It is said that things come in threes. In the case of Senator James Inhofe, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, and newly-confirmed NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, it may be true of people, too.
All three cut their political teeth in the city of Tulsa. Now, with Inhofe four decades into a national anti-environmental career for the ages; Pruitt trying to outdo him in little more than a year, and Bridenstine quitting Congress to oversee NASA's space and earth science, a less-than-grateful environmental community says, "Thanks, Tulsa."
"Tulsa used to be a vibrant, progressive city," laments lifelong Tulsan Barbara Vanhanken, who represents Eastern Oklahoma in the state's 4,300-member Sierra Club chapter. But she acknowledges that Tulsa's 400,000 residents have always been loyal to the oil and gas industry, as the name of its minor league baseball team, the Drillers, suggests.
The state's Sierra Club Director, Johnson Bridgwater, goes a bit farther, saying the state's politics are the province of "oil and gas billionaires." He credits Pruitt's and Bridenstine's recent emergences in Washington – and Inhofe's longevity – to the state's petro-patrons.
No one in Oklahoma's seven-member congressional delegation, all Republicans, managed better than a 9 percent on the 2017 scorecard of the League of Conservation Voters (Bridenstine was at 3 percent, and Inhofe drew a zero).
It wasn't always the case with Oklahoma leaders. Carl Albert was a Congressional icon who championed Medicare and other programs that are now part of a bitter ideological struggle. His six years as Speaker of the House spanned the fall of South Vietnam and the downfall of Richard Nixon. An iconoclastic liberal Oklahoma Senator, Fred Harris, launched a quixotic 1972 presidential run with the slogan "No More Bull Shit" (really).
Mike Synar, an eight-term Congressman from Muskogee,
made pesticide safety his signature issue, championing efforts to forbid pesticides banned for use in the U.S. from being exported for use in other countries.
Synar was voted out in 1994, shortly before dying of a brain tumor.
More affable than angry in his style,
Inhofe is a vigorous octogenarian who, if he chooses, is up for re-election in 2020. He would turn 86 less than two weeks after election day.
His family left Iowa for Tulsa when Inhofe was young. He attended Tulsa schools, spent two years in the Army, and returned home to launch a 30 year career in real estate and insurance, concurrently serving as a state representative, senator, and ultimately three-term mayor of Tulsa. He quit the private sector and was elected to the first of four terms as Tulsa's Congressman in 1987.
Inhofe rose to the U.S. Senate via a special election in 1994 and quickly became a standard-bearer for conservative causes – fighting against marriage equality, gun control, entitlement programs, and most famously of all, climate science. He called climate change the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." James Mountain Inhofe is the undisputed alpha dog of climate denial in the U.S. government.
Inhofe ran the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee for six years. Aided by staffer Marc Morano, Inhofe became a virtuoso in climate snark. Morano left the Senate staff in 2009 for a private sector career as the P.T. Barnum of climate denial. Inhofe built
an igloo on the Capitol grounds in 2010 and tossed a snowball at the Senate's presiding officer in 2014.
On more than one occasion, Inhofe has referred to Scott Pruitt as one of his best friends in politics. Other observers see Inhofe as Pruitt's mentor and political sponsor.
Pruitt left his native Kentucky to attend law school at the University of Tulsa, and stayed on after passing the bar. For five years, his private practice specialized in defending religious freedom. Pruitt traced Inhofe's steps through the Oklahoma State Senate, representing the Tulsa area for eight years starting at age 30 in 1998.
Pruitt waged unsuccessful runs for Congress and Lieutenant Governor, but in 2010, he won the race for state Attorney General, quickly establishing a reputation as the federal EPA's most aggressive foe. He also led a curious investigation of the Humane Society of the United States after the animal protection group focused on conditions on
factory farms and ranches in the state. Pruitt's AG office quietly dropped the investigation two years later when HSUS sued the state, alleging harassment.
Narrowly approved by the U.S. Senate in February, 2017, Pruitt
pressed ahead on parallel paths of science denial, clear-cutting EPA rules and enforcement actions, and apparently lavish spending on travel, security, and perks. Even Inhofe expressed concern about Pruitt's seeming lack of ethical boundaries.
Enter Jim Bridenstine. He endured a rough confirmation vote earlier this month. His
across-the-board opposition to environmental regulation may not come into frequent play as NASA Administrator, but his stone-cold embrace of climate denial surely could. He has opined that "there is no credible scientific evidence that greenhouse gas atmospheric concentrations, including carbon dioxide, affect global climate." As a Congressman, he is on the record as favoring NASA's exit from its central role in climate and other Earth science research.
