As he was cruising to victory in the governor’s race last fall, I wrote that Jeff Landry’s persistent denial of climate science made him a clear and present danger to the drive for a sustainable coastal zone — basically Louisiana’s bottom third — as well as the rest of the state.

Turns out that may have been an understatement.

Because so far, the theme of Landry’s rule seems to be “Oil and Hate.”

That would be a toxic mix anywhere, but it will be a disaster for Louisiana’s future.

Landry flooded his administration so thoroughly with officials who have ties to the oil, gas and petrochemical industries that you wondered if he would replace the pelican on our license plates with a drilling rig and rename the state “Oilyana.”

The most outrageous and dangerous move is his proposal to place the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority under the Department of Energy and Natural Resources. The CPRA is charged with saving coastal communities and fisheries by protecting the few wetlands we have left and building new ones. The DENR’s mission is helping oil and gas companies to “drill baby drill” in those wetlands — and everywhere else.

Landry claims this is just a conservative’s approach to streamline government for better efficiency. No one believes that.

Gov. Bobby Jindal — no champion of big government or environmental regulations — made one of his first acts enshrining the primacy of coastal restoration by ordering all agencies to clear any work on the coast through the CPRA. He appointed now-U.S. Rep. Garret Graves, also not known for waving green flags, to run that show, and Graves did it with an iron fist.

Landry wants to turn that around. He wants the preservation agency to go through the drilling agency for permission to do any of its work. He wants drilling to have primacy in the wetlands it helped destroy.

Now, if the administrator in charge of oil and gas development sees a conflict between the two goals and knows his boss believes in god, guns and oil (not necessarily in that order), which way will he lean?

Maybe best analogy for a Louisiana audience goes like this: How would you feel if Landry put the Alabama football coach in charge of LSU’s game plans? That’s what Landry is doing with our coastal future.

It’s not hyperbole. The news about how much time we have left to survive below I-10 gets grimmer every day. The latest is a study from Tulane University using state measurements that show 75% of our remaining wetlands could be under water in just 24 years. The causes: subsidence and rapidly rising sea levels due to emissions from the production and use of oil and gas.

The report said the losses could be reduced if the world quickly and dramatically reduced emissions. The CPRA supported those findings.

Landry, of course, always says he knows better than scientists on any issue with negative impacts on the oil and gas industries.

Indeed, for his eight years as our attorney general, he waged a series of court battles against federal regulations designed to reduce the pollution oil and gas industries were pumping into our lives.

To obscure the true impacts of his efforts — less poisons for us would mean fewer profits for his friends — Landry has gone full demagogue, claiming his crusades are defending us from the predations of a federal government that hates our way of life.

His inaugural address was loaded with alleged conspiracies by environmental groups out to ruin us by spreading lies. Of course, he provided no names or listed any lies.

Now he claims anyone opposing his plan to give even better tax breaks to polluting industries by reducing requirements they provide lasting jobs must “hate the middle class.”

I’m not about to say that people who want to maintain or increase the lethal poisons our children are exposed to hate our middle class.

But is it possible they love the oil and gas industry more?

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