Every spring, Houston hosts a conference most Corpus Christi residents will never attend, but we nonetheless will live with its consequences. CERAWeek by S&P Global is where corporate executives and senior government officials gather to talk about “energy markets and geopolitics,” and where energy, finance, technology, and policy converge during their conference this upcoming March.
That might sound abstract, but the outputs of those conversations are concrete here at home. Corpus Christi is positioned as a profit playground for liquefied natural gas exporters, petrochemical expansion, and the next wave of energy-hungry buildout tied to data centers. When leaders in those industries talk about “growth,” we hear the translation in our neighborhoods: more industrial load, more cumulative pollution, more public subsidies, and more pressure on a water system already showing stress.
CERAWeek’s “Innovation Agora” explicitly markets itself as a marketplace for ideas about energy innovation and emerging technologies, exactly the kind of space where the fossil fuel sector and tech sector collaborate on what comes next. The “Executive Conference” centers corporate executives and senior government officials. That is the point. The people most affected by these decisions are typically not in the room…