A Louisiana Republican Reckons with Climate Change

Garret Graves wants to help the
Gulf Coast adapt to sea-level rise,
 but Democrats are skeptical about
how far he will go.

Garret Graves is a forty-seven-year-old Republican congressman from Louisiana who, earlier this year, bet his considerable political future on the proposition that the age of conservative climate denial is over. Graves had come to the point of view, he told me recently, “that those who were denying were taking an unsustainable position. That the science was going to further and further sink the island that they were standing on, and that eventually they would be inundated.” When the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, announced a new Select Committee on the Climate Crisis this winter, after teen-aged activists staged a sit-in at her office, Graves visited the Republican leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy, to argue that the new committee gave Republicans a chance to take a less obstinate position on climate change, if they were nimble enough to see it.

Graves, who is medium height and athletic, with a strong chin and a loud voice, came with a PowerPoint presentation, laying out for McCarthy “everything from the disasters to our progress on emissions, without blowing up the economy, to the strategic resources of the United States and those of other countries.” There was, he argued to McCarthy, “a better way to apply Republican principles to this issue of climate change”—an insistence that the challenge of climate change can be met by scientific innovation, by the application of our remarkable instruments and brains. In February, McCarthy named Graves to serve as the ranking member on the committee. And, just like that, the Republicans chose as their spokesman on climate change a gregarious, outdoorsy young man who liked to say that not only was sea-level rise real but that he had measured it with his own yardstick.

Read the story from The New Yorker by Benjamin Wallace-Wells - “A Louisiana Republican Reckons with Climate Change."

Tropical Storm Barry is part of an alarming trend driven by climate change, experts say

Parts of the South, including much of Louisiana, are bracing for potential catastrophic levels of rain this weekend as Tropical Storm Barry draws near.

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) said the storm could strengthen to hurricane levels by Friday night or Saturday morning. But experts cautioned on Friday that the real danger associated with Barry is from the rains the storm will bring: A torrential downpour is set to fall on an area already saturated with water.

“If they push it high enough, it’ll overtop the levees,” Darryl Malek-Wiley, an environmental justice organizer in New Orleans, told ThinkProgress in advance of the storm.

Barry is expected to make landfall on Saturday, bringing between 10 and 20 inches of rain to the region.

Read the story from ThinkProgress by E.A. Crunden - “Tropical Storm Barry is part of an alarming trend driven by climate change, experts say."

Seas are rising too fast to save much of the Mississippi River Delta, scientists say

The state of Louisiana is proceeding with ambitious plans to redirect the Mississippi River and rebuild some of its rapidly vanishing wetlands — but even this massive intervention may not be enough to save the most threatened lands from fast rising seas, scientists concluded in a study published Wednesday.

This amplified color mosaic shows the Mississippi Delta in 2014. 

The study uses a methodology called “optical dating” to study how the river built an area called the Lafourche subdelta in coastal Louisiana, where the Mississippi dumped loads of sediment as much as 600 years ago, when it changed paths. The technology lets scientists identify the last time that long-buried sand was exposed to sunlight and, therefore, determine the rate at which the river naturally built up land by carrying sediment downstream.

“What we found was that, on average, it produced somewhere between 6 and 8 square kilometers of land per year, and the shoreline migrated seaward by somewhere between 100 and 150 meters per year,” said Torbjorn Tornqvist, a Tulane University geologist who was one of the study’s authors. “Those numbers in themselves I find pretty impressive.”

Read Chris Mooney’s story from The Washington Post - “Seas are rising too fast to save much of the Mississippi River Delta, scientists say.”

Louisiana, sinking fast, prepares to empty out its coastal plain

WASHINGTON (BLOOMBERG) - Louisiana is finalising a plan to move thousands of people from areas threatened by the rising Gulf of Mexico, effectively declaring uninhabitable a coastal area larger than Delaware.

Flood waters from Tropical Storm Harvey cover a road in Iowa,
 Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, on Aug 29, 2017

A draft of the plan, the most aggressive response to climate-linked flooding in the US, calls for prohibitions on building new homes in high-risk areas, buyouts of homeowners who live there now and hikes in taxes on those who won't leave. 

Commercial development would still be allowed, but developers would need to put up bonds to pay for those buildings' eventual demolition.

Read The Straits Times story - “Louisiana, sinking fast, prepares to empty out its coastal plain.”

How Climate Change Will Redraw Louisiana’s Flood Maps

In Louisiana you presently go to your
local service station in your boat.

There is a lot of water in southern Louisiana right now. The region’s been lashed with rain for the past week—the water has inundated freeways, surged past levees, and left about 40,000 homes water-logged husks of their former selves. The rain has stopped, for now. And when the water finally drains, people will return to their homes, pick up what’s left and start rebuilding.

But the climate science prognosis doesn’t look good. This is the eighth time in about a year that 500-year rainfall has hammered the US, and climate change will make extreme weather events like this more common. That means, among other things, millions of dollars-worth of property damage. Fixing everything up, and managing the growing threat of climate-related destruction hinges on flood insurance—which relies on ever-evolving, incomplete maps to determine risk. But new models will make it possible to better predict flood plains as it becomes increasingly dangerous to live on the coast.

The system isn’t perfect, but for people living in flood-prone regions like southern Louisiana, it’s the best line of defense, says Rafael Lemaitre, a FEMA spokesperson. If you’re covered, FEMA will pay out as much as $250,000 to repair your home.

Read Chelsea Leu’s story on Wired -“How Climate Change Will Redraw Louisiana’s Flood Maps.”

Native Americans first U.S.population to be relocated because of climate change

Parts of coastal Louisiana are being swallowed by
rising seas resulting from climate change.

The sacred land in coastal Louisiana that a small community of Native Americans has called home for more than a century has been all but swallowed by the rising sea, leaving residents with little dry ground and a fear they will lose their heritage.

Now a $48 million federal grant will allow the band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians of Isle de Jean Charles to move away from their vanishing home. The funding for the relocation will make the tribe one of the first—and so far the largest—populations in the United States to be resettled because of climate change.

The money, from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), is part of a program designed to make communities more disaster-resistant. For the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians, that means moving their whole community north to higher ground when a suitable site is identified in the next several years.

The slice of land that has supported the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians through trapping fishing, and agriculture for 170 years is rapidly being swallowed by the Gulf of Mexico.

Read the Inside Climate News story - “Native American Tribe Gets Federal Funds to Flee Rising Seas.”