It’s that lovely time of year when folks—myself included—don floppy hats, binoculars and notepads to monitor our migrating feathered friends.
We're a big bunch: there are an estimated 47 million birders in the U.S. And we play an increasingly important role: scientists need more than our interest and camera phone pictures for one important pollinator, the hummingbird. They need our observations. As climate change threatens hummingbird habitat ranges they’re reaching out to birders to help track their habits and health.
Climate change creates imbalances in temperature and migratory bird timing, and scientists say hummingbirds, which are important wildflower pollinators in North America and food pollinators in tropical regions, are particularly vulnerable. A warming climate can alter when flowers bloom. This earlier blooming can create a mismatch between hummingbird arrival and flowers, which they suck nectar from throughout the day to stay alive.
A 2014 report from National Audubon Society scientists is grim: Hummingbirds could lose vast amounts of their current ranges over the next 60 years if climate change continues on its current path.
I'm still new to the past-time, but I love when a Ruby-throated hummingbirds make their way to Michigan around early May. It’s the only regular hummingbird visitor to the Mitten-state and watching them dip their straw-like beak into a flower or feeder while hovering like an overgrown insect is always special.
“Hummingbirds co-evolved with feeding sources, these nectar sources should be blooming to coincide with their arrival,” said Kathy Dale, Audubon’s director of citizen science. The flutterers are crucial pollinators, mostly wildflowers when they’re in North America. However, there are food system concerns as hummingbirds help pollinate some tropical crops such as bananas, papaya and nutmeg, according to an Audubon report.
Some dire findings from the Audubon report: The Allen’s hummingbird, a mostly rust colored bird that breeds in southern Oregon and coastal California, is projected to lose 90 percent of its current breeding range by 2080. The tiny Calliope hummingbird and the Ruby-throated hummingbird may find just 22 percent and 27 percent, respectively, of their current summer range stable come 2080.
University of Maryland researchers reported in 2012 that in the northern slice of the Broad-tailed hummingbird's breeding area in Colorado, glacier lilies were blooming about 17 days earlier than they did in the 1970s. The study found that the time between the first-arriving Broad-tail and the first flower had shrunk by almost two weeks.
Such timing mismatches could reduce nesting success, said Nickolas Waser, senior author of the 2012 study and an adjunct professor at the University of Arizona. “This is especially concerning in higher elevations,” he added.
Blooming differences high in the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado, for instance, were not as pronounced in Arizona.
Droughts in places such as Colorado can worsen the problem: Waser reported last month that drought reduced both pollen and nectar production in scarlet trumpet flowers.
David Inouye, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, has been studying pollinators at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory for more than 40 years. “I was just out hiking the other day and saw [a species of Indian paintbrush] flowers but didn’t see any hummingbirds,” Inouye said, adding he was hiking at about 5,500 feet altitude in Colorado.
Hummingbirds' ability to adapt remains to be seen. This is where us birders come in: Dale and colleagues are hoping some citizen science can help—through (what else?) an app called “Hummingbirds at Home.” As you monitor birds in your yard, log in and note when they’re visiting and what they're eating.
“We’re trying to get citizen scientists to tell us when birds are visiting nectar sources, when they’re feeding,” Dale said. “Some people do it everyday.”
That’s the nice thing about us birders—we’re an ardent bunch. Dale points to Audubon’s use of citizen science going back 100 years. “It’s always been people out in communities first raising the issue of challenges for birds and their habitat,” she said. “When I go talk with people they always want to talk about the first big sighting they had this spring.”
(Ahem, yellow-rumped warblers near Connor Bayou here western Michigan, 4/16/16)
This is Audubon's fourth year offering the app; about 25,000 people are signed up. Dale said they are starting to sort through the data and will start publishing some findings over the next year or so.
It shouldn’t be too hard a sell. Watching a hummingbird’s vibrating hover in a lush garden is one of nature’s great delights.
Happy 4th of July! Looking for a summer book? Here's what our staff is reading.
It's hard to believe it's already the Fourth of July — which means fireworks, cookouts, beach time and our annual summer reading list!
