The Journal. - Hot, Dry and Booming: A Texas Climate Case Study

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

Kyle, Texas is one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States. It is also facing heat and drought that has been exacerbated by climate change and is expected to get worse. Matt Wirz reports on the tensions in Kyle as the city continues to build, even as it runs low on water.  Further Listening: - A Plan to Hack the Planet Further Reading: - This Texas City Is Too Hot, Short on Water—and Booming  - Welcome to Y’all Street, Texas’ Burgeoning Financial Hub  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A little over a year ago, Alex Stockton bought a one-way ticket to Texas. He was looking for work. He says he had $600 in his pocket and a friend's couch to sleep on. How's it working out for you down there? I got off his couch in two weeks. I got a career. I just bought a brand new SUV. Just built a house for myself and my girlfriend to live in with my stepdaughter. Doing way more than I thought I could even achieve

in a lifetime, if I'm being honest. Alex found all the success in Central Texas. He's a foreman of a utility crew in and around the city of Kyle. And just like Alex, a lot of people are moving there. Over the last decade, the city's population has doubled. Even though Alex loves his new home, there is one thing about it that's really hard,

the infamous Texas heat, it that's really hard. The infamous Texas heat. And it's getting worse. In June last year, the heat index, which accounts for heat and humidity, reached a record 118 degrees in the area. This June, it hit 115. It is extremely hot down here. Where I grew up in Germantown, Wisconsin, a hot summer is probably, and this is peak, 95,

once in a while. And I come down here and it's 106 plus the heat index, plus I'm working in the road. So if you're working in asphalt, you can just go ahead and add 50 degrees to whatever the ambient air temperature is. Wow. It's a lot slower pace when it comes to outside work

down here, because you can't exert yourself as much if you, I mean, you can, but you're going to pass out in about 30 minutes. Are you worried about heat stroke and like getting dehydrated? Oh, every day. Every day. Every day. Alex said that his crew of three will drink about eight gallons of water a workday. On top of that, when he goes home, he downs even more water to recover and says he avoids alcohol on weeknights so he's not dehydrated the next day.

As foreman, Alex says he's constantly vigilant against things like heatstroke. We can kind of pick each other's slack up. Like, hey, go take a break. You look like you're getting a little pale or getting a little ditzy or slurring your words or not really comprehending much. You've heard people slurring their words or not really comprehending much. You've heard people slurring their words from heat? Oh, sure. Yeah.

And as the city of Kyle grows and gets hotter and hotter, there's another problem. There is less and less water because there's a drought. So front lawns are brown and water restrictions are in place. Do you worry about water availability going forward? In Kyle, yes. Kyle is already buying water from other municipalities. That city has blown up so quickly that it is just, it can't be supported by the aquifer.

I also worry that people are going to stop giving them water once they run out. They're going to say, listen, you kind of made your bed laying in it. Kyle, Texas is at the intersection of exploding growth and the effects of climate change. How Kyle decides to respond to this challenge will be a lesson for other cities around the country

as they face more people, higher temperatures, and less water. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Leinbach. It's Friday, September 6th. ... Coming up on the show...

Everything is bigger and hotter and drier in Kyle, Texas. ... This episode is brought to you by CIBC. From closing that first sale to opening a second store, as a business owner, you've hustled to accomplish a lot, but the rewards don't stop there. When you earn two times more points on things that matter to you and your business, easily track those business expenses, and experience flexible Aventura rewards, you'll realize how much more rewarding your hustle can be. Get up to $1,800 in value when you apply for the CIBC Aventura Visa for Business at cibc.com slash Aventura Business. Terms and conditions apply.

How to stop losses work on Kraken? Let's say I have a birthday party on Wednesday night, but an important meeting Thursday morning. So sensible me, pre-book a taxi for 10pm with alerts. Voila! I won't be getting carried away and staying out till 2. That's Stop Loss Orders on Kraken, an easy way to plan ahead. Go to kraken.com and see what crypto can be. Our colleague, Matt Wirtz, covers financial markets. Mostly.

