HOUSTON — En homenaje al Día de la Tierra, EHNe está publicando cartas de estudiantes del octavo grado de YES Prep Northbrook Middle School en el barrio de Spring Branch, Texas, que está en el área de Houston.
Las profesoras de literatura y gramática Cassandra Harper e Yvette Howard incorporaron el medio ambiente en una serie de lecciones en diciembre del año pasado. Cada estudiante realizó sus propias investigaciones para iniciar la redacción de cartas a EHNe sobre sus preocupaciones o esperanzas. Cami Ferrell, reportera de EHNe, visitó el salón de clase para hablar sobre sus propias experiencias reportando en Houston.
La colección de cartas, editadas ligeramente, no representa las opiniones del YES Prep Northbrook o EHN, pero las publicamos para echar un vistazo a las mentes jóvenes y su relación con los problemas medioambientales.
Jair Zapata-Guevara
Hay muchas cosas importantes como el dinero, una casa, tener un trabajo, pero no son tan importantes como nuestro planeta y el aire que respiramos.
Algunas vez que te has hecho esta pregunta: “¿respiramos aire limpio?” tú estarás pensando que sí, pero la realidad es que no respiramos aire limpio. Las personas no se preocupan por el cambio climático y eso no solo nos está matando a nosotros, está matando a nuestro planeta. Las personas piensan que el cambio climático solo es una broma, pero implica que en el futuro la atmósfera del planeta explotaría y el aire que hoy en día respiramos se fuera y moriríamos.
El impacto que esto tendrá será como decir que la humanidad se extinguirá pronto por la contaminación de nuestro planeta. Algunos ejemplos de que el cambio climático nos está afectando son: que Texas ha experimentado una temperatura mayor que 100 grados, (y eso resulta en) inflamación, problemas al corazón y tú puedes morir por un ataque de calor.
El cambio climático es algo importante para la supervivencia de la raza humana, y puede causar irritación en la piel o hasta cáncer de piel. El cambio climático es alguna de las cosas que podría cambiar tú vida para siempre, podría matar a tu hijo/hija o tus padres. El cambio climático no es ningún chiste. Las personas tienen que cambiar el medio ambiente para que el cambio climático no nos extinga.
Para poder combatir el cambio climático, es importante que las personas adultas o niños puedan salir y reciclar la basura de la calle para que no termine en el océano. Muchas de las razones del que el cambio climático se está volviendo más fuerte es la basura que tiramos a la calle, mucha basura termina en los océanos que cause que el cambio climático se vuelva más fuerte.
Paras las personas que leen este mensaje, quiero acabar diciéndote que tú puedes a ser la diferencia en este planeta, tú nos puedes a ayudar a cambiar este planeta haciendo que este mensaje se transmita a mucha persona, recogiendo la basura de las calles y reciclando toda la basura que mires en la calle.
– Jair Zapata-Guevara
Jericsson Guevara-Franco
En este mundo tenemos un montón de problemas sobre el cambio climático. El cambio del clima afecta mucho porque hay fábricas de petróleo que hacen mucho humo, y ese humo contamina el aire. Cuando respiran ese aire es cuando se enferman y por veces esas enfermedades causan la muerte de muchas personas.
También el cambio del clima afecta mucho a las personas porque cuando el clima se pone demasiado caliente ocurren muchos incendios en el mundo. Esos incendios ocurren más frecuentemente en bosques. Ese humo que se crea con los incendios también afecta a las personas y contamina el medio ambiente.
Algunas veces cuando el clima cambia pueden ocurrir inundaciones y afectar a muchas familias porque cuando hay inundaciones las casas de muchas personas se llenan de agua, y eso causa que las familias pierdan todos sus muebles. Por ejemplo en México, en Acapulco, hubo un tsunami y eso ocurrió por el cambio del clima. Muchos edificios quedaron destruidos y muchas personas perdieron sus casas.
Otro ejemplo de que el cambio climático afecta a las ciudades es que Texas ha pasado de un clima normal a un clima demasiado caliente. Eso afecta a los latinos porque la mayoría de los latinos trabajan en trabajos que se tiene que trabajar afuera y eso causa que las personas se deshidraten por mucho calor. Si el clima se pone demasiado caliente puede causar cáncer en la piel y de esa enfermedad te puedes morir, hubo muchas personas que se murieron por cáncer en la piel.
