fossil fuels. That burden falls on industry more than anything else, as it should. The report uses the phrase “mitigate” to describe these strategies, the same phrase preferred by industries, corporations and economic boosters along Texas’ gulf coast that helped get the planet to this point.

Mitigation is the favorite solution of the regulators that continuously use the phrase “no significance” when talking about the environmental harms of gas terminals and rocket programs, failing to outrightly disclose that ‘significance’ is purely a bureaucratic phrase, something written when the regulator can’t measure something. Any mention of it is almost always admitting apathy. But the report’s most sobering analysis is its calls for how to absorb climate shocks, to prepare for relocation and decoupling utility systems, to adapt to a now irreversible cross into the 1.5 C threshold.

Anyway, here’s what’s going on along the Texas coast...

*Protesters across the street from Space Fest. Image: STEJN*

‘Fuera SpaceX Fest’ Following a Month of Brownsville Capitulations to Musk’s ‘Monorail’

The South Texas Environmental Justice Network (STEJN) hosted a handful of events in Brownsville and Boca Chica Beach as the City of Brownsville held its now-annual Space Fest, the latter an attempt to celebrate the city’s space industry (which is just SpaceX).

While Brownsville showed off autonomous taxis and more astronaut inflatables than I care to mention, members of South Texas Environmental Justice Network and Rio Grande Valley residents protested against SpaceX on the street, using the banners and signs they made a couple days prior during a community art-making event. (See photos and videos of those protests here.)

Outside of my obvious qualms with SpaceX and the oligarchy it successfully established in Brownsville, I find the festival particularly curious. Mostly because, outside of metastasizing at Boca Chica Beach, SpaceX has not gotten to the moon, or Mars, nor has it put a person in one of its rockets, and has not done much more in South Texas than litter both land and atmosphere.

Remember when SpaceX was supposed to start launching to Mars by now? Or, somewhat related, when Brownsville was supposed to have flying taxis last year, because then-mayor Trey Mendez said it was going to be New Space City?

Despite Brownsville’s new state media channel not covering the protests, a city flyer made the very obvious addition of “offensive signage” to Space Fest’s prohibited items list. I couldn’t imagine anything more offensive than banners with a logo from a company that has enough money to fix every road in the city, house and feed every person in that city and still have money left over, right next to a neighborhood full of people in that city who need it the most—is that what they meant?

This follows the city disannexing 444 acres near the Port of Brownsville, which SpaceX has spent the last few weeks tearing apart, in exchange for a meager amount of money for water projects. I have more thoughts on this that I’ll share in an upcoming video.

Japanese LNG investor investigating complaints against Freeport LNG

The Japanese Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) is investigating community complaints against Freeport LNG, the liquified natural gas export plant in Brazos County in which they’ve invested $2.6 billion. This past May, organizers from Brazos County–Manning Rollerson, the Freeport Haven Project, Gwendolyn Jones (Climate Conversation Brazoria County), and Melanie Oldham (Better Brazoria) hand-delivered these complaints to JBIC representatives in Tokyo, Japan. You can read more from my reporting here on that day in May. This isn’t the first time that complaints have been made against an LNG company in Texas. The Rainforest Action Network Japan team filed a complaint against Japanese megabank MUFG for its investment in Rio Grande LNG in 2024. The bank says the investigation is in progress, but there’s no real evidence that the company has made any progress at all.

“I’ve traveled to Tokyo twice to meet Japanese financiers and tell them, face to face, what their funding of Freeport LNG has done to my community,” Manning Rollerson, a Freeport resident and the founder of the Freeport Haven Project, said in a press release.

“Now it is time for them to come to Freeport, hear from the families living in the shadow of this plant, and make the decision to stop financing this project immediately.”

Japanese banks investing in LNG is part of the country’s larger geopolitical energy strategy. See my colleague Reuben Brown’s excellent reporting on this topic, which I was honored to be present for most of, here.

Good Stuff Corner

In a rare example of McAllen not being one of the most lame and bootlicking cities in the Rio Grande Valley–which is a God-honest feat among the region’s uniquely subservient municipalities–a few dozen people and Joey Santore (Crime Pays, Botany Doesn’t) planted several native trees at the International Museum of Art and Science (IMAS).

Planting native trees is a no-bullshit way to make a difference in the area’s temperatures and force people to look at the native flora and appreciate it. Another testament to one of my favorite phrases: “you can just do things.” McAllen’s been on a streak with native flora lately. Let’s hope that the rest of the Valley gets wise.

Doing the Collapse

When I was living in Washington, D.C. in 2018, during my final semester of undergrad, my professor Joel Swerdlow, a former editor of National Geographic, an interview subject of Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, and the only journalist in D.C. that paid me any mind, assigned us a novella called The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. The fictional book, written by the same authors of Merchants of Doubt, was written from the perspective of people in 2393 writing a report on how the U.S. and other western nations routinely ruined their chances at saving themselves from climate catastrophe, despite several chances to do so. In what I think is a clear sign of cultural exceptionalism, we don’t acknowledge how many civilizations have collapsed throughout history–even the ones we know of. Those who do know can’t totally agree on how those civilizations collapsed. But unique among our culture is that we will have had all the warnings, time, and resources to stop our own collapse then decided not to. Instead, we accelerate it.

There are psychological and sociological reasons why that is, at least for a majority of the people in the United States and beyond. But I think the real reason is the collective neurosis afflicting the most powerful among us, one that believes reaching immortality, or ascension, is done in death. Not in martyrdom or for a greater collective, but as an individual enterprise in denial done en masse, the weight only realized when the lights go out forever. If there’s any justice in the metaphysical world for us all, that blackness will be perpetual, as will the regret, for those who facilitated this collapse. May the rest of us, at the conclusion of our time here, find each other again and again in those worlds beyond optical perception.

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