--:-- Host: Kate Leinbaugh: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. It's Friday, September 6th.
--:-- Host: Kate Leinbaugh: I'm Kate Leinbaugh.
--:-- Host: Kate Leinbaugh: Today, we're talking about Kyle, Texas, one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States. It's also facing heat and drought that has been exacerbated by climate change and is expected to get worse.
--:-- Host: Kate Leinbaugh: Our colleague, Matt Wirtz, covers financial markets. Mostly. He moonlights covering all sorts of other stuff, like growth and climate in the Sun Belt.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: I 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.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: To figure that out, I started reading through census reports. And I reached out to an organization called Ice Data Services that was looking closely at how climate change affects specific places across the U.S.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: 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.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: 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.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: 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 going up. You have huge cranes and drills and dump trucks.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: So how big is Kyle today? OK, 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.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: Texas in general is expanding like crazy. Between 2010 and 2022, the state population jumped by almost 20 percent to over 30 million people. And people are moving there for lots of reasons.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: 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.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: 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.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: But alongside this boom, Kyle is also dealing with extreme weather. They are experiencing high heat and high humidity at the same time.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: 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.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: And so that can exacerbate things like heat exhaustion, heat stroke, and things like renal failure, which is super scary.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: How does this combo, the heat and humidity, affect people's daily lives? Well, everybody drinks a lot more water.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: 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.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: You can't do that there. Even by like 9 or 10 o'clock, it's like in the high 90s to low 100s. It's unbearably hot already at 9 or 10.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: So I talked to a mother who 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.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: The heat has other knock effects. Running the AC nonstop pushes electricity bills up. It also stresses the grid.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: But still people keep coming. This is the promised land. You know, this is like the American dream, right?
--:-- Matt Wirtz: The people that are moving there, they're aware of the climate conditions, right? They're moving not because they disregard that.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: 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.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: Maybe you have some money to like spend on your kids' education, for example. So, you know, this is a really sensible move in some ways.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: But in other ways, though, it may not be. Because Kyle is enduring that drought. And much of its water sources are maxed out.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: There's more people coming to Austin and all the surrounding suburbs. And so they're sucking up the water from underground.
--:-- Matt Wirtz: And so they're running out of water. Coming up, what Kyle is trying to do about the lack of water.
--:-- [Discussion continues with a commercial break]
--:-- Host: Kate Leinbaugh: Welcome back to The Journal. We're talking about Kyle, Texas, one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States.
--:-- Host: Kate Leinbaugh: The city is facing heat and drought that has been exacerbated by climate change and is expected to get worse.
--:-- Alex Stockton: I'm Alex Stockton, a foreman of a utility crew in and around the city of Kyle.
--:-- Alex Stockton: I bought a one-way ticket to Texas about a year ago. I was looking for work. I had $600 in my pocket and a friend's couch to sleep on.
--:-- Alex Stockton: 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.
--:-- Alex Stockton: I just built a house for myself and my girlfriend to live in with my stepdaughter. I'm doing, like, way more than I thought I could even achieve in a lifetime, if I'm being honest.
--:-- Alex Stockton: Alex found all this success in Central Texas.
--:-- Alex Stockton: 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.
--:-- Alex Stockton: 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.
--:-- Alex Stockton: 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.
--:-- Alex Stockton: This June, it hit 115. It is extremely hot down here.
--:-- Alex Stockton: Where I grew up in Germantown, Wisconsin, a hot summer is probably, and this is like peak, 95 once in a while.
--:-- Alex Stockton: 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.
--:-- Alex Stockton: 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—
--:-- Alex Stockton: I mean, you can, but you're going to pass out in about 30 minutes.
--:-- Alex Stockton: Are you worried about heat stroke and, like, getting dehydrated?
--:-- Alex Stockton: Oh, every day. Every day. Every day.
--:-- Alex Stockton: Alex said that his crew of three will drink about eight gallons of water a workday.
--:-- Alex Stockton: 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.
--:-- Alex Stockton: As foreman, Alex says he's constantly vigilant against things like heat stroke.
--:-- Alex Stockton: We can kind of pick each other's slack up. Like, hey, go take a break. You look like you're, you know, getting a little pale or, you know, getting a little ditzy or slurring your words or not really comprehending much.
--:-- Alex Stockton: You've heard people slurring their words from heat?
--:-- Alex Stockton: Oh, sure. Yeah.
--:-- [Discussion continues]
--:-- Host: Kate Leinbaugh: The city of Kyle is buying water from other municipalities.
--:-- Host: Kate Leinbaugh: That city has blown up so quickly that it is just, it can't be supported by the aquifer.
--:-- Travis Mitchell: I'm Travis Mitchell, the mayor of Kyle, Texas.
--:-- Travis Mitchell: A combination of drought conditions and population growth has created a need for the city to seek out water from additional sources.
--:-- Travis Mitchell: Construction just began on a new pipeline that will take water from the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer.
--:-- Travis Mitchell: Kyle and neighboring towns have spent millions to build a pipeline to a water source that is farther away and deeper underground, the Carrizo Aquifer.
--:-- Travis Mitchell: The pipeline operators estimate it will supply water to Kyle and surrounding cities for 50 years.
--:-- Travis Mitchell: 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.
--:-- Travis Mitchell: And so guess what they did? The exact same thing. They started building pipelines, sucking into that same Carrizo Wilcox aquifer.
--:-- Travis Mitchell: 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.
--:-- Travis Mitchell: Sorry, only 10 more years, not 50? Yeah, it could be 10 years.
--:-- Travis Mitchell: So in the near future, the region is starting to consider more radical approaches.
--:-- Travis Mitchell: One idea comes from desert countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel. Those places rely on expensive and complicated infrastructure to desalinate seawater.
--:-- Travis Mitchell: Texas could do the same, drawing supplies potentially from the Gulf of Mexico.
--:-- Travis Mitchell: 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.
--:-- Travis Mitchell: 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.
--:-- Travis Mitchell: Which is you take sewage water, so you're pooping pee water, and you run it through a waste processing plant, and you filter it, and it turns into potable water.
--:-- Travis Mitchell: And there's different ways that you can use that water. It's a political question as much as it is a scientific question.
--:-- Travis Mitchell: 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.
--:-- [Discussion continues]
--:-- Host: Kate Leinbaugh: That's all for today. Friday, September 6th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal.
--:-- Host: Kate Leinbaugh: The show's made by Catherine Brewer, Maria Byrne, Jonathan Davis, Pia Gadkari, Rachel Humphries, Ryan Knudsen, Matt Kwong, Jessica Mendoza, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Pierce Singhi, Leying Tang, Jivika Verma, Lisa Wang, Catherine Whelan, Tatiana Zemis, and me, Kate Leinbaugh, with help from Trina Menino.
--:-- Host: Kate Leinbaugh: Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapak, and Peter Leonard, with help this week from Sam Baer.
--:-- Host: Kate Leinbaugh: Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week from Peter Leonard, Nathan Singapak, and Blue Dot Sessions.
--:-- Host: Kate Leinbaugh: Fact-checking by Mary Mathis and Kate Gallagher.
--:-- Host: Kate Leinbaugh: Thanks for listening. See you Monday.
