Jon Rosenthal, a Democratic state representative from Houston, is facing off against Bo French, a far-right Republican culture warrior from Fort Worth, for a seat on the commission that regulates the oil and gas industry in Texas.
In an interview with Inside Climate News during a campaign visit to El Paso this month, Rosenthal shared his vision for the oil and gas regulatory agency and responded to French’s inflammatory attacks.
The Railroad Commission of Texas no longer regulates the state’s railroads and instead oversees the vast oil and gas industry, including pipelines, drilling permits, waste disposal and new programs like carbon capture and storage.
Rosenthal worked as a mechanical engineer in the oil and gas industry for 25 years. Following Donald Trump’s 2016 election, he ran for state representative and flipped a seat that had been held by Republicans for more than two decades. Rosenthal has served on the Energy Resources Committee throughout his nearly eight years in the Texas House.
French, the Republican nominee, stepped down as Tarrant County GOP chair to run for commissioner, defeating incumbent Jim Wright in the May 2026 primary run-off. He was raised in Midland in the heart of the gas- and oil-rich Permian Basin, and his family has oil and gas holdings. French spent his career as a trader and more recently in politics. His social media is filled with calls to deport 100 million people and ban “Sharia law” in Texas.
Rosenthal, the only Jewish member of the Texas House, told Inside Climate News he is compelled to speak out against “bigotry and discrimination” and unite with Texans of all backgrounds.
Inside Climate News reached out to French for comment on Rosenthal’s criticism of what he called anti-semitism and Islamophobia in French’s campaign materials. French did not respond.
The Railroad Commission’s three members, all Republicans, serve staggered six year terms. Wayne Christian and Chairman Christi Craddick’s terms run through 2028 and 2030, respectively. The general election race to fill Wright’s seat between Rosenthal and French is on Nov. 3.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
MARTHA PSKOWSKI: How did your experience as a mechanical engineer lead to you running for office and shape what you’ve done in the Texas House?
JON ROSENTHAL: I identify more as an engineer than a politician. I am a relative newcomer [to the Texas House] eight years and four sessions in, but I spent 25 years in oil and gas and another five or six years in heavy manufacturing before that. I got to work with subject matter that I find fascinating and challenging.
I had never considered getting into politics but Trump’s first election changed that for me. I decided that I couldn’t live with myself if I continued to complain from my comfortable place at home. I decided to run for office and I opposed the state representative for District 135 at the time, Gary Elkins, who had been in the legislature for 25 years. People didn’t think I had much of a chance.
The incumbent had a lot more money to spend but I spent my time recruiting volunteers and knocking on doors. I won. Once I got into the legislature I gravitated toward energy policy and served on the House Energy Resources Committee.
PSKOWSKI: If elected, you will be serving alongside two Republicans. How would you approach working with the other commissioners to accomplish your priorities?
ROSENTHAL: I’ve learned that the Republicans and the Democrats in the Texas House by and large don’t dislike each other just because of their party. I was actually shocked by how collegial they are. You learn that to get anything done, you have to build a consensus.
There are not that many Democrats, so you have to work with your colleagues and find common ground. Philosophically, my whole life, I have believed that I can find common ground with almost anybody.
What am I going to do as the only Democrat on the commission? The very first thing is to have a conversation seeking common ground. That’s the values we share, the goals we have in common.
I hope the other two commissioners want to strengthen and improve the commission. I will lobby heavily to get the commission increased funding so they can be more effective at their job, more responsive to communities and pay their workers prevailing wages so that they can compete for the best.
They must be keenly aware that they cannot keep up with the orphan well proliferation. Even though they did a good job of plugging the record number of wells last year, they ended up with more than what they started with. It just tells me the commission needs more money. I think it’s pretty common sense.
PSKOWSKI: Do you support changes to ethics rules so that commissioners are not voting on matters where they have a vested interest?
ROSENTHAL: I think it ought to be a law that if you are regulating the very companies that you have financial stakes in, that’s a problem. If the bulk of your campaign contributions comes from the entities you’re supposed to be regulating, that’s also a problem. But until it’s a law, that’s how it’s going to go. They should recuse themselves from conflicts of interest.