Members of our staff have reviewed a book they've recently enjoyed to give you ideas for your own summer reads. I invited our newsroom, some of the folks at Environmental Health Sciences, which publishes EHN.org, as well as some readers and friends of EHN to share their reviews. Each reviews links out to the book — either direct through publishers or through Bookshop.org, which works to connect readers with independent booksellers. Shop local people!
Enjoy the list, enjoy summer and, as always, we'd love to hear some of your book suggestions.
It seems I’m late to the party on Elif Batuman. I found The Idiot at one of my favorite independent bookshops here in the far North, thanks to a staff recommendation note (shoutout to Gretchen!). It’s a coming-of-age story of a daughter of Turkish immigrants (Selin) going to her first year at Harvard. She meets an older student and starts a relationship that largely takes place over email (this is the mid-90s so email is in its infancy), with them shipping notes back and forth full of wordplay and small flirtations. But this isn’t a rom-com, happily-ever-after relationship tale, rather, this might bring up some memories for anyone who had a confusing crush or two in their college years. All the while, Selin is navigating campus life and the opportunities, challenges and ridiculousness that can come with living in an intellectual bubble. I’ll be honest – it’s probably not for everyone. There is little to no plot, and largely reads like an extended inner-monologue/diary. But Selin is hilarious and self-deprecating. The book is full of somewhat dark wit and is a refreshing take on what it means to plod through those awkward years on the doorstep of adulthood.
If you like The Idiot, definitely check-out the follow up from Batuman, Either/Or, which picks up on Selin’s next year at university.
It can be difficult to remember that there was once a time that humans didn’t exist. As John Green notes, there is evidence of humans in just about every nook and cranny of the world. This collection of essays, designed to read like online reviews, is unlike any other book Green, or anyone else for that matter, has written. Green attempts to review the era of humans, or the Anthropocene on a five-star scale. From things like Diet Dr. Pepper to Scratch ‘n’ Sniff stickers, he highlights objects or ideas that truly resonate with the human experience.
The book started as a pandemic project, which was actually a worst case scenario project. Green, who has obsessive compulsive disorder, has spent the better part of the last four decades paranoid about the possibility of a pandemic. In 2020, he was forced to face one of his greatest fears. John opens by sharing that he called his brother Hank, who has a great deal of knowledge in different fields of science, in an attempt to decide whether or not his overwhelming worry could be scientifically rationalized. To his anxieties, Hank responded, “The species will survive this.” That one sentence sent Green spiraling, attempting to grapple with his own mortality. His mind believed Hank’s words, but quickly noted that if the species survives this, what won’t we survive?
The climate crisis appears through many of Green’s reviews, but not from an angle of fear. Green argues that climate doom is unproductive and that the only way to survive is to believe that we will.
A child named Damon Fields is born in Lee County, Virginia to a loving but troubled mother caught in a cycle of recovery and relapse. The young woman raises her son with support from two older neighbors struggling to hold together their own extended family as the opioid crisis devours the younger generation, one by one. But ultimately, the boy nicknamed “Demon Copperhead” is forced to make his own way in the world, yearning for family as his own disintegrates; navigating a dysfunctional, neglectful child welfare system; triumphing as a hometown hero before spiraling into chaos as he confronts devastating trauma.
It’s hardly a new story. Kingsolver says as much with her decision to use Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield as the blueprint. Like Dickens, she chooses an intelligent, scrappy, charismatic child as the vehicle for a much broader treatment of exploitation and injustice. While reading Demon Copperhead, I was fortunate to attend a talk in which Kingsolver described her book — and her home region — for an international audience. “Appalachia,” she explained, “has been treated like an internal colony of the United States. Outside industries have come in for over a century, to take out the good stuff and keep the people as a kind of captive labor force. The opioid crisis is one more thing that was done to us.”
This novel is about much more than the opioid crisis, coal or any other single industry that has left deep scars on Appalachian landscapes and peoples. You can’t avoid being outraged by the abuse and impunity Kingsolver brings to light. Anyone whose life or family has been touched by addiction will find it a tough read, as I did. Yet the story manages to achieve a certain buoyancy. It insists on the humanity of its characters, preserves the possibility of recovery and healing and celebrates the restorative power of community.
