The Guadalupe River runs red tonight. Not with blood–though there’s enough of that in its swollen banks to stain the limestone–but with the reflected emergency lights of yet another recovery team pulling another small body from the mud in Texas, the nation’s top fossil fuel producer.
They find them curled in fetal positions, these children of Flash Flood Alley, their arms still wrapped around each other as if summer camp sing-alongs could save them from 12 inches of rain in three hours. The official count stands at 109 dead, 161 missing.
The real number? That won’t be known until the river spits out all the RVs it swallowed whole from the River Crest Campground, until they drain the lake that used be Camp Mystic’s archery range, until the morgue trailers stop filling with Texans who believed their governor when he said climate change was “a myth.”
Beginning on the evening of July 3, heavy storms across Texas produced rainfall over 18 inches in some areas, leading to significant flooding, especially in Kerr County located in the Texas Hill Country.
During the 2021 Texas winter storm, Governor Greg Abbott and some other Republicans primarily blamed renewable energy for the power outages, characterized the climate crisis as a “myth,” and attempted to mislead the public about the cause of the erratic weather changes.
Abbott held a press conference today between search-and-rescue updates and compared mass drowning to a fumbled football play.
“Every team makes mistakes,” shrugged the governor in his wheelchair,
The Trump administration has reduced funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which includes programs related to flood mapping. Over 300,000 Texans could lose their health insurance once the changes hit Medicaid, which insures over 4 million low-income and disabled people in the Lone Star State.
Now they’re using Blackhawk helicopters borrowed from the Arkansas National Guard to look for kindergarteners who floated away in sleeping bags.
Down in Kerrville, they’re finding the price tags still attached to the corpses. $29.99 Walmart sneakers. $12.99 “Don’t Mess With Texas” tank tops. The receipts in their pockets dated July 3rd – the day NOAA’s understaffed weather service (thanks to the GOP’s cuts) issued warnings that never reached the campgrounds, the day the state’s unmanned river gauges (defunded in 2021) failed to measure the coming torrent. The free market works wonders until it doesn’t, until you need something as socialist as a functioning early warning system.
The number of flood deaths has ticked up in recent years, according to National Weather Service data. Across the country, 145 flood-related deaths were reported in 2024, well above the 25-year average of 85 flooding-related deaths per year.
Many of these fatal floods were associated with tropical cyclones, which studies show have become stronger and wetter amid rising global temperatures. More than half of last year’s flood deaths — 95 total — came during Hurricane Helene, which struck southeastern states in September and was the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Ted Cruz is already on Fox News calling the disaster “an act of God,” which is rich coming from a man who fled to Cancún during the last climate-enhanced catastrophe. A bill extending the lifespan of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) failed in the Senate on December 20.
The junior senator’s new talking point? That questioning why Texas has no flood warning sirens is “offensive to grieving families.” More offensive than the $5.5 million in fossil fuel donations he’s taken while blocking every flood insurance reform? More offensive than the “In Thoughts and Prayers” banner hanging outside the Kerr County courthouse, where they’re stacking unidentified bodies?
As the Trump administration has proposed dismantling the National Flood Insurance Program and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which administers it, the MAGA death cult has a new catechism.
Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced legislation to ban weather modification, insisting cloud seeding caused the floods. Never mind that Texas stopped its rain enhancement program in 2013. Never mind that climate scientists have warned for decades how warmer air holds more moisture (20% more since the 1950s).
The same oil barons who paid for Abbott’s campaigns are now paying TikTok influencers to blame “liberal geoengineering” for dead campers and other flood victims.
Trump’s newly appointed FEMA director thought hurricane season was “something about a Jimmy Buffett song” and the agency’s been too busy preparing its own funeral per presidential decree – to bother with trifles like coordinating body recovery.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem needs five business days to approve any expenditure over $100k; the drowned families of Hunt, Texas, should’ve scheduled their deaths around her calendar.
Meanwhile in Austin, the legislature’s “solution” is a special session to discuss… football stadium floodlights. The same GOP majority that rejected a 2023 bill to update rainfall projections (now 18 inches for extreme storms vs. 13 inches in the 1960s) will solemnly debate whether cheerleaders should get hazard pay. They’ll do this in a capital city where $150 million in needed flood infrastructure was scrapped for another round of oil tax breaks.
Texas politicians may not be intentionally killing the state’s residents, but it is hard to imagine they could do more if they were trying.
After Texas legislators and Abbott allowed residents to openly carry handguns in public and later removed licensing and training requirements, the overall gun death rate increased 44% from 2013 to 2022. This year, the Texas Legislature approved SB 1596, legalizing short-barrel firearms, and SB 1362, prohibiting Extreme Risk Protection Orders in Texas and seeking to punish entities that enforce those issued out of state.
Three of the five worst mass shootings since 2015 have taken place in Texas, where lawmakers keep passing laws that tear down gun safety measures. It is surprising that the mothers’ tears have not already caused such floods.
The water keeps rising. The bodies keep surfacing. And in a Mar-a-Lago ballroom, the Texas Oil & Gas Association will hold its annual “Energy Champion Awards,” serving Guadalupe River cocktails (blue curaçao with vodka “icebergs”).
In a 2021 climate change lawsuit, Governor Abbott filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Texas Supreme Court to accept Exxon’s petition to depose California officials, highlighting the case’s “major implications for the energy industry in Texas.”
Chip Roy, a Republican House member from Texas whoearned a zero rating from the League of Conservation Voters and wants deeper cuts to green spending, he is known for his attempt to block the $19.1 billion disaster relief bill providing aid for devastated communities recovering from hurricanes, flooding, tornadoes and wildfires after they were hit by storms that owed their increased intensity to climate change.
Roy complained about “the hysteria around climate change” and said there is an abundance of “misinformation out there about the extent of man’s impact on temperatures on the Earth.”
Somewhere downstream, a mother claws through the mud with bare hands, still looking for her son’s Buzz Lightyear backpack. The water took him Friday. The governor took her taxes. The oil companies took her future. And the river, always the river, keeps whispering the truth Texas refuses to hear: The next flood is already coming. The next graves are already dug. The next children are already packing for camp.