Denying Climate Change Spells Doom for Louisiana’s Coast | The Times-Picayune
The marshes of Southeast Louisiana are washing away with salt water intrusion in St. Bernard Parish. (Photo by David Grunfeld)
A few questions for your Sunday morning. Why does Louisiana’s Attorney General Jeff Landry, President Donald Trump, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt and the GOP Congress — including many in Louisiana’s delegation — want to drown south Louisiana over the next 40 years?
This is not an outrageous charge. It is based on this fact: Each of those policy makers has recently called climate change a hoax or continues to oppose regulations and research that could reduce the sea level rise the state’s own scientists say will drown almost everything between Lake Charles and Slidell by 2067.
Just a year ago the latest edition of the Coastal Master Plan handed to the Legislature by the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority contained these warnings:
- Louisiana is locked into losing 1,200 to 2,800 square miles of our current coastal zone to the Gulf of Mexico by 2067.
- The number of communities, industries and jobs consumed by the Gulf will depend on how successful the world is in reducing the carbon emissions driving warming-caused sea level rise.
- Lower emissions will mean more dry land by 2067 – and the hope that some of that will remain dry by the end of the century.
- All of this will happen even if the state finds the $92 billion to build all the projects currently in the plan.
The Legislature then unanimously approved the plan — therefore making all of those climate science-based statements and warnings official state policy.
Yet, last week there was AG Landry claiming the science behind climate change and sea level rise is a hoax. This politician and part-time lawyer went on to give his learned opinion on why all those scientists in the state and around the world are wrong.
Who you gonna believe, he asks? A pol already running for governor and backed by carbon-polluting industries, or scientists presenting peer-reviewed facts, measurements and studies dating back decades — and supported by the state’s GOP-dominated Legislature?
Landry’s act was doubly embarrassing for the state because it overshadowed the coastal good news his press conference was about: Suing the Army Corps of Engineers for land loss caused by its poor maintenance of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. Yes, this is the same guy who opposes efforts to sue oil companies for their far greater role in coastal loss – but the corps doesn’t make campaign contributions.
In the same week we had Pruitt, the lawyer from an oil state and noted climate skeptic (see a pattern?) now in charge of our nation’s environmental health, asking if climate change was necessarily a “bad thing.”
Now, if you farm in a northern state where warming could mean a longer growing season, maybe that’s a good thing. Or, if you own a shipping company that sees shortened trade routes thanks to the loss of Arctic sea ice, you could profit.
But if you live on the bottom third of Louisiana where the average elevation is 2.5 feet, and we’re expecting at least 3 to 5 feet of sea level rise and sinking by the end of the century — climate change is a killer.
Read the rest of the article at The Times-Picayune.