This collection of short stories is made up of feminist retellings of ancient Japanese folktales remixed for the modern era. Each story is full of humor, satire, and retrospection about the feelings and traits historically looked down upon as overly “feminine” and how maybe they’re more magical than we think. Ghosts, spirits, monsters and shapeshifters make their appearance in these stories, each with their own unique personality and story that provides the reader with commentary on gender and the standards that women are held to.
This book is one of my favorites to both recommend and re-read. A great summer read, to me, is a book that keeps you engaged from start to finish, and these stories had me giggling and sometimes brushing away a tear. The author provides a little guide for each folktale she draws inspiration from at the end so audiences not familiar can learn and appreciate the original tales along with the contemporary lens that she writes with.
Settle in: If you think you know history, that you have a sense of place, consider again the tiny worms, the dog at your feet, the quarrelsome neighbor down the block.
Mathias Énard exposes how little we know of our lives and environment in a boisterous adventure crossing generations in the damp marshlands of western France. Énard, filling his tale with colorful characters, opens with the most nescient: A self-centered anthropology student who moves from Paris to collect "impressions and notes" about the locals of La Pierre-Saint-Christophe.
That is just a gateway to a fantastical world our student, David Mazon, will never see: A world of recycled lives and entwined histories, where Death and the living observe a three-day truce as gravediggers fill their bellies, drain their flagons, stain their shirts and offer eructations "until, still struggling to make our gastral gurglings intelligible while in drink, … Death reclaims her rights over life and we, our sorrowful toil."
This is no easy beach read. Bring your dictionary – "Gravediggers" was written in French, but the translation by Frank Wynne is jaw-dropping. The memories and stories are feast enough.
When I was a kid in the 1950s, we practiced crawling under desks and into elementary school basements to prepare for nuclear attack. Now we watch Fox News and related fantasy shows to pretend it isn’t happening. In his new book, David Sanger--one of the most experienced and brutally honest reporters anywhere working the “international security” beat for the New York Times--tears through recent unfolding events involving the US, China, Russia, Ukraine and Gaza with the pace of a spy novel revealing just how tenuous our current ‘peace’ is. No wonder the Doomsday Clock is as close, or closer, to midnight now as it has ever been. Blame falls everywhere, but especially on the cult-driven warriors of the radical right. Even Ronald Reagan would be gobsmacked by their shameless, power-lusting irresponsibilities.
Journalist Justin Nobel followed up on his 2020 investigative report on widespread radioactive contamination from the oil and gas industry for Rolling Stone with this book. In it, he emphasizes that this isn’t just fracking — though fracking tends to unearth particularly radioactive substances, especially in the Marcellus Shale region — and explores the oil and gas industry’s long, untold history of exposing unknowing workers and communities to radioactive waste at extraction sites all across the country. Nobel’s powerful storytelling helps to illuminate the devastating impacts this has had on frontline communities, while his extensive research and meticulous documentation make clear the gaps in our legal and regulatory frameworks that have allowed this problem to persist. Petroleum 238 reads like both a guide to understanding a complex issue and a call to action.
Meg Lowman is a treetop explorer who has spent her life and career in the canopy. As a child of the outdoors, she studied leaves, bugs, and every bit of nature she could find around her home, creating a club of girl explorers that held court in a tree fort. As an adult, she made her way through the male-dominated natural sciences to invent the tools she needed to ascend hundreds of feet into the treetops. She has been at home there ever since.
Across the globe Lowman has studied what we now know from her research to be the more than 50% of terrestrial biodiversity that is located in the tops of trees, including cataloguing vast leaf characteristics and leaf diets of countless insect species. She has invited everyone to join her and has found innovative ways for all people to be empowered to do so, creating apparatus and programming for people who cannot walk independently on land to swing from the trees and collect their own contributions to research.
The Arbornaut is the story of the author’s adventures in the treetops, the amazing creatures she has found there, and her ever striving to share the wonder and joy of the out-of-doors with everyone around her. It is a beautiful story of a deep love and appreciation of nature and a kind and enveloping invitation to love it with her, and for all of us to work together to protect it.