While he's an accomplished pilot, Bridenstine has no science or space credentials. Managing NASA's $19 billion budget will also be a novel experience for him. His leadership of the Tulsa Air & Space Museum ended in a swirl of controversy in 2010, with accusations of
mismanagement and conflict of interest.
The Sierra Club's Bridgwater holds out hope that bright-red Oklahoma could produce another Mike Synar. While 4,300 members in a state of four million hardly makes the Sierra Club a political dynamo, he says it represents 36 percent growth since 2016.
Denise Moreno-Ramírez, growing up in Nogales, Arizona, faced unrecognized health crises in her community, linked to historical contamination.
Her PhD project, "Voices Unheard," collected firsthand accounts from locals, enhancing scientific data with personal stories and emphasizing overlooked community histories.
This approach reclaims the value of oral histories in scientific research, countering the trend of depersonalized data analysis.
Key quote:
“The answer isn’t just in science. It’s in people.”
— Rib Davis, Chief of the Oral History Society.
Why this matters:
Understanding environmental health impacts through community stories adds human context to scientific data, promoting informed policy decisions. Inclusivity in scientific research has the potential to shape healthier futures for marginalized communities.
CAMERON PARISH, La. — Late into the night, John Allaire watches the facility next to his home shoot 300-foot flares from stacks.
He lives within eyesight of southwest Louisiana’s salty shores, where, for decades, he’s witnessed nearly 200 feet of land between it and his property line disappear into the sea. Two-thirds of the land was rebuilt to aid the oil and gas industry’s LNG expansion. LNG — shorthand for liquified natural gas – is natural gas that's cooled to liquid form for easier storage or transport; it equates to 1/600th the volume of natural gas in a gaseous state. It’s used to generate electricity, or fuel stove tops and home heaters, and in industrial processes like manufacturing fertilizer.
In the U.S., at least 30 new LNG terminal facilities have been constructed or proposed since 2016, according to the
Oil and Gas Watch project. Louisiana and Texas’ Gulf Coast, where five facilities are already operating, will host roughly two-thirds of the new LNG terminals – meaning at least 22 Gulf Coast LNG facilities are currently under construction, were recently approved to break ground or are under further regulatory review.
Although the U.S. didn’t ship LNG until 2016, when a freight tanker left, a few miles from where Cameron Parish’s LNG plants are today, last year the country became the global leader in LNG production and export volume, leapfrogging exporters like Qatar and Australia. The
EIA’s most recent annual outlook estimated that between the current year and 2050, U.S. LNG exports will increase by 152%.
Allaire, 68, watches how saltwater collects where rainwater once fed the area’s diminishing coastal wetlands. “We still come down here with the kids and set out the fishing rods. It's not as nice as it used to be,” he told
Environmental Health News (EHN).
That intimacy with nature drew Allaire to the area when he purchased 311 acres in 1998. An environmental engineer and 30-year oil and gas industry veteran, he helped lead environmental assessments and manage clean-ups, and although retired, he still works part-time as an environmental consultant with major petroleum companies. With a lifetime of oil and gas industry expertise, he’s watched the industry's footprint spread across Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico’s fragile shores and beyond. Now that the footprints are at the edge of his backyard, Allaire is among a cohort of organizers, residents and fisher-folk in the region mobilizing to stop LNG facility construction. For him, the industry’s expansion usurps the right-or-wrong ethics he carried across his consulting career. For anglers, oil and gas infrastructure has destroyed fishing grounds and prevented smaller vessels from accessing the seafood-rich waters of the Calcasieu River.
From the view of Allaire’s white pickup truck as he drives across his property to the ocean’s shore, he points to where a new LNG facility will replace marshlands. Commonwealth LNG intends to clear the land of trees and then backfill the remaining low-lying field.
“You see what’s happening with the environment,” Allaire said. “When the facts change, I got to change my mind about what we’re doing.”
Community bands together
John Allaire, left, purchased 311 acres in Cameron Parish in 1998, and has watched the oil and gas industry's footprint spread to his property.
