There is striking parallel between Ronald Reagan's environmental wrecking crew of years past and the current administration. Here is the first in a series looking back at Reagan rollbacks and characters.
James Gaius Watt was by all accounts a direct and plainspoken man. He said what he meant, and often found out how much trouble that could cause for him in Washington.
Born, raised, and schooled in Wyoming, Watt was a rising star among Western ranchers, farmers and miners who bristled against what they saw as intrusive federal control over their livelihoods. He worked for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and founded the Mountain States Legal Foundation, the first of several nonprofit law offices focused on challenging public lands and environmental regulations.
President Reagan made Watt Interior Secretary in 1981 to the delight of the "Sagebrush Rebellion," the western groundswell that helped sweep Jimmy Carter out of office. Presaging Trump officials decades later, Watt's legal foundation had several pending lawsuits against the department he now ran.
What Watt did not have was the full backing of both houses of Congress. Republicans took control of the Senate in the Reagan landslide, but the House remained firmly in Democratic hands. But Watt was not completely hamstrung. He fired dozens of attorneys involved in environmental enforcement and announced his intention to lease the entire U.S. coastline for oil drilling, whether Big Oil wanted it or not. (They didn't).
Watt set up the Minerals Management Service, whose howlingly inept stewardship of energy resources blew up in a scandal involving drugs, porn, prostitutes and a rapidly revolving door between Big Oil and the government in 2008-2010.
He pushed for dramatic increases in coal leasing on public lands in the West, and for a moratorium on new National Park land. In other words, but for the plain-spokenness, he was a prototype for Trump-era governance.
Watt's deep religious values and apparent obliviousness to Washington culture made him a regular form of political comic relief. His edict that female Interior employees could not wear pantsuits to work was widely ignored. Washington Mall concerts by the Grass Roots and the Beach Boys drew his ire.
Watt, who later admitted he'd never heard of the Beach Boys, disinvited the band from the 1983 Fourth of July concert on the Mall out of concern that the clean-scrubbed, aging band would bring drugs, alcoholism, and "the wrong element" to America's front lawn. He relented when Vice President George H.W. Bush and First Lady Nancy Reagan came to the band's defense.
That plainspoken streak continued. One of his ugliest quips came in 1981, foreshadowing the Bundy takeovers years later: "If the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or at the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used."
Watt suggested that the Interior Department's logo, featuring a bison facing to the left, should be flipped so the bison faced right. A herald of the partisan environmental divide we now face, Watt said where most saw Washington divided into Democrats and Republicans, he saw "Liberals and Americans."
Finally, a particularly unfunny joke told during a speech to the U.S Chamber of Commerce did him in. Bragging about the diversity among a coal leasing panel, Watt quipped, "We have every mixture you can have. I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent."
President Reagan received his resignation soon after.
He remained in Washington after leaving the Interior Department, working as a lobbyist. In 1996, he pleaded guilty to withholding documents from a grand jury investigating corruption in the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
In exchange for the guilty plea, the government dropped 18 perjury charges against Watt. He paid a $5,000 fine, served five years' probation and performed 500 hours of community service.
Watt faded from public life and retired to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he turned 80 last week. While he's had little to say about current rollback efforts, he praised the anti-regulatory push by former Vice President Dick Cheney, his Jackson Hole neighbor. "Everything Cheney's saying, everything the president's saying — they're saying exactly what we were saying 20 years ago, precisely … Twenty years later, it sounds like they've just dusted off the old work."
The same could be said for Ryan Zinke's leadership at Interior, but with a few crucial differences. Today, facepalming insults have been upgraded to Chief Executive status. Zinke and his cabinet colleagues have a volley of daily distractions and a compliant Congress to give cover as public lands, national monuments, endangered species and more lose their protection.
Not even an apparent scandal involving Zinke's Montana crony getting a supersized contract to re-wire hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico made a wave.
But James Watt was a prototype over 35 years ago.
Top Weekend News
Kathleen Hartnett White, President Trump's nominee to head the Council on Environmental Quality, has withdrawn from consideration. White took some grief from both sides of the aisle for her anti-science views. (Washington Post)
Two pieces on a durable science controversy: Do cellphones pose a cancer risk? Undark looks at the lengthy history of dueling studies; The AP reports on two new government studies that minimize the risk.
NatGeo's Craig Welch reports on Cape Town, a metropolis of 4 million people that's running out of water. What big cities are next?