If you need to cool off from the summer heat, take a trip to Alaska and a step back in time to the late 1800s. This novel describes an expedition up the Wolverine River valley and the lives of the native people who live there. The expedition leader’s wife is left pregnant back in Vancouver, despite her desire to travel along, and her story is just as interesting. While the story is fictional, it is modeled on real events and people, with some fantasy thrown in. Ivey addresses the themes of nature and humanity and how humans relate to nature in a powerful way. I am looking forward to reading more of her books.
If you are looking for a brief reprieve from your day to day reality, this exciting coming-of-age novel about a backpacker stumbling upon a secret utopian commune in Thailand will do the trick. Engaging and fast paced, the novel explores themes any traveler will relate to - chiefly the impulse to “get away from it all” and live a simpler life away from the stresses of modernity. The book spawned a film with Leonardo DiCaprio and launched the career of author Alex Garland, who went on to write and direct movies like 28 Days Later, Ex Machina, and most recently Civil War and I thought it was fun seeing him in early form as a writer.
Editor's note: Paul Ehrlich is a renowned scientist, environmental advocate and the Bing Professor of Population Studies, Emeritus and President of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford. He's also a frequent contributor to EHN.
A friend (a leading neurobiologist) said I had to read the book she had just finished. I’m almost done with “Fire Weather” and boy, was she right – especially for anyone who teaches or lectures about the human predicament. I’m almost done the book now, and had to tear myself away to let my friends know about it.
Fire Weather centers around the fire that ravaged Fort McMurray in Alberta in 2016. The town is a center of Canada’s tar sands industry, now existing in an atmosphere very different from the one I got familiar with doing a summer’s (1951) field work in the same taiga biome around the Great Slave Lake for the Canadian Defense Research Board. Then, although I was introduced to the problem of structural damage from melting permafrost, forest fire was far from my mind as I surveyed the intensity of the biting fly threat (extreme) to troops in the field (those days the Soviets were putatively “coming over the pole”).
The descriptions of the nearly unprecedented fire are detailed, but gripping. I was also pleased the book explores the efforts of the petroleum industry, auto manufacturers, and others to keep humanity on the road to a holocaust (and themselves to a temporary continued flow of obscene profits) with full knowledge of the actual lethal situation to which they were and are major contributors. Most people are still not aware of the human predicament or of the central role of overpopulation in driving it (Vaillant does not miss that).
If you, like me, feel nauseated whenever you see an SUV ad on the tube, this is a book for you!
Reader mailbag: Lies My Teacher Told Me, by Nate Powell
Editor's Note: We asked our readers for their go-to summer reads. John obliged.
I’m already on my second read of Lies My Teacher Told Me, Nate Powell’s new graphic novel adaptation of the classic by James W. Loewen. It’s not strictly an environment book, but it puts so much of what we’re going through today into vital historical context. It also clearly links the mistakes we make in teaching history — and the myths that have made their way into history books and lessons — to American exceptionalism, Christian nationalism, right-wing isolationism, and other problems that currently plague the planet. A stunner of a book.
Editor's Note: We're honored to have a number of authors on our subscriber list, and G. Spencer Myers alerted us to his eco-thriller series.
I created a character that is our conscience as we meet the challenge of global warming. Dr. Derk Bryan, a college professor and the Indiana Jones of the EPA, is an obsessive environmentalist who is trying everything possible to reduce his own carbon footprint. He throws away all his polyester shirts and replaces perfectly good vinyl flooring with tile. In each novel he tackles a different threat to our environment.
The latest, The Girl with the Red Nails, deals with plastics. Since the conclusion of this book, the EPA announced it would begin regulating forever chemicals in drinking water. Our efforts are making a difference.
Do you have summer reading suggestions for us? We'd love to hear from you, email us at feedback@ehn.org.
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.”
Hurricane Beryl brought severe flooding, winds, and power outages to Jamaica, causing significant damage after wreaking destruction on Grenada, St. Vincent and other Caribbean islands. Several deaths were reported.