Credit: John Allaire
During an Earth Day rally in April, community members gathered in the urban center of Lake Charles to demand local oil and gas industries help deliver a safer, healthier future for all. In between live acts by artists performing south Louisiana’s quintessential zydeco musical style, speakers like James Hiatt, a Calcasieu Parish native with ties to Cameron Parish and a Healthy Gulf organizer, and RISE St. James organizer Sharon Lavigne, who’s fighting against LNG development in rural Plaquemines Parish near the city of New Orleans, asked the nearly 100 in attendance to imagine a day in which the skyline isn’t dotted by oil and gas infrastructure.
Not long ago, it was hard to imagine an Earth Day rally in southwest Louisiana at all. For decades, the area has been decorated with fossil fuel infrastructure. Sunsets on some days are highlighted by the chemicals in the air; at night, thousands of facilities’ lights dot the dark sky.
“It takes a lot of balls for people to start speaking up,” Shreyas Vasudevan, a campaign researcher with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, told EHN in the days after the rally. In a region with its history and economy intertwined with oil and gas production, “you can get a lot of social criticism – or ostracization, as well – even threats to your life.”
Many are involved in local, regional and national advocacy groups, including the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Healthy Gulf, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Turtle Island Restoration Network, the Center for Biological Diversity and the National Audubon Society.
“You see what’s happening with the environment,” Allaire said. “When the facts change, I got to change my mind about what we’re doing.” - John Allaire, environmental engineer and 30-year oil and gas industry veteran
But environmental organizers are fighting a multi-billion-dollar industry with federal and state winds at its back. And LNG’s federal support is coupled with existing state initiatives.
Under outgoing Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards — a term-limited Democrat — the state pledged a goal of reaching net-zero greenhouse emissions by 2050. Natural gas, which the LNG industry markets as a cleaner-burning alternative, is cited as one of the state’s solutions. Louisiana is the only state that produces a majority of its carbon emissions through fossil fuels refining industries, like LNG, rather than energy production or transportation. Governor Edwards’ office did not return EHN’s request for comment.
This accommodating attitude towards oil and gas industries has resulted in a workforce that’s trained to work in LNG refining facilities across much of the rural Gulf region, said Steven Miles, a lawyer at Baker Botts LLP and a fellow at the Baker Institute’s Center on Energy Studies. Simultaneously, anti-industrialization pushback is lacking. It’s good news for industries like LNG.
“The bad news,” Miles added. “[LNG facilities] are all being jammed in the same areas.”
One rallying cry for opponents is local health. The Environmental Integrity Project found that LNG export terminals emit chemicals like carbon monoxide –potentially deadly– and sulfur dioxide, of which the American Lung Association says long-term exposure can lead to heart disease, cancer, and damage to internal or female reproductive organs.
An analysis of emissions monitoring reports by the advocacy group the Louisiana Bucket Brigade found that Venture Global’s existing Calcasieu Pass facility had more than 2,000 permit violations.That includes exceeding the permit’s authorized air emissions limit to release nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter and volatile organic compounds 286 out of its first 343 days of operation.
The Marvel Crane, the first liquid natural gas carrier to transport natural gas from the Southwest Louisiana LNG facility, transits a channel in Hackberry, Louisiana, May 28, 2019.
“This is just one facility,” at a time when three more facilities have been proposed in the region and state, Vasudevan said. Venture Global’s operational LNG facility — also known as Calcasieu Pass — “is much smaller than the other facility they’ve proposed.”
In an area that experienced 18 feet of storm surge during Hurricane Laura in 2020 — and just weeks later, struck by Hurricane Delta — Venture Global is planning to build a second export terminal Known as “CP2,” it’s the largest of the roughly two dozen proposed Gulf LNG export terminals, and a key focal point for the region’s local organizing effort.
Residents “don’t really want LNG as much as they want Cameron [Parish] from 1990 back,” Hiatt told EHN of locals’ nostalgia for a community before storms like Rita in 2005 brought up to 15 feet of storm surge, only for Laura to repeat the damage in 2020. Throughout that time, the parish’s population dipped from roughly 10,000 to 5,000. “But the wolf knocking at the door is LNG. Folks in Cameron think that's going to bring back community, bring back the schools, bring back this time before we had all these storms — when Cameron was pretty prosperous.”
“Clearly,” for the oil and gas industry, “the idea is to transform what was once the center of commercial fishing in Louisiana to gas exports,” Cindy Robertson, an environmental activist in southwest Louisiana, told EHN.
Helping fishers’ impacted by LNG is about “actual survival of this unique culture,” Cooke said.
