Please join us for an in-person deep dive with leading scientists, experts, and frontline leaders to uncover what’s behind big oil’s relentless marketing campaign of this flawed technology, and what’s at stake for communities in Texas and across the country on Thursday, October 26 and Friday October 27.
AC Hotel by Marriott
723 Main Street
Houston, Texas 77002
Thursday October 26, 2023
1:00 – 5:00 p.m.: Guided tour of Houston-area carbon capture and storage project sites and neighboring communities, led by community leaders
6:00 – 8:00 p.m.: Welcome reception
Friday, October 27, 2023
8:00 – 9:00 a.m.: Breakfast
9:00 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.: Presentations and panel discussions
“John Beard, Jr. is the founder and CEO of Port Arthur Community Action Network. After working in the oil industry for 38 years, Beard turned to holding the industry accountable and became a community advocate in his hometown of Port Arthur, Texas fighting for health and safety protections in an area teeming with refineries, export terminals, petrochemical plants… and cancer. He is a recipient of the 2021 Rose Bratz Award from the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Community Sentinel Award from the Halt the Harm Network. He has met with key members of the Biden Administration and Congress during the 2022 budget debate which led to the successful removal of harmful permitting provisions from the budget bill. Recently, PACAN CEO Beard was a delegate in Paris to the United Nations Conference on the Global Plastics Treaty, Geneva for the UN Conference on Chemical Waste and ICCM5 in Bonn, Germany.
Dr. Robert D. Bullard is a distinguished professor of urban planning and environmental policy and founding director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University. He is also co-founder of the HBCU Climate Change Consortium and the National Black Environmental Justice Network. He received his Ph.D. degree from Iowa State University. Professor Bullard is often called the “father of environmental justice.” He is the author of 18 books. His latest book is The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities (2012). In 2008, Newsweek named him one of “13 Environmental Leaders of the Century.” In 2019, Apolitical named him one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People in Climate Policy, and Climate One presented him the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication. In 2020, WebMD gave him its Health Heroes Trailblazer Award and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) honored him with its Champions of the Earth Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2021, he was appointed by President Biden to serve on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. In 2022, he was awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Georgetown University and the University of Johannesburg. That same year he received the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) Lifetime Achievement Award and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Most recently, Dr. Bullard received the Harvard Law School Environmental Law Society’s Horizon Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to environmental law and policy.
Bill has served as the Pipeline Safety Trust’s Executive Director since 2020 and serves with a passion for fierce independence, public safety advocacy, and environmental protections. The Pipeline Safety Trust is the only national non-profit watchdog organization on the pipeline industry and was formed in the wake of the 1999 Olympic Pipeline Disaster in Bellingham, WA.
Bill serves on the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Hazardous Liquids Pipeline Advisory Committee (LPAC), serves on a White House CO2 CCUS Permitting Task Force, and is regularly called on as a source for independent pipeline information by state and federal lawmakers and national media outlets.
Dr. Emily Grubert is Associate Professor of Sustainable Energy Policy, and, concurrently, of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on justice-oriented deep decarbonization and decision support tools related to large infrastructure systems, with emphasis on evaluation of dynamic life cycle socioenvironmental impacts and the effects of different value systems on decision pathways. Grubert holds a Ph.D. in Environment and Resources from Stanford University and previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Carbon Management (2021-2022) and Senior Advisor for Energy Asset Transformation (2022-2023) at the US Department of Energy. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of Environmental Research: Energy.
As vice president Autumn oversees TCS programs, serves as spokesperson, and leads the group’s legislative and outreach strategies. She has over two decades of policy expertise in areas including energy tax policy and subsidies, carbon pricing, hardrock mining, timber subsidies, oil and gas leasing, carbon capture and storage, western water, and integrated water projects. Her portfolio also includes energy financing mechanisms, including federal loan guarantees; and revenues derived from resource extraction on federal lands and waters. She has been published in major news outlets including the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal and has testified before both the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate.
Before joining TCS, Autumn worked on energy and natural resource issues at Penn State University. She has studied at the National University in Heredia, Costa Rica, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Penn State University Schreyer Honors College.
