Meanwhile, ever-worsening extreme weather threatens to end the Texas Miracle for good.

But it’s not bad news for everyone! The pipeline company whose alleged market manipulations may have helped crash the grid in 2021? They made $2.4 billion then, and just walked away with another $400 million. President Trump has gone to war against the oil industry’s biggest market competitors — wind and solar energy — while slashing the rules that make polluters work a little harder to protect the public from toxic waste.

We founded Future Heist to tell a simple story: that the country is being plundered. Over the last 20 years, a well-connected cabal of largely Texas-based politicians, billionaires, and private corporations has worked to suppress our democracy, use up our water, poison our air, and wreck our landscapes and our politics. They’re building a world where they get rich while leaving the rest of us poorer, sicker, and more divided.

(And ‘us’ in this case may start in Texas, but boy it doesn’t end here.)

We’re dragging that theft into the light. And we’re building the crew that steals the state back. Because we believe Texas can be freer, fairer, and healthier than it is now.

What We Do

Future Heist investigates the theft, traces the pattern, connects the dots, tells the story, and makes sure it reaches the people who most need to read it.

We connect the seemingly separate fights over waste, water, land, energy, and pollution so that more Texans can find each other, compare notes, and build power together.

We dig up what’s happening, put that information into the right hands, and help bring them to statewide attention.

We do that by reporting and building data tools that help Texans — and ultimately Americans as a whole — keep their families and communities safe, and build a better, cleaner, fairer and more prosperous state. We focus on the oil and gas industry, because in our state it is a major blocker to that effort. But we’re looking beyond that.

We find stories about places where industry – sometimes by corrupting the power of the government – is trying to make a buck now at the price of the future of people who live there; or where people are organizing or innovating to secure a better, freer and safer future for their families and communities. This is, overall, a hopeful project.

In more practical terms, one part of our work is simply taking a lot of good work that’s being done the last few steps over the finish line, to where normal people can use it. A large element of this is taking taxpayer-funded data, assembled by taxpayer-funded agencies (in formats that appear designed to be as hard as possible to deal with) and putting it in a form that Texans can actually use.

We share these datasets freely along with the tools (often open-source) used to generate them, and we distribute them under permissive licenses.

Who We Are

We’re a small team of investigators and builders giving Texans the information they need to fight back. We dig up the facts, build the tools to track what’s happening, and get the results to the people who can use them.

Saul Elbein | The Investigator

Saul grew up in a small, intense religious community in North Dallas — just across the Metroplex from the beginnings of the fracking boom. He was raised to believe that taking care of land and water is a sacred responsibility, and that a healthy government protects ordinary people from abusive industry.

Those ideas propelled him through 15-plus years reporting from across Texas and the U.S., with extended projects in Latin America, Europe and Southeast Asia, covering the world’s great race for resources and the people fighting to keep from getting run over, for publications like The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Texas Monthly, and Vice. He specializes in stories of people standing up to systems that threaten to break them — like the families fighting the frack wells forced onto their doorsteps.

He came back to Texas in 2021 to cover it for The Hill. He’s ridden along with oil industry whistleblowers and wastewater haulers; walked farmland wrecked by pipeline companies.

It’s the same story he covered overseas: the story of a great theft of the future, and the refusal of some people to let their future be stolen. He founded Future Heist to tell it.

He lives in Austin, where he is raising two boys to clamber the same limestone cliffs and swim in the same creeks that he did as a kid. He thinks there is no more beautiful thing than a Hill Country swimming hole.

Greg Randall | The Architect

Greg was backpacking out of cell range on April 27, 2011, when an EF4 tornado went through Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He came down to a phone full of messages asking if he was alive. He spent that summer photographing what was left and reading infrared satellite imagery of his own city, where healthy trees glow and the tornado’s path shows up as a dead line through them.

He went to art school for photography and printmaking, then spent a decade building web infrastructure, most of it inside universities, rebuilding medical-center and law-school sites so they’d work for someone using a screen reader. The same job now has him running face recognition over century-old group photographs to pull out individual portraits, and AI models over faded pencil and blackletter to get the names off records nobody could search.

