In this season when many Louisianans are making resolutions to achieve personal goals in 2024, turns out the office of Jeff Landry, our attorney general and next governor, quietly got a head start a few weeks ago: It signed Louisiana up for coastal suicide.

How else to explain its stated intention to fight against a new federal policy that could dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the key to stopping the Gulf of Mexico from drowning much of the coast in the next few decades.

Landry’s office made that coast-killing resolution the first week of December, when the Biden Administration announced it was raising the “social cost of carbon.” That’s the figure the Environmental Protection Agency places on the damages to the economy from one ton of carbon emissions.

The concept was developed by the Obama Administration to justify regulations reducing carbon pollution. It’s based on the “benefit-cost” test for regulations introduced by the Reagan Administration, which requires a new regulation to show that its social benefits — including savings on health costs — will outweigh the costs to industry for approval. It has been accepted by courts for decades.

Using that formula, the first social cost for carbon was set at $42 a ton. The Trump Administration quickly reduced that to just $5 a ton at the behest of fossil fuels producers, and then Biden’s administration reinstated it to an inflation-adjusted $51 a ton.

But with the costs of climate impacts soaring into the tens of billions annually from record storms, fires, droughts and sea level rise, many considered that much too low.

A solution unexpectedly arrived on Dec. 2 when the Biden Administration set new limits for one greenhouse gas: methane.

Although released in far less volume than carbon dioxide, methane is considered 81 times more powerful in trapping heat in the atmosphere, the cause of climate change. However, when new research showed the amount of methane leaks from operational and closed wells was much higher than thought, the new rule was needed.

That rule came with a thrilling surprise for the fight against sea level rise: It nearly doubled the social cost of carbon to $108 a ton!

This higher, more accurate cost gives a legal argument for tighter regulations on all greenhouse gas emissions and could hasten the nation’s transition from fossil fuels.

That was met with joy for those concerned with research showing that surging sea levels could flood the sinking Louisiana coastal zone — almost everything south of I-10.

Indeed, the latest edition of the state’s $50 billion plan for coastal survival now says the best case for holding on to our remaining wetlands and protecting communities is to quickly and dramatically reduce emissions, as outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But there was no joy in the office of Louisiana’s Attorney General.

Elizabeth Murrill, Landry’s solicitor general and our next AG, said that “this number means that the government has a weapon that it can use to justify anything it wants to.”

Not true. Under the benefit-cost formula birthed by Reagan, each regulation must prove its economic value.

The only bright spot Murrill saw was a possible new opening for attacking the social cost of carbon — again. Louisiana and a group of other GOP states failed when the figure was $51.

“Now we’ve got a concrete application of the numbers and now we can go back and challenge everything again,” she said.

Not a very coast-friendly New Year’s resolution from Landry’s office.

No one should be surprised.

In his eight years as AG, the officer expected to protect Louisiana citizens has been fighting regulations aimed at reducing the industrial poisons from the petrochemical industry that have placed Louisiana worst among all states for total pollution, third from the bottom in industrial toxins and health risks from pollution, all contributing to one of the shortest life spans in America and hence in the western world.

Don’t expect that to change. Landry once told people who disagreed with state laws on abortion he favored that they had a choice: They could live somewhere else.

He seems determined to make that a New Year’s resolution a growing number of people will make.

Bob Marshall, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Louisiana environmental journalist, can be reached at bmarshallenviro@gmail.com, and followed on Twitter @BMarshallEnviro.