In a measure of organizers’ success, she pointed to a recent permit hearing for Venture Global’s CP2 proposal. Regionally, it’s the only project that’s received an environmental permit, but not its export permit, which remains under federal review. At the meeting, some spoke on the company’s behalf. As an organizer, it was a moment of clarity, Cooke explained. Venture Global officials “had obviously done a lot of coaching and organizing and getting people together in Cameron to speak out on their behalf,” Cooke said. “So, in a way, that was bad. But in another way, it shows that we really had an impact.”
“It also shows that we have a lot to do,” Cooke added.
Environmental organizers like Alyssa Portaro describe a sense of fortitude among activists — she and her husband to the region’s nearby town of Vinton near the Texas-Louisiana border. Since the families’ relocation to their farm, Portaro has worked with Cameron Parish fisher-folk.
“I’ve not witnessed ‘community’ anywhere like there is in Louisiana,” Portaro told EHN. But a New Jersey native, she understands the toll environmental pollution has on low-income communities. “This environment, it’s so at risk — and it’s currently getting sacrificed to big industries.”
“People don’t know what we’d do without oil and gas. It comes at a big price,” she added.
Southwest Louisiana’s Cameron Parish is one of the state’s most rural localities. Marine economies were the area’s economic drivers until natural disasters and LNG facilities began pushing locals out, commercial fishers claim.
Credit: Xander Peters for Environmental Health News
Residents “don’t really want LNG as much as they want Cameron [Parish] from 1990 back,” James Hiatt , a Healthy Gulf organizer, told EHN. "But the wolf knocking at the door is LNG."
Credit: Xander Peters for Environmental Health News
For the most part, Cameron Parish’s life and economy has historically taken place at sea. As new LNG facilities are operational or in planning locally, locals claim the community they once knew is nearly unrecognizable.
Credit: Xander Peters for Environmental Health News
A disappearing parish
The stakes are seemingly higher for a region like southwest Louisiana, which is the epicenter of climate change impacts.
In nearly a century, the state has lost roughly 2,000 square miles of land to coastal erosion. In part driving the state’s erosion crisis is the compounding impacts of Mississippi River infrastructure and oil and gas industry activity, such as dredging canals for shipping purposes, according to a March study published in the journal Nature Sustainability. Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority said Cameron Parish could lose more land than other coastal parishes over the next 50 years. A recent Climate Central report says the parish will be underwater within that time frame.
On top of erosion and sea level rise impacts, in August, 2023, marshland across southwest Louisiana’s Cameron Parish burned. The fires were among at least 600 across the Bayou State this year. Statewide, roughly 60,000 acres burned — a more than six-fold increase of the state’s average acres burned per year in the past decade alone.
But while the blaze avoided coastal Louisiana communities like Cameron Parish, the fires represented a warning coming from a growing chorus of locals across the region — one that’s echoes by the local commercial fishing population, who claimed to have experienced unusually low yields during the same time, according to a statement from a local environmental group. At the site of the Cameron Parish fires are locations for two proposed LNG expansion projects.
"The idea is to transform what was once the center of commercial fishing in Louisiana to gas exports.” - Cindy Robertson, an environmental activist in southwest Louisiana
It was an unusual occurrence for an area that’s more often itself underwater this time of year due to a storm surge from powerful storms. For LNG expansion’s local opposition, it was a red flag.
As the Louisiana Bucket Brigade has noted prior, the confluence of climate change’s raising of sea levels and the construction of LNG export terminals — some are proposed at the size of nearly 700 football fields — are wiping away the marshland folks like Allaire watched wither. Among their fears is that the future facilities won’t be able to withstand the power of another storm like Laura and its storm surge, which wiped away entire communities in 2020.
Amidst these regional climate impacts, LNG infrastructure has shown potential to exacerbate the accumulation of greenhouse gasses that cause global warming. For the most part, LNG is made up of methane — a greenhouse gas that’s more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Among the 22 current LNG facility proposals, the advocacy group Sierra Club described a combined climate pollution output that would roughly equal to that of about 440 coal plants.
The climate impacts prompt some of the LNG industry’s uncertainty going forward. It isn’t clear if Asian countries, key importers of U.S. LNG, will “embrace these energy transition issues,” said David Dismuke, an energy consultant and the former executive director of Louisiana State University’s Center for Energy Studies. Likewise, European nations remain skeptical of embracing LNG as a future staple fuel source.
