JULY 18, 2025 BY WFKISTNER
The news media routinely fail to point out what causes global warming and which elected officials are funded by the oil and gas industry.
Rescue workers were still searching for bodies buried in twisted piles of brush and tree trunks along the Guadalupe River when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz stepped up to the microphones in Kerrville on July 7. “Texas is grieving right now. The pain, the shock of what’s happened these last few days has broken the heart of Texas,” he said, adding that he had just picked up his daughter at a nearby summer camp a week before.
Cruz’s press conference was one of the first public acknowledgments of the horrific devastation triggered by a record-setting flood that inundated an area of the central Texas Hill Country known as Flash Flood Alley. The rain-swollen Guadalupe River swept hundreds of campers, tourists, and residents to their deaths in the early morning hours of July 4, including dozens of young girls attending Camp Mystic who were trapped in water that rose more than 20 feet in just a few hours.
There were few answers for how it could have happened. Cruz advised Hill Country residents to look to their churches to heal their wounds and rebuild, providing little solace for a shell-shocked community.
Cruz also warned that it was not the time to cast blame for the tragedy. “There will be those who blame President Trump,” he said. “After rebuilding, there will be a natural process to figure out what happened.”
Since the initial days of the disaster, “figuring out what happened” has focused mainly on emergency response efforts and flood warnings. But there has been little to no focus on what caused the Guadalupe River flood or other similar extreme weather events, which is something scientists figured out years ago. Warmer air from global warming holds more moisture, which causes more torrential downpours, worsens floods, and turbocharges hurricanes. And that global warming has been largely caused by burning coal, oil, and gas, a fact that seems to get little mention these days.
It is no surprise that Cruz and other top elected officials from the Lone Star state would refrain from making that scientifically proven connection. After all, they are the recipients of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry and, in turn, have been blocking government action on climate change for decades. But it is a surprise that the news media, too, largely failed to adequately inform the public that the recent flood in Texas—as well as other extreme weather events—result from a climate crisis driven by human activity. That failure enables Cruz and other officials who benefit from the fossil fuel industry’s largesse, if they acknowledge that climate change is happening at all, to chalk it up to a natural phenomenon that we can’t do anything about.