Charles Harvey has worked for the US Geological Survey, was a faculty member at Harvard University and is now a Professor of Environmental Engineering at MIT. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Geologic Society of America and has received the M. King Hubbert Award for contributions to hydrogeology, the Abdulaziz International Prize for Water, and the Meinzer Award for advancing the science of hydrology. He has built international multidisciplinary field projects: On Borneo, a program to study tropical peatlands, ecosystems that now emit enormous fluxes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere; In Bangladesh, a field program to study arsenic contamination of well water, a health crisis that continues to kill hundreds of thousands of people.
Bekah is an artist and organizer from the Rio Grande Valley. She is currently working with South Texas Environmental Justice Network to stop the expansion of the fossil fuel industry that threatens low-income communities of color and sacred lands.
Dr. Alex Kolker is an earth scientist who has worked on the interface between human and natural processes across Earth’s coastal zones. He has studied sea level rise, coastal resilience, groundwater transport in deltas, air pollution in industrialized coastal environments and the geological risks associated with carbon capture. His work uses a combination of field, analytical, and data science methods to understand how these heavily dynamic and heavily populated parts of the world change in this era of intense human impacts.
Patrick Nye has more than forty years of experience in oil and gas exploration and over twenty years developing renewable wind projects throughout South Texas and Mexico. He holds a BA degree in Zoology and a BS degree in Geology. He is a member of the Society of Independent Professional Earth Scientists (SIPES), Texas Board of Professional Geoscientists, American Association of Petroleum Geologists. In 2022 Patrick received the SIPES Outstanding Service Award for his years of service to SIPES and the SIPES Foundation. Patrick resides in Ingleside on the Bay, Texas with his wife Julie. He serves as president for the non-profit Ingleside on the Bay Coastal Watch Association that addresses industrial expansion, relative sea level rise, seagrass loss, air and water quality monitoring along the Coastal Bend.
Roishetta Sibley Ozane is the founder of The Vessel Project of Louisiana, a small mutual aid and environmental justice organization. She is aLeo the Gulf Fossil Finance Coordinator with the Texas Campaign for the Environment Fund. Roishetta is an award winning, internationally known environmental justice advocate and has spoken on stages Nationally and abroad including in Egypt, Canada, and Malaysia championing for Black, indigenous, people of color communities and their right for clean air, clean water and sustainable communities that aren’t overburdened by fossil fuel buildout. Roishetta is a member of several organizations including National Association of University Women, McNeese State University Black Alumni, and a She Leads Fellow Alum for the Power Coalition of Equity and Justice. Additionally Roishetta is a single mom of 6 and her children are who she’s trying to make the world a better place for. Roishetta truly believes that no one is good until we are all good and she proves that daily through her giving heart and philanthropy.
Virginia Palacios is Founder and Executive Director of Commission Shift, a statewide nonpartisan advocacy organization building public support to reform oil and gas oversight in Texas through accountability at the Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC). Palacios is a ninth-generation native of Webb County, one of the highest gas-producing counties in Texas. She has worked on water, air, soil, and methane issues related to oil and gas development since 2011. Palacios has co-authored several peer-reviewed studies on oil and gas methane emissions and reports proposing solutions for addressing orphaned wells, venting and flaring, and ethical conflicts at the RRC. She holds a Master of Environmental Management degree from Duke University, and was recently selected to serve on a White House Task Force on Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS) on non-federal lands.
Jen Powis is the managing attorney of the Gulf Regional Office for Earthjustice, the largest public interest environmental law firm in the nation. She leads Earthjustice’s litigation strategy, managing a team of attorneys across the Gulf South. She has nearly two decades of experience as a public interest attorney and has previously counseled a broad range of nonprofit entities across Texas. Prior to opening Earthjustice’s first office in Texas, she held various nonprofit legal roles. After initially sharpening her litigation skills as a federal law clerk and at a private firm, Jen went in house, working for multiple nonprofits to develop campaigns that united litigation with administrative advocacy. After nearly a decade in house, Jen opened her own firm where she represented and provided legal counsel to nonprofits on issues related to campaign development, land conservation, emergency management, and generally, the environment. After Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017, Jen co-founded the Coalition for Environment, Equity, and Resilience, a collaborative of 25 organizations dedicated to raising awareness of the connections between pollution, place, and public health. She was named a Top Lawyer for Nonprofits in Houston by Houstonia magazine and continues to serve her local community through board leadership. Jen is a graduate of Texas A&M University and The University of Texas School of Law.
