In 2015, a 25-year-old flooring installer named Roendy Granillo collapsed and died of heat stroke on a construction job in Melissa, a small town northeast of Dallas, after his family said he was denied a water break. They carried his story to Dallas City Hall, and the council passed an ordinance on a 10-5 vote, guaranteeing construction workers a 10-minute rest break every four hours. Austin had passed a similar rule in 2010. The rules stood for more than a decade. Then, in 2023, a single state law erased them both and barred any other Texas city from passing one.
Over the past decade, in a state whose leadership has broadly resisted any sort of climate mandates, a string of Texas cities moved the other way. The four largest, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and Austin, each wrote a climate plan and committed to cutting emissions to zero by mid-century. Austin moved its target up to 2040, San Antonio adopted its plan in 2019, Houston pledged a 40 percent cut by 2030, and Dallas wrote money for its plan into the city budget. Smaller places joined in, from San Marcos and Smithville to El Paso, which approved its own plan in early 2026.
The cities can still set the goals, but the practical tools to reach them—from building codes to worker protections to transportation funding—have increasingly been relegated to the state level.
The clearest case is buildings, where moving new construction off gas and onto electricity is one of the most direct ways a city can cut emissions. Austin’s first plan would have nearly eliminated gas hookups in new buildings by 2030. It never happened. The provision was softened after the local gas utility pushed back, and in 2021 the state settled the question for everyone, barring cities from banning natural gas as a fuel source in new construction.
Atmos Energy, one of the state’s largest natural-gas distributors and a major operator in the cities where these plans were written, defends the arrangement on grounds of cost. “Affordable energy leads to affordable housing,” the company said in a statement to the Texas Observer, arguing that keeping natural gas in the mix and preserving consumer choice holds down housing costs while still cutting emissions. It backs the case with its own figures: in Texas, the company said, natural gas is “about half the cost of electricity,” and a home with gas “produces 13 percent less carbon emissions than an all-electric home.”
That carbon figure is Atmos’s own, and gas-versus-electric comparisons turn heavily on how methane leakage is counted and on what powers the grid. But the consumer-choice argument is real. In 2021, the Legislature made it law, guaranteeing builders the right to choose natural gas.
Utilities did not always need a law.
In San Antonio, the Texas Observer found that the municipal power utility, CPS Energy, helped fund and shape the climate plan, and the final version left more room for fossil fuels than early drafts had. The goal survived; the plan to get there ultimately came out softer.
The broadest limit arrived in 2023. The Texas Regulatory Consistency Act, which opponents call the Death Star law, preempts cities from regulating across broad swaths of state law unless the Legislature has signed off first, and it lets private parties sue to enforce that. The bill was authored by now-House Speaker and Lubbock state Representative Dustin Burrows and advanced through the Texas Senate by then-Senator Brandon Creighton, who told colleagues the measure was needed to avert “a patchwork of different ordinances across this state that are an impossible compliance nightmare for businesses.”
A district court struck it down as unconstitutional, but an appeals court reversed that decision, allowing the law to take effect while challenges continue. Houston, San Antonio, and El Paso continue to fight it in court. In June 2026, some House conservatives floated further expanding the law to let the attorney general sue cities and impose penalties directly.
The water-break rules were among the first local measures swept up by the new law. David Chincanchan, policy director at the Workers Defense Action Fund, the organization that pushed for both ordinances, put the loss in plain terms. “For workers, these ordinances represented the kind of reasonable, common-sense policies that can literally save lives,” he said, a requirement that gave them the confidence to assert their rights in an industry where injuries and retaliation are common.
Losing the rules, Chincanchan said, “means workers’ health and safety and protection from heat illness depends on the uncertain ‘goodwill’ of supervisors and employers incentivized to prioritize productivity and profits over the safety and lives of workers.” He argued that having preempted the local ordinances, the state now has both the responsibility and the opening to pass heat-safety protections of its own.
The pattern reaches beyond building codes and workplace regulations. Transportation is the largest source of emissions in most Texas cities, and the state’s grip on transportation funding has produced a similar bind. Denton, a city of more than 150,000 north of Dallas, adopted a net-zero plan and then kept widening roads anyway. Transportation makes up an estimated 53 percent of the city’s emissions, and its own dashboard shows that sector lagging.