Now he builds the scrapers, pipelines and public tools behind Future Heist. He pulled roughly 600,000 rows of Texas water-quality records out of filings the state keeps technically public and practically unreadable, and put them on a map where a resident can look up their own tap water. He scores old plugged wells for how likely they are to fail under pressure from nearby wastewater injection, and flags the ones that reach deep enough to put that waste in the drinking water. The records are usually already public. They are just never in the same place.

He lives in Richmond, Virginia, next door to Henrico County, which has thirty-seven data centers and seventeen more planned. In June the county manager asked its employees and school staff to turn off their computers at night, close the blinds, and unplug their chargers.

He is raising a son who spent his first two years in Havana, Florida (locally: HAY-vana), north of Tallahassee, in Junes when they couldn’t go outside at all. Richmond is easier on a kid than Havana was. Greg does not expect it to stay that way.

The Extended Network

Future Heist works because of the people on the ground. The real crew is ranchers, nurses, local organizers, and digital creators who carry these stories where they can do the most good.

We bring the reporting, the tools, and the megaphone. They bring the trust, the relationships, and the local knowledge that turn information into action.

Stealing Back the Future

Future Heist is built on a simple idea: That the broad sense that things are getting worse, and the feeling that there’s nothing you can do about it, are both products of a long-running theft by certain elements in industry, carried out with the aid of (or at least without meaningful opposition by) our elected representatives and appointed regulators.

Do you ever feel like there’s no point in even trying — like the future has, in some real if hard-to-define sense, been stolen from you and your family? The game is rigged, the dice are loaded, and the environment is full of poison?

You’re not hallucinating. A specific, nameable group of actors has been working to asset-strip Texas — and the country at large — and leave the rest of us in a dried up, rust-belt hellhole while they get even richer.

We can point to specific evidence of this — the destruction of a world-leading American system of weather prediction, or the Texas government’s refusal to stop the oil and gas industry from polluting the places where people live and poisoning children.

We believe, in other words, that the future has been stolen. We also believe — and we see, every day, in the actions of ordinary Texans — that it can be stolen back.

Our Editorial Perspective

We use the tools of journalism — we tell stories that are true, and where we confront different truths that contradict, we help readers find their way through.

But as seen above, we’re real people with a real stake in this country: we have homes that could burn up in wildfires and kids who can get sickened by forever chemicals and who start yelling when it’s too hot to play outside. That gives us a specific perspective, which we’ve arrived at over the course of our careers through rigorous and objective reporting.

The truth in this state is, frankly, crazy. This is a place where, as we reported earlier this year, it was perfectly legal for developers to build a neighborhood and elementary school on top of a drilling waste dump and never tell the people who lived there. Where serious, sober-minded public figures have concluded that the only solution to the oil and gas industry’s unending flood of toxic wastewater is to put it on farmland. Where oil and gas companies can leave toxic waste in pits on the land they lease and never tell the owner. Where the Republican nominee for the open seat on the state oil regulator unseated the incumbent by accusing him of being too soft on Muslims.

Our reporting will be as fair, complete, and true as we can possibly make it, and if we get something wrong, let us know and we’ll fix it. We’ll be operating fact-first and in good faith.

We will interview experts, scientists, and thought leaders. But we won’t just interview one who says it’s raining outside and another who says it isn’t — or pretend those two people are standing on equal footing. We’ll look outside our own windows with our own eyes and tell you what we see. And we’ll support that information with tools, data, and science that, if you will, analyze the humidity in the air and capture the wetness on the ground. But we call it like we see it, and if telling the Lord’s plain truth in a state like this often looks like activism, well, then sometimes we’re activists.

We report on issues that we think are important, because something needs to change here, and quickly.

Join Us

We’re raising the flag for Texans — and allies — who love this land and are sick of being treated like collateral damage.