I moonlight covering all sorts of other stuff, like in this case, growth and climate and the sun belt. Matt was interested in finding the place in America where growth and the negative impacts of climate change overlapped. A place where people keep moving to, even as the living there gets harder. To figure that out, Matt started reading through census reports and he reached out to an organization called ICE Data Services that was looking closely at how climate change

affects specific places across the US. And they gave me a bunch of data and I cross-referenced that data with the census data that I was looking at to see what are the cities that have lots and lots of growth in terms of the population and also have really high exposure to climate risk along these vectors like heat, wildfire, flood risk, hurricane risk, storm surges, things like that. And Kyle, Texas is right in the nexus of those two trends. Kyle, Texas is the country's second fastest growing city of cities that have more than

50,000 residents. It's about 20 miles south of Austin in the Texas Hill Country. It's about 20 miles south of Austin in the Texas Hill Country. Kyle is, until recently, just another suburb, right? And then it started to grow very, very rapidly. You see all these new housing developments with these kind of cookie cutter homes or cookie cutter apartment buildings coming up. You have huge cranes and drills and dump trucks. So how big is Kyle today? Okay, so the population today is almost 70,000 and around 10 years ago it was 31,000. So

imagine the population of your town doubling in 10 years. Texas in general is expanding like crazy. Between 2010 and 2022, the state population jumped by almost 20% to over 30 million people. And people are moving there for lots of reasons. It's cheaper than many coastal cities, the economy is doing great, and there are lots of available jobs. Companies like Caterpillar, SpaceX, and Chevron have announced that they're moving their headquarters to the state. Other major companies have expanded there, too. The city of Kyle is benefiting from all of this.

For example, Amazon just built a new sorting center there. But alongside this boom, Kyle is also dealing with extreme weather. They are experiencing high heat and high humidity at the same time. And high heat and high humidity are a very dangerous combination because when the air is humid, the body is unable to cool itself efficiently. When there's a lot of humidity in the air, your body can't perspire normally. And so that can exacerbate things like heat exhaustion, heat stroke, and things like renal failure, which is super scary. How does this combo, the heat and humidity, affect people's daily lives?

Well, everybody drinks a lot more water. It's a big deal for parents because, like, what do you want to do with your kids in the summer? You always tell them, go outside, go play. You can't do that there. Even by like nine, 10 o'clock, it's like in the high 90s to low 100s. It's unbearably high already at nine or 10. So I talked to a mother who like would bring her kid

to the grocery store, to like Walmart. They just needed to go somewhere where there was space for the kid to run around and it was air conditioned. And the heat has other knock on effects. Running the AC nonstop pushes electricity bills up. It also stresses the grid. But still, people keep coming. This is the promised land.

You know, this is like the American dream, right? That's the people that are moving there. They they're aware of the climate conditions, right? They're moving not because they disregard that, it's because it's gotten really hard in this country to like buy a house, get a decent paying job, live at like, you know, a quality of life that seems comfortable and is sustainable, where you're actually saving money. Maybe you have some money to spend on your kids' education, for example. So, you know, this is a really sensible move in some ways.

In other ways, though, it may not be. Because Kyle is enduring that drought. And much of its water sources are maxed out. There's more people coming to Austin and all the surrounding suburbs, and so they're sucking up the water from underground, and so they're running out of water. Coming up, what Kyle is trying to do about the lack of water. that your business is unique, so your business insurance should be too. Whether you're a shop owner, a pet groomer, a contractor, or a consultant, you can get customized coverage for your business. Contact a licensed TD Insurance Advisor to learn more.

Transform and roll out! From the director of Twistery 4. Buckle up! On September 20th, witness the director of Twistery 4. Buckle up. On September 20th, witness the origin of the Transformers. This is going to change everything. Awesome! Transformers 1, only on Peter September 20th. The shortage of water has become an inescapable problem

in Kyle, Texas. It's hard to get water, which you need to live on, and it's going to get harder and more expensive. When you were there, how did people talk about water shortages? A lot of people complained about their lawns. They really want to be able to water their lawns, and this is a silly little thing but it's actually like so representative of

the reality shift that has to happen that hasn't happened. You know you talk to policymakers and academics down there and they're all like yeah it's gonna be like Arizona where nobody's gonna have a lawn in Central Texas in like a decade. So people talk about that. They talk about not being able to wash their cars, right? They talk about the cost of water. The cost of water has gone up a lot there. You know, it's gone up in the past 10 years, it's gone up like between 60 and 70%.