As the saying goes, Paige “wasn’t born here, but got here as quick as she could!” She moved with her family from Cancer Alley, Louisiana to the Petro Metro of Houston, Texas as a baby and suffered with asthma as a child – a formative experience which sparked both a passion for air quality advocacy and a lifelong commitment to help advance common-sense environmental policy. Paige has served in the public, nonprofit, and education sectors for nearly two decades, working to promote environmental stewardship, advance social justice, and improve quality of life in the greater Houston region. They hold degrees in economics and public policy from the University of Houston; are a Certified Public Manager, Climate reality Leader, and Rice University Center for Environmental Studies Community Fellow.
Jane is the Campaign Manager on the US Fossil Economy at the Center for International Environmental Law. Since 2016, Jane’s work has focused on organizing and coordinating groups around the world and in her home state of Louisiana in the fights against petrochemical pollution and false solutions to the climate and plastics crises.
David Schlissel is the Director of Resource Planning Analysis at IEEFA. He has researched written, and testified as an expert witness on carbon capture and storage since 2016. He also is co-author of a recent IEEFA report on Blue Hydrogen: Not clean, not low carbon, not a solution. His commentaries, reports and testimony are available at ieefa.org.
Adrian Shelley is a native Texan from the City of Houston. He is the Texas Director of Public Citizen, which works on issues including clean energy, environmental enforcement, and ethics reform. Adrian has a law degree from the University of Texas and previously served as the Executive Director for Air Alliance Houston. He enjoys spending time with his family, reading, playing music, growing food and other plants, and the outdoors.
As a Staff Attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, Victoria fights false climate solutions such as CCS and biomass energy. Prior to joining the Center, she worked as an attorney with Earthjustice, where her role included litigating toxic chemical regulations and helping overburdened communities advance environmental justice. She holds a law degree from U.C. Davis School of Law.
Donna Thomas has worked and lived in Fort Bend County for over 28 years, a resident of Green Valley Estates Community. She served on the Green Valley CIA Board, GVE Civic Club, FortBend SN41 as Vice President and Fort Bend Sustainability Working Group. She also serves as Fort Bend County Precinct Chair, LISC Ambassador, Fort Bend County Environmental Leader with Texas Senate District 13, CEER Houston’s Regional Resilience Campaign, and has done work with Air Alliance Houston, Fort Bend County Representative with WA.Parish Working Group (#CloseParishCoal:Campaign) and the Founder/Chair of Fort Bend County Environmental Organization.
Emily Foxhall joined The Texas Tribune as energy reporter in December 2022. She’s focused on the state’s transition to green energy, the reliability of the power grid and the environmental impact of electricity generation. Emily is based in Houston, where she grew up. After a stint as a Tribune student intern in 2012, she began her career at the Los Angeles Times and its community papers. She later worked at the Houston Chronicle where her environmental reporting uncovered the effects of climate change and pollution on the region. She won several Texas Managing Editors awards and was part of the 2017 team that was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of Hurricane Harvey. Emily graduated from Yale University in 2013, where she studied English and was a Yale Journalism Scholar.
Pam is editor of Floodlight’s Gulf Coast team. Based in New Orleans, Pam is a veteran editor and reporter, focused on energy, environment and climate change. She was part of The New Orleans Times-Picayune team that published after Hurricane Katrina — efforts for which it was awarded two Pulitzer prizes — and covered the storm’s aftermath on the state’s oil and gas industry and electric utilities. Pam served as an energy and environment editor at CQ Roll Call, as a correspondent for Platts— where her work spanned from utility regulation to the BP oil spill— and as deputy editor at Engineering News-Record, where she led and wrote multiple award-winning climate-related packages. Pam’s reporting has also appeared in HuffPost and the Guardian.
Jane is the Campaign Manager on the US Fossil Economy at the Center for International Environmental Law. Since 2016, Jane’s work has focused on organizing and coordinating groups around the world and in her home state of Louisiana in the fights against petrochemical pollution and false solutions to the climate and plastics crises.