Para combatir el cambio climático personas adultas o niños pueden salir a las calles a reciclar la basura y así la basura no termine en el océano o también las personas pueden cuidar el medio ambiente con ya no fabricar más fábricas de petróleo. Estas son algunas cosas que pueden hacer las personas para que puedan mejorar el medio ambiente.
The oil and gas industry is significantly increasing its campaign contributions to Republicans like August Pfluger, a Texas Congressman, despite booming under President Biden.
August Pfluger, a relatively unknown Republican, is the largest recipient of oil and gas campaign donations in the 2024 election cycle, receiving over $573,000.
The fossil fuel industry, favoring GOP candidates who support their interests, has contributed over seven times more to Republicans than to Democrats in this cycle.
While oil production is reaching new heights, the industry continues to criticize Biden’s environmental policies, claiming they're a threat to fossil fuel profitability.
Key quote:
“Despite the fact that oil is doing incredibly well under President Biden, the industry and its allies have continued to press the misleading talking point that Biden is engaged in war on oil and gas."
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.”
Offshore drilling companies like Shell are increasing deepwater oil and gas extraction in the Gulf of Mexico, claiming it is a cleaner alternative than onshore operations due to reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
Oil companies argue that deepwater drilling is crucial for global energy needs and has a lower carbon footprint than onshore drilling.
The Gulf of Mexico has experienced rising oil production, reversing the decline after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill.
Environmentalists are concerned about the industry's pivot back to fossil fuels, urging a faster shift to renewable energy.
Key quote:
“We’re not talking about stopping oil production today. But no matter how you look at it, there’s a really dire need to accelerate this shift to clean energy.”
— Brettny Hardy, a senior lawyer in the Oceans Program at Earthjustice
In an interview with CBC, environmental scientist Pete Myers advocates for a significant reduction in plastic production and emphasizes the urgent need to address plastic pollution's health impacts.
Pete Myers, chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences, highlights the toxic health impacts of plastics and stresses the need for urgent reductions in their production.
Myers criticizes the notion of recycling as a solution, suggesting it distracts from more effective measures like limiting virgin plastic production while Nestlé and other corporations call for collaborative global rules with less emphasis on production caps.
Canadian Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault acknowledges the need to eliminate the most harmful plastics but expresses hesitation about imposing a cap on all plastic production.
Key quote:
“We have the ability to use the science we have today, which we didn't have when plastic was invented. We know why some plastics are safe and some aren't. And let's use that information, that chemical information, to design safer materials.”
— Pete Myers, chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences
The Epoch Times, a pro-Trump publication, has been accused of spreading anti-climate misinformation through hundreds of ads across Europe, leading to concerns about stoking climate skepticism.
Amsterdam has more than 45,000 square meters of blue-green roofs, designed to capture and store rainwater for later use.
The blue-green roofs have layers that collect water for building residents to use for watering plants and flushing toilets.
The Resilio project, using specialized software, is modeling the impact of these roofs to help predict and manage flooding.
Key quote:
“Our philosophy in the end is not that on every roof, everything is possible, but that on every roof, something is possible.”
— Kasper Spaan, policy developer for climate adaptation at Waternet
Why this matters:
As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of storms, innovative water management solutions like blue-green roofs can significantly reduce flooding while providing sustainable water resources to urban communities. Read more: Embracing rainwater through green infrastructure.
Environmental groups have filed a lawsuit against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) over its approval of a pipeline slated to supply methane gas to a new Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) power plant in Middle Tennessee.
The Sierra Club and Appalachian Voices are challenging FERC's approval of the 32-mile pipeline, citing risks to communities and natural resources along the route.
The controversial pipeline will supply methane gas to a TVA plant, one of several gas-powered plants TVA has proposed, despite environmental criticism.
The pipeline's route will impact predominantly poor or Black communities, and environmentalists warn of higher energy costs and climate damage.
Key quote:
“FERC is supposed to safeguard the public interest, not rubberstamp unnecessary pipeline projects that will harm our communities, hurt the climate, and contribute to higher power bills.”
— Spencer Gall, senior attorney, Southern Environmental Law Center