Imagine that. Also the watering holes, people talked about that. When I was a kid, I used to go to blah, blah, blah. You know, Jacob's Well, for example, can't go there anymore. Certain lakes that were really, really low, they couldn't operate their boats in the lakes anymore. So that's some of the ways that people talked about water. Kyle's homes and businesses need more water

than the city can supply. According to a report commissioned by the city, that deficit grew by about 700% between 2021 and 2023. That's because much of the city's water supply comes from lakes and underground aquifers that depend on rainfall. And the drought has meant those sources are running dry. Travis Mitchell, the mayor of Kyle, Texas, said the city will adapt to the new circumstances.

A combination of drought conditions and population growth has created a need for the city to seek out water from additional sources. Construction just began on a new pipeline that will take water from the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer. Kyle and neighboring towns have spent $250 million to build a pipeline to a water source that is farther away and deeper underground, the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer. The pipeline's operators estimate it will supply water

to Kyle and surrounding cities for 50 years. However, those models were developed a while ago, and you've had all these other towns around Kyle, around Austin, around San Antonio, that are also growing, and they're faced with the exact same problem. And so guess what they did? The exact same thing. They started building pipelines sucking into that same Carriza-Wilcox Aquifer.

And so these estimates that it'll last 50 years, you know, based on my conversations with some really knowledgeable academics, it might only be 10 or 20 years that it'll last them. Sorry, only 10 more years? Not 50? Yeah, it could be 10 years. So in the near future, the region is starting to consider more radical approaches. One idea comes from desert countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel. Those places rely on expensive and complicated infrastructure to desalinate seawater. Texas could do the same,

drawing supplies potentially from the Gulf of Mexico. So that's something that if you talk to scientists about this, they're like, yeah, that's going to happen. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when. Is the city looking to do anything else? Okay, well, so one thing that they are doing is they are looking into what's called a purple pipeline, which is you take sewage water, so your poop and pee water,

and you run it through a waste processing plant, and you filter it, and it turns into potable water. And there's different ways that you can use that water. It's a political question as much as it is a scientific question. So will people be willing to drink that water? If they are, and some towns have already done this in parts of West Texas, then that water gets directly put into the utility and it comes out of your faucet.

In the meantime, the city just keeps growing. It's a race, you know, it's really, we're in a race where we're gonna see all this growth and all this adaptation to climate change. This is a real time experiment as to whether or not we're gonna do that fast enough to adapt to the changes that are happening throughout the Sun Belt. Like this isn't just relevant for Texas,

it's also relevant for Arizona, Georgia, New Mexico, California. And my takeaway, I guess, is we've had mass migration into sun-belt states. And that's increased the population of Americans that are living in areas that are exposed to extreme climate change. Will there be more and more K's in the years to come? Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah. If climate change continues along the trajectory that it is on, then yes. And Kyle is a poster child for that. And it's going to be a bellwether for how well we as a country are able to adapt to these changes or not.

That's all for today, Friday, September 6th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. The show's made by Katherine Brewer, Maria Byrne, Jonathan Davis, Pia Gadkari, Rachel Humphreys, Ryan Knutson, Matt Kwong, Jessica Mendoza, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez Espinosa,

Heather Rogers, Pierce Singie, Lei Ying Tang, Jeevika Verma, Lisa Wang, Katherine Whalen, Tatiana Zimis, and me, Kate Limbaugh. With help from Trina Menino. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapok, and Peter Leonard. With help this week from Sam Bear. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week from Peter Leonard, Nathan Singapok, and Blue Dot Sessions.

Fact Checking by Mary Mathis and Kate Gallagher. ["Singapok"] Thanks for listening. See you Monday.