We are always looking for people making interesting art or media; organizing their neighbors to get things done; tinkering with off-grid technology or new ways of growing food; experimenting with new ways of living. We’re looking for content creators who are drawn to science and the environment; reporters looking for stories or looking to get them to a wider audience; organizers with urgent local fights that deserve to no longer be local.

If you know someone like that? Reach out. We’re looking for organizers, creators, reporters, and ordinary citizens ready to take a stand and help grab back the future of this state from the people who have just about gotten away with stealing it.

Our AI Policy

How We Use It

We find things work best when machines talk to machines and people talk to people. Large language models (LLMs) like Claude and ChatGPT are great for coding and working with data, and reading huge quantities of text without getting tired.

But they have no consciousness or conscience; they have never lived a day on this earth or been in love or felt loss or eaten a ripe Fredericksburg peach and let the juice run down their chin. They’re useful and even essential tools, but things go badly when they’re put in charge.

We see LLMs less as minds-in-a-box than as tools that let non-coders interact with computer code using natural language. As we confront one of the best-funded and biggest industries on the planet, LLM-type tools make the watchdog work we do, at the cadence we do it, possible.

Our work involves a small team making sense of enormous amounts of data and documents, and working on coding problems that are, frankly, far beyond what either of us can do in, say, Python.

How We Don’t Use It

We stay away from LLM-based writing, in part because it is, frankly, awful and hallucination-prone — in part because it has a plasticky, uncanny valley feel, and in part because writing and reporting are, in journalism, inseparable from thinking.

But this is a fine line, because in computer-enabled data journalism, the model is often suggesting a set of meanings and interpretations that, even if we rewrote it entirely, would still be a product of its reasoning.

That means most of what we publish is entirely human-written, though some written data journalism relies on a spine of LLM-based interpretation. Everything also gets a thorough human edit, though most pieces also get some amount of LLM-enabled editing to amend flow and check typos.

The one exception to our no-LLM-drafting rule is readmes and technical writing in our published software.

Our solution to this problem is to use AI to build tools and analyze data to enable creative work, not replace it. In practice, that means:

1. Human first, human last: First drafts and framing-out is always human; all copy gets a tough human edit before meeting readers.
2. Tracking: We maintain a clear chain of custody for every claim in a piece, back through layers of analysis it’s built on, down to the raw data it came from — which allows us to adversarially fact check everything we publish.
3. Transparency: We publish this data so that people can use or recheck and argue with it.

We also know that LLMs will always answer a question in the easiest way possible, and when it is easier to make something up than to do a rigorous check of the data (spoiler: it usually is), then they will do that. When they do, we call it “hallucination,” but in all cases, whether the resulting information is fact or fiction, the machine is doing the same thing: generating likely text from the context in its immediate memory.

Thus, we don’t ask the LLM questions like “What’s in produced water,” which will often cause it to make up an answer it doesn’t have. Instead we give an LLM a few hundred documents about fracking water, with layers of analysis on top of it and clear chains of custody between raw facts and more derived analysis.

Then we ask something like: “Read these documents, and based on the information here, please write a detailed summary of what might be in fracking water, listing the document and direct quote for the source of the information.” This creates answers that are (a) more likely to be supported by the data, but also (b, and perhaps more importantly) easy for humans to fact-check.

Ethics & Standards

We work in good faith, with a strong sense of responsibility to the truth and generosity towards all — at the same time that we hold ourselves, our allies, and our opponents all to a high standard.

As such, you can trust that we have done everything we can to prove that everything you read on one of our channels is true. If we get something wrong, we will fix it. When appropriate, we’ll rethink our processes to prevent repeating the error.

It also means that, in the interest of every piece being as strong as it can be, we seek commentary and perspective from people who we may not agree with.

It also means that, if we conclude from the facts that they are being deceptive or evasive, we will say so.

We will use anonymous sourcing only when needed to protect a source from credible personal or professional retaliation; when we do, we explain our reasons for doing so. Even when we keep someone’s identity shielded from the public eye, we will always vet them, background them, and seek corroborating documentation and sourcing before publishing.

Got a story idea, question, tip, or pitch for us? Send us an email here.