Texas Campaign for the Environment

Background

The Texas Campaign for the Environment was founded in 1991 and initially focused most of its efforts on advocating for expanded recycling programs. Since its founding, the group has also campaigned for composting, proper disposal of electronic waste, single-use plastic bans, and restrictions on fracking. The group’s website as of 2025 stated that in recent years, due to the “climate crisis” and “ Texas’ outsized role as the nation’s largest producer of fossil fuels,” the group has shifted its focus to opposing the oil and gas industry, stating that “TCE’s issue focus has shifted to pushing back on oil, gas, petrochemical and plastics polluters, and their political and financial enablers.” ²

Activities

Texas Campaign for the Environment has promoted left-of-center positions on a variety of environmental issues, regularly calling on companies to support complete divestment from plastic and oil and gas production. In 2024, the group led a campaign called “Exiting Petrochemicals” in partnership with Break Free from Plastic, Friends of the Earth, and the Center for International Environmental Law that called on major banks to “Immediately prohibit all financing for petrochemicals expansion and adopt absolute greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets” and to “adopt environmental justice policies to end financing for petrochemical projects in communities of color and low-income communities.” ³

The group also hosted protests outside CERAWeek, a global energy conference held in Houston in 2025, stating at the time that the event “features the world’s biggest polluters and climate villains—including the CEOs of Shell, BP, Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and more. For too long, these companies have treated Gulf South communities, and communities of color and low-income communities around the world, like ‘sacrifice zones.’ They poison communities’ air and water, increasing their risk of serious health conditions like asthma and cancers, and fuel the climate crisis’s devastating hurricanes, fires, and floods.” ⁴

The group also highlighted concerns in engaging immigrant communities in its activism campaigns amid increased immigration enforcement under the second Trump administration. ⁵

The group also led opposition to the construction of an ammonia manufacturing facility in Ingleside, Texas in 2025. The group’s opposition to ammonia production ignored claims by the European-based manufacturing company that increased production would “significantly contribute to our strategy of decarbonizing agriculture” and provide a “clean” fuel for shipping and power production, and centered its rhetoric around the use of petrochemically derived inputs in the ammonia manufacturing process despite ammonia being clean-burning and releasing no carbon dioxide. ⁶

Opposition to Nuclear Energy

Texas Campaign for the Environment was one of more than 650 signatories on an August 2022 letter opposing the use of nuclear energy organized by People vs. Fossil Fuels and addressed to the “Democratic Leadership” in Congress. The letter was titled “Opposition to Fossil Fuel Project Approvals and Permitting Reforms Conditioned on the Inflation Reduction Act.” ¹

The letter portrayed as “false solutions” carbon sequestration, carbon-free nuclear energy, and all sources of energy not approved as “renewable” by the signatories. It read in part: “Relying only on large scale investments in renewable energy and environmental justice alone will not stave off climate disaster if Congress simultaneously puts its legislative foot on the gas to expand fossil fuel production and false solutions like carbon capture, hydrogen, biomass, biofuels, factory farm gas, and nuclear power.” ¹