Opinions and Editorials
Philip and Mary Landrigan wrote a powerful, positive piece on protecting your kids from a world of poisons.
Neither political frustration nor a whopping hangover will prevent young activist Joelle Moses from talking about climate change. (Reuters)
A Scientific American editorial urges universitites to let their researchers speak out on controversial issues.
Kew Gardens lost 400 trees during the 2022 drought, prompting a study on future climate risks.
More than 50% of Kew’s tree species are vulnerable to dying as London’s climate is predicted to resemble Barcelona’s by 2050.
Kew’s succession plan includes replacing at-risk trees with drought-tolerant species from hotter climates.
Key quote:
“By focusing on resilience and adaptability we hope to show it is possible to mitigate the severe impacts of climate change in both urban spaces and gardens such as Kew.”
— Richard Barley, director of gardens at Kew.
Why this matters:
Imagine the iconic Kew Gardens, a sanctuary of global flora, transforming into a somber reminder of our environmental neglect. The potential loss of these trees isn't just about losing greenery; it's about the ripple effect on biodiversity, air quality and the overall health of our planet. Read more: Respect the elderly: Saving cities’ oldest trees.
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.”
The Supreme Court may undermine the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's latest rule on emissions from power plants, following challenges from conservative states and industry groups.
Conservative states and industry groups asked the Supreme Court to halt Biden's rule on power plant emissions.
Critics argue the rule threatens affordable electricity and exceeds EPA’s authority.
Legal experts doubt the Supreme Court will act against the rule like it did with the Obama-era Clean Power Plan.
Key quote:
“This rule poses a significant threat to affordable and reliable electricity for millions of Americans, especially as power demand skyrockets across the nation.”
— Jim Matheson, CEO of NRECA
Why this matters:
A Supreme Court stay would delay or potentially block regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. This could hinder efforts to combat climate change and maintain cleaner air standards.
Millions of Californians live near oil and gas wells that are increasingly in the path of wildfires, raising concerns about explosions, pollution and infrastructure damage.
More than 100,000 oil wells in the western US, mainly in California, are at high risk of wildfires.
Nearly 3 million people live within 3,200 feet of these wells, facing heightened health and safety risks.
Historic and projected data show a significant increase in wildfire threats to oil infrastructure.
Key quote:
“One of the things that surprised me was just the extent of how many oil wells had been in wildfire burn areas in the past, and how much this was impacting people in California — and is likely to in the coming century.”
— David J.X. González, assistant professor of environmental health sciences at UC Berkeley
Why this matters:
Wildfires near oil wells pose serious health risks and environmental hazards. With climate change intensifying wildfires, protective measures and regulations become increasingly urgent.
Rapidly intensifying storms are forcing cities to adapt as residents increasingly shoulder the burden of disaster preparedness and evacuation planning.
Cities have less time to order evacuations due to faster storm intensification, putting residents at risk of being trapped or facing unnecessary evacuations.
Community groups and local organizations in New Orleans are stepping up to fill gaps in disaster preparedness with resource centers and solar panels.
Climate change is reducing vertical wind shear, leading to more rapid storm intensification near coastlines, exacerbating the challenge.
Why this matters:
As climate change accelerates storm intensification, cities and residents must adapt quickly to new disaster preparedness challenges. Effective community collaboration and self-reliance become crucial in safeguarding lives and property.
Severe megafires in 2020 and 2021 have significantly harmed sequoia groves in California, hindering their ability to regenerate naturally, two new studies reveal.
The marshes in New York City, vital ecosystems for shorebirds and other wildlife, are severely impacted by sea level rise and storm surges, compounded by heavy metals from their industrial past.
More than 80% of New York City's original tidal wetlands and marshes have been filled in for development.
Remaining marshes suffer from erosion caused by sea level rise, storm surges and human activities.
Heavy metal pollutants in the marshes pose a threat to water quality and wildlife.
Key quote:
"Unless we put sediment on top so [the marshes] can keep up, they’ll just be drowned. They’ll be underwater, and they’ll fall apart, which is really happening."
— Dr. Dorothy Peteet, senior research scientist with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Why this matters:
The erosion of New York's marshes not only threatens biodiversity but also the city's water quality. Protecting and restoring these ecosystems is crucial for maintaining environmental health and mitigating flood risks.
Power shutoffs or wildfire evacuations can be deadly for disabled people, especially nondrivers who may not have a way to get to a cooling center or evacuation point.