PSKOWSKI: Produced water, oilfield wastewater, is one of the big challenges the commission is facing. As more wastewater is injected underground, we are seeing problems like blowouts across the Permian Basin. Do you think the Railroad Commission needs to be doing more to prevent those incidents or make sure that operators are held responsible if injection is found to cause damages?
ROSENTHAL: It’s absolutely the job of the agency to permit and monitor and ensure folks are following the rules. I think we should reward the operators that follow the rules by streamlining permitting processes, maybe even reducing permitting costs, so that we’re incentivizing the operators that play by the rules.
Because if we fail to hold accountable the operators who don’t play by the rules, we’re giving them an unfair advantage. The commission clearly lacks the resources to [enforce the law] effectively, considering the scope and the size of the industry and the stuff they have to monitor.
As hard as [the inspectors] may be working, they just don’t have enough people to go around. They don’t have the resources they need to monitor the industry.
When they overpressurize the disposal facilities, the structure of the earth starts to crack. It leads to the seismicity issue. You have an overpressurized subterranean formation.
If the earth starts to break, where does that stuff go? It’s not going to come out through the wellhead because that’s probably the strongest part of the whole thing. It’s going to seep out through the ground and find the path of least resistance. Then you end up with unpredictable situations.
PSKOWSKI: The Railroad Commission is issuing its first Carbon Capture and Storage permits. Do you think the technology is safe and what should the Railroad Commission be considering when issuing these permits?
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ROSENTHAL: What’s interesting about this is it’s not a partisan issue. Different people feel different ways about it. A lot of legislators don’t have a technical background. I was in favor of giving primacy to the Railroad Commission for carbon capture regulation because when you split it up between [agencies] the lines between the areas of responsibility become blurred.
I think having one agency take control of this is a good thing. But I feel like we handed them extra stuff to do and did not increase their appropriation for it.
What should they be looking for? They have a set of set practices in place. Storing carbon dioxide underground is probably less dangerous, the substance itself is less dangerous, than other stuff that we pressurize underground. We talk about saltwater disposal, that’s laden with noxious chemicals. Carbon dioxide, that’s already in the air.
The issue is it’s more challenging to seal off a gas than a liquid. You have to have better controls. But we have safe ways to go about this.
But again, who is paying to monitor those facilities and ensure they’re properly tested, permitted and monitored?
PSKOWSKI: Texas is developing permits to treat and reuse produced water outside the oilfields. What are your thoughts on these permitting programs and produced water reuse?
ROSENTHAL: I can’t say I’m an expert on the water treatment part of this because, remember, I built drilling equipment. But I do favor incentivizing the development of those technologies so that water is used more economically and efficiently. Because it really is an effort we should undertake.
We’ve got too much produced water and we’re running out of pore space to store it. At the same time, we have a problem where we don’t have enough water in some areas of Texas.
Given the choice to spend a bunch of extra money to reclaim water or to spend much less money and dispose of it [underground], the operators will probably do whatever they can do to maximize their profits.
When we were in the House we debated a bill with an appropriation to incentivize reclaiming produced water. I was in favor of it. I see a role to incentivize the technology.
PSKOWSKI: Your opponent Bo French recently put out an ad where he included a clip of you saying you would work in green energy. Any response to that ad? And how do you see renewables fitting into the energy mix in Texas?
ROSENTHAL: As a legislator, I’ve always been very progressive. Definitely progressive on social issues but I’ve always been more pragmatic on economic issues, on the energy industry. While it’s true, I would be happy to work in green energy, I don’t think that would be a negative thing, I would also be happy doing what I did before in the oil and gas industry.
I also have been very public saying I think we should embrace an all of the above approach to energy production in Texas. What is quote unquote green energy?… It could be geothermal, it could be hydrogen energy. It’s not just wind and solar.
In this state our energy needs are growing tremendously. The place where I diverge pretty significantly from the more left-leaning constituents of the state is that when I say “all of the above energy,” I mean we cannot afford to turn any energy off.
I would never shut down an energy source in this state until we had a replacement for it. It makes no sense to me to take away any of the energy that we’re generating while the population is growing faster than any other state and our industrial base is growing. And if we’re going to invite these data centers, we’re going to need even more energy.