“They really don't want to have to pull the trigger,” Dismukes added, referring to Europe’s hesitation to commit more resources to exporting LNG from the American market. “They don't want to go down that road.”
While there will be a tapering down of natural gas supply, Miles explained, “we’re going to need natural gas for a long time,” as larger battery storage for renewables is still unavailable.
“I'm not one of these futurists that can tell you where we're going to be, but I just don't see everything being extreme,” Dismukes said. “I don't see what we've already built getting stranded and going away, either.”
For now, LNG seems here to stay. From 2012 to 2022,U.S. natural gas demand — the sum of both domestic consumption and gross exports — rose by a whopping 43%, reported the U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA. Meanwhile, in oil and gas hotbeds like Louisiana and Texas, natural gas demand grew by 116%.
Throughout 25 years, Allaire has witnessed southwest Louisiana’s land slowly fade, in part driven by the same industrial spread regionally. Near where the front door of his travel trailer sits underneath the aluminum awning, he points to a chenier ridge located near the end of the property. It’s disappearing, he said.
“See the sand washing over, in here?” Allaire says, as he points towards the stretches of his property. “This pond used to go down for a half mile. This is all that's left of it on this side.”
A recent American Lung Association report states that climate change and wildfires are reversing progress on air pollution, impacting 131 million Americans with unhealthy air.
Leaders from across the globe gathered in New York at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
A report presented on the first day of the forum argue that the green economy perpetuates extractive practices, often ignoring Indigenous rights.
The Indigenous leaders called for a ban on deep-sea mining as well as mining in sacred lands.
Key international reports and conferences emphasize the disproportionate impact on Indigenous lands by projects aimed at combating climate change.
Key quote:
“The concept of a transition to a green economy maintains the same extractive logic that causes States and the private sector to overlook the collective rights of Indigenous Peoples in pursuit of national interests.”
— “Indigenous Peoples in a greening economy” UN report.
Why this matters:
Despite their sustainable label, green energy projects can still lead to ecological damage that particularly affects indigenous communities. This includes the disruption of wildlife, water sources and plant life that are essential not only to the biodiversity of these regions but also to the cultural practices and survival of indigenous peoples.
New regulations by the International Maritime Organization require significant emission reductions, prompting the search for sustainable fuels like methanol, hydrogen, ammonia and experimenting with electricity and nuclear power.
Methanol shows promise due to renewable production methods, but challenges in global availability persist.
Ammonia emerges as a strong candidate despite its toxicity, with ongoing developments to improve its combustion efficiency in maritime engines.
However, the industry needs to look at other ways to cut down emissions, like wind-assisted technologies.
Why this matters:
Transitioning to cleaner fuels is important for the shipping industry to meet upcoming emission reduction targets, which are set to become net zero by 2050. Success in this industry could set a precedent for other sectors, pushing them towards their own environmental commitments.
A legal complaint challenges the lack of air conditioning in most Texas prisons, labeling it as cruel and unusual punishment.
The suit represents all inmates in such conditions, citing past deaths and ongoing risks during the intense summer heat.
Despite some new air conditioning installations, most facilities remain uncooled, raising health and safety concerns.
Key quote:
“What is truly infuriating is the failure to acknowledge that everyone in the system — all 130,000 prisoners — are at direct risk of being impacted by something that has a simple solution that has been around since the 1930s, and that is air conditioning.”
— Jeff Edwards, attorney.
Why this matters:
Excessive heat in prisons threatens inmates' health and survival and exacerbates tensions and violence, impacting staff and operational safety.
Following a complaint about misleading climate advertisements in the UK, the Financial Times and Reuters have removed Saudi Aramco's content promoting its environmental initiatives.
The withdrawn content includes advertorials and a podcast, alleged to overstate the effectiveness of Aramco's "advanced fuels" in reducing carbon emissions.
The New Weather Institute's complaint prompted the removal, accusing the content of presenting biased information favoring oil-dependent technologies over electric vehicles.
The Advertising Standards Authority is currently investigating the allegations of greenwashing.
Key quote:
"Journalism needs decontaminating from polluters’ vested interests."
— Andrew Simms, co-director of the New Weather Institute.
Why this matters:
When media organizations choose to run advertisements containing misleading or false information about climate issues, it can erode trust in the media and conflict with the ethical responsibility journalists have to inform the public accurately.
Biodegradable food packaging is a step in the right direction, experts say, but when composted carries risks of microplastic and chemical contamination.