The reason is not indifference. Major constitutionally dedicated state highway revenues are restricted to traditional roadway uses, limiting how far state money can shift toward mass public transit. Attempts to change this—such as a 2025 constitutional amendment that would have allowed State Highway Fund money for transit-oriented projects—have repeatedly fallen flat at the Capitol, where highway contractors carry a big stick.
Austin’s experience with transit tells the same story on a larger scale. In 2020, voters approved Project Connect, a multibillion-dollar package whose centerpiece was a light rail system, originally envisioned to encompass 27 miles of new routes, meant to both cut car dependence and carbon emissions and greatly expand public transit options in the capital city. Six years later, the line has been pared back to about 10 miles and its cost has risen from $7.1 billion to $8.2 billion. The project has not broken ground. The Texas attorney general challenged the funding mechanism, and the Texas Supreme Court in May 2026 sent the case back to a lower court without resolving it. State lawmakers have twice attempted to sever the voter-approved tax revenue funding the project. Groundbreaking is now projected for 2027 at the earliest, with completion by 2033. Austin voters said yes in 2020. The city is still waiting.
The state has also weighed new limits on the low-carbon power feeding these plans. A 2025 measure, Senate Bill 819, would have put new wind and solar projects through a renewable-specific permitting and setback regime that are not imposed on other power generation sources in the same way. It passed the Senate and stalled in the House, but similar proposals keep returning, which signals to cities that even the supply-side of their plans sits under a ceiling that could drop in any session.
There is a real argument on the other side, and it is worth stating plainly. A single statewide rulebook spares businesses from navigating different rules in every city where they operate. Fuel neutrality can be defended as consumer choice, and a patchwork of local mandates can raise costs and sow confusion. The people who built these preemptions claim they are shielding Texans from local overreach.
But put the pieces together and a structural problem comes into view. In Texas, cities took up climate and heat policy in part because the state would not, yet the tools to carry it out sit at the state level, where residents have far less leverage. In the Death Star era, Lone Star cities are left answerable to voters for outcomes they no longer fully control.
Columbia University law professor Richard Briffault, a leading scholar of what he has termed “the new preemption,” has described it as a pattern in which states block local action without replacing it with a statewide scheme of their own. The Texas approach fits the template: cities make commitments, the state narrows the means, and the accountability gap falls on local officials who answer to voters for goals the state has made harder to reach.
And the cost is not shared evenly. The parts of these plans aimed at the most exposed Texans tend to thin out first. Electrified buildings and heat protections would have mattered most in low-income neighborhoods and on outdoor job sites, where the heat lands hardest and air conditioning is not a given.
El Paso’s climate work has centered those residents. The city’s Chihuahuan Desert Climate Action Plan, adopted in early 2026, runs to 10 strategies and 53 actions, including neighborhood heat walks and tree-planting in the areas that need shade most. At the center of the equity work is a cool-roof program that installs weatherization upgrades for income-qualified households.
Dora Hernandez, climate program manager in the City of El Paso’s Strategic and Legislative Affairs office, said the program “helps mitigate the impacts of extreme heat in some of the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods, advancing both climate and public health objectives.” Asked specifically where state limits get in the way of the broader plan, her office outlined what El Paso can still do but did not address the constraint.
El Paso’s list is a useful reminder that the ceiling is not the floor. Cities still control their own fleets, their own buildings, their tree canopies, and their outreach. What remains is meaningful, but narrower than what was planned.
But there are early signs the local climate goals are slipping. Seven of Austin’s 17 climate goals were rated “Needs Support” or “Off Track,” according to the city’s Climate Implementation Plan, last updated in April 2026. The hardest-hit area was sustainable buildings, where three of four goals fell into those categories, including cutting the carbon in building materials and the emissions from natural gas, the very lever the state stripped from cities in 2021.
Net-zero by 2050 was meant to be a commitment with a plan behind it. Stripped of the means to get there, it drifts toward a slogan, a target that survives precisely because it no longer threatens anything. The risk is not that the cities will be punished for falling short. It is that everyone quietly stops expecting them to succeed.
In the meantime, it is heat season in Texas. Construction crews are on job sites in Dallas and Austin, working without the break guarantee their cities once required and the state erased. Texas leads the nation in workplace fatalities, including those from heat exposure, according to federal labor data.
The goals are still on paper. The tools are somewhere else.
The post The Hard Ceiling Over Texas Cities’ Climate Plans appeared first on The Texas Observer.
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