The storm is expected to hit the Yucatán Peninsula with hurricane-force winds, heavy rainfall and storm surges by Friday.
Beryl may re-strengthen in the Gulf of Mexico, posing a threat to South Texas, which could experience heavy rainfall and potentially hurricane conditions by early next week.
Key quote:
“Total devastation all around."
— Allison Caton, owner of Paradise Beach Club, which was destroyed in the hurricane, on the hard-hit Caribbean island of Carriacou.
Why this matters:
As the first hurricane of the season, Beryl's rapid intensification and path of destruction through several small Caribbean nations highlight the dangers of increasingly severe weather patterns, indicating a need for stronger preparedness measures in vulnerable regions. There are growing calls for major greenhouse-gas-emitting countries to step up and provide financial support for recovery. Read more: Robbie Parks on why hurricanes are getting deadlier.
Hurricane Beryl, which hit the Caribbean as a Category 4 storm, highlights the crucial role of coral reefs in mitigating storm damage, but these vital ecosystems are disappearing.
Coral reefs act as natural barriers, reducing wave energy and preventing flooding in Caribbean nations.
The area of live corals has decreased by 80% in recent decades due to climate change and human activities.
Without reefs, the flood risk in the Caribbean and the U.S. would increase significantly, endangering thousands more people.
Key quote:
"Without reefs, annual damages would more than double."
— Authors of the 2018 study "The global flood protection savings provided by coral reefs."
Why this matters:
Coral reefs provide essential protection against hurricanes, but their decline due to climate change weakens this natural defense. Rising ocean temperatures, acidification, and human activities are causing unprecedented rates of coral bleaching and degradation. As these reefs disappear, so too does their ability to protect coastal communities from the ravages of hurricanes.
A report reveals Scott Sheffield, former CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources and his son Bryan, have significantly increased their political contributions primarily to Republican candidates, following a Federal Trade Commission decision barring Scott from ExxonMobil's board.
Scott Sheffield – the head of a Texas oil and gas empire– and his family have donated over $6.2 million to political causes since 2010, a Public Citizen’s report found.
The Federal Trade Commission barred Scott Sheffield from joining ExxonMobil's board due to alleged collusion with OPEC.
Bryan Sheffield increased donations to Republicans after the FTC's decision, including $413,000 to support Trump's presidential campaign.
Key quote:
"Oil barons being able to cash out and sell their companies and devote huge amounts of political contributions is a major problem for our democracy."
— Alan Zibel, researcher at Public Citizen and author of the new report.
A policy lauded by climate activists to pause natural gas exports was quickly overturned, revealing the complexity and challenges in shifting U.S. energy policy.
In January, the Biden administration paused new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export approvals, hailed as a significant climate win.
A federal judge recently ruled that the administration must continue considering individual projects, effectively ending the pause.
This reversal highlights the ongoing struggle within the administration to balance environmental goals with energy and economic interests.
Key quote:
"If this is really over — you have a DOE that’s going to go back to a presumption that LNG exports are in the public interest — this will have been a blip. If this is going to be an opening salvo in an ongoing battle over every step in LNG exports, it’ll be trench warfare."
— Steven Miles, research fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
Climate change is prompting some cities to market themselves as safe havens from extreme weather, but experts question their ability to truly offer protection.
Buffalo, New York, markets itself as a "climate refuge" due to its moderate climate and low risk of extreme weather events.
Other cities like Duluth and Ann Arbor are also positioning themselves as climate havens to attract residents fleeing harsher climates.
Experts warn that no city is immune to climate change and stress the need for adaptation and infrastructure investment.
Key quote:
"I'm not saying climate change is going to be good for Buffalo, or Buffalo is going to be an oasis. We’re not an oasis, we suck less.”
— Stephen Vermette, professor of geography at Buffalo State University.
Why this matters:
As climate change worsens, more areas will become uninhabitable, pushing people to relocate. Marketing certain cities as climate havens could strain their resources and infrastructure, potentially leading to new challenges in those areas.
As mounds of dredged material from the Houston Ship Channel dot their neighborhoods, residents are left without answers as to what dangers could be lurking.
