During the November open meeting of the Railroad Commission of Texas, Commissioner Wayne Christian remarked that he personally disagreed with his agency’s administrative approval of a Class VI CO2 injection well permit in Ector County. He went on to say that the permit approval was the wrong direction for the RRC to take, noting “I firmly believe that it is very questionable to inject something else in the ground out there in that part [of the state] for safety” … “when there’s the chance of any escape, which I’ve talked to engineers [that have] been in the business 50 plus years that say it’s not ‘if,’ it’s ‘when.’”
Commission Shift agrees that carbon injection risks public and environmental health, and that taxpayers should not be paying for oil and gas companies to dispose of the waste their industry generates.
However, Commissioner Christian made false and misleading claims about climate change and carbon capture’s impact on the oil and gas industry during his comments as well. We unpack and fact check those claims here.
Despite Commissioner Christian’s stance at the open meeting, over the past three years, all three commissioners have voted to approve — and taken steps to support — the RRC pursuing Class VI carbon injection well primacy from the EPA, including when they signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the EPA earlier this year.
Commissioner Christian also said carbon capture and storage (CCUS) would cause oil and gas companies to go out of business, something he said he doesn’t believe voters elected him to do. Commission Shift has found that the carbon management sector is led by oil and gas companies who have spent billions of dollars lobbying Congress for section 45Q tax breaks, which transfer billions of taxpayer dollars to oil and gas companies to dispose of the waste they generate. In short, CCUS will take from taxpayers to add profits to oil and gas companies, not put them out of business.
In his remarks, Commissioner Christian called the “the environmental agenda” “extremist” and “over the top” and claimed that a filing by the EPA says CO2 is no longer a threat. In fact, the Trump Administration is challenging the EPA’s greenhouse gas endangerment finding, which concludes climate change and the gases that cause it are threatening human life, but the challenge is not final.
Over 99% of peer-reviewed climate science studies have found that humans caused climate change. Many extreme weather events in Texas over the past 20 years have been attributed to global warming in some way, which typically increases the intensity and severity of such events.
In 2015, investigative journalists published a nine-part series documenting that Exxon knew that it was contributing to global warming that would lead to “potentially catastrophic events.” Exxon proceeded to fund a multi-decade public relations campaign to sow doubt about climate change.
In July, Commissioner Christian noted in the July Energy News: “At the end of the day, CO2 is a plant food needed for all human life to flourish and is an important fact that environmentalists love to omit to the public conversion.” While carbon dioxide is an essential part of photosynthesis, which results in oxygen we need to breathe, it is important to understand the concentration of carbon dioxide that allows the earth’s climate to remain stable.
According to data gathered from ice cores and other observations, global concentrations of carbon dioxide were less than 300 parts per million (ppm) over the past 800,000 years, before the industrial revolution. Today, carbon dioxide concentrations have surpassed 425 ppm. Because atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations track closely with global temperature, this rise in CO 2 indicates that humans need to significantly reduce CO2 emissions in order to stabilize the climate.
Source: Graph by NOAA Climate.gov based on data from Lüthi, et al., 2008, via NOAA NCEI Paleoclimatology Program. Accessed on: Dec. 1, 2025. Retrieved from: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide
For more information on climate change, check out Global Weirding, a series of easy-to-understand videos by Texas-based climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe.
During his comments, Commissioner Christian also invoked an unabashedly bigoted political figure as he argued about the importance of free speech and transparency.
While Commission Shift values transparency and free speech, context matters and we will never condone racism.
Commission Shift will continue to hold the Railroad Commission accountable to its mission by keeping Texans across the state informed on key developments in oil and gas policy. Join us — sign up to receive open meeting highlights and reminders here.