There is a movement toward lowering our carbon emissions, lowering our greenhouse gases, and going with more green energy sources. That is a global shift in process that the oil and gas industry is participating in pretty fully.
Oil and gas is not going anywhere anytime soon. It’s the backbone of the economy. It’s the backbone of our energy infrastructure.
PSKOWSKI: You’re trailing Bo French in fundraising, which isn’t unique for a Democrat in a Texas statewide race. How are you trying to maximize your reach on the campaign trail and overcome that fundraising deficit?
ROSENTHAL: Even in my House campaigns, the Republicans have always outspent me. They just have more money. It’s always been an exercise to do more with less to be effective in different ways.
I don’t foresee being in a position to buy television advertising. My opponent claims to have a lot of television. I’m doing AM talk radio shows.
The biggest challenge is not that I have less money. It’s getting more people out in the world to understand what this commission does. And then to understand the two candidates that are in the race. The polls show the race is very close and small pieces of information can make a big difference.
If we can reach enough people, I can win. We’re talking to people in rural areas who either are in the energy industry or agriculture and livestock. Those people are also concerned about the environment, because their business depends on having clear air and land and water.
“Anyone who has an actual conversation with me is not going to walk away and call me a clown. Which is what people who have never met me call me online every day.”
PSKOWSKI: Bo French has made repeated attacks on immigrants, Muslims and famously asked if Jews or Muslims are a bigger threat to Texas. He has now turned his attention to you and compared you to a Bolshevik in an email blast. You’re the only Jewish member of the Texas House. When you saw the Bolshevik email, what was your first reaction? What are the dangers of this rhetoric? [The email included an AI-generated image of Rosenthal in the room where the Romanovs were killed during the Bolshevik Revolution and mirrors the “Judeo-Bolshevism” conspiracy theory that communism is a Jewish plot. The Nazis employed Judeo-Bolshevism in their propaganda].
ROSENTHAL: It’s extremely serious the way he is going about this. Employing the use of literal Nazi propaganda. Using the AI image of me in the room where the Romanovs were executed, to many people that will seem like a weird or obscure reference. But this was an effort to blame the Jews for something that the majority of the Jews were actually against and had nothing to do with.
Demonizing people for their ethnicity and religion in general. … I’ve always been taught that a core belief of the Jewish people is that in order to avoid another Holocaust, you want to step out and speak out against that kind of bigotry and discrimination.
I hope the silver lining is this is an opportunity to bring together people of all faiths who cannot abide by this. He might be anti-Semitic and it certainly seems that way. He is openly anti-Muslim and anti-Asian.
We all have to stand for each other. The hate that comes at us is all the same. It’s all hate and I still have faith in humanity that most people feel that’s wrong.
PSKOWSKI: What kind of reception are you getting in more rural areas and among more conservative audiences?
JON ROSENTHAL: I think most people in the real world are clumped around the middle somewhere. I think most Texans and probably most Americans don’t feel like they’re fully aligned with one party or the other.
I have been overjoyed by how I’ve been received in rural areas because it’s an opportunity to dispel a caricature that’s been painted about me or painted about Democrats in general. Whether people agree or disagree with some of my positions on these issues, anyone who has an actual conversation with me is not going to walk away and call me a clown. Which is what people who have never met me call me online every day.
I’m serious about the issues and I’m serious about the undertaking both as a legislator and now seeing this role at the agency. I am happy to debate with people of good faith. I think just having conversations with folks and letting them see I’m a pretty normal person that’s just trying to do a little bit in this world.
I just hope people will not just buy into stereotypes. The decider in this are the people who are willing to consider something other than party affiliation. They get to pick who is going to have this critically important role that tends to fly under the radar.
The question is if you want someone who has the background to actually address those problems? Or do you want someone’s going to lead the fight against Sharia law, whatever that is?
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Thank you,
Reporter, El Paso, Texas
Martha Pskowski covers climate change and the environment in Texas from her base in El Paso. She was previously an environmental reporter at the El Paso Times. She began her career as a freelance journalist in Mexico, reporting for outlets including The Guardian and Yale E360. Martha has a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Hampshire College and a master’s degree in Journalism and Latin American Studies from New York University. She is a former Fulbright research fellow in Mexico. Martha can be reached on Signal at psskow.33.
