Oil and gas canals. You’ve likely heard about the canals—tens of thousands of them, ever-widening, shredding the wetlands. The canals are what some scientists say is Louisiana’s major cause of land loss. In Part 3 of our collaboration with Wetlands Radio, we explore the impact of canals, why industry has gotten away with the damage, and what's being done about it now.
And then, what does it actually look like for Big Oil to clean up after itself? We bring you an interview about the current, controversial lawsuits aiming to hold the oil and gas industry accountable for the ways they’ve altered the landscape.
EPISODE CREDITS
This episode was hosted by Executive Producer Carlyle Calhoun and Wetlands Radio producer Eve Abrams.
Wetlands Radio is produced by Eve Abrams and funded by BTNEP, the Barataria Terrebonne National Estuary Program through the Environmental Protection Agency's National Estuary Program. To hear Wetlands Radio episodes in their entirety, visit btnep.org.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Sea Change is also supported by the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
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TRANSCRIPT
You’re listening to Sea Change. I’m Carlyle Calhoun. And this is part three of our collaboration with Wetlands Radio, a series about coastal restoration. In our last episode we learned about the deep geologic reasons the oil and gas industry has such a big presence in Louisiana and why it still holds so much power here. In this episode, we look at one way oil prospecting and extraction has fueled land loss.
And then, what does it actually look like for Big Oil to clean up after itself? An interview about some of the current lawsuits aiming to hold the oil and gas industry accountable for the ways they’ve altered the landscape.
Carmouche: ”they are able to try to hide behind, blaming the Mississippi River from their canal land loss. But what they can't hide from are photographs. And fortunately for the state of Louisiana, we've had aerial photography since the thirties. And all I have to do is show you year by year, by year by year canal, by canal, by canal, how much destruction they have caused.”
First, Eve brings us Wetlands Radio’s episode on Canal Backfilling.
Rosina Phillippe’s home is nestled in the wetlands between Louisiana’s big toe and Barataria Bay. About 40 miles downriver from New Orleans. The only way to get there is by boat.
ROSINA: This is home, first of all -- home to my people. We are the Atakapa-Ishaka Chawasha people. We have been here for millennia plus.
In her near 7 decades, Rosina’s watched the land change and disappear. She says it’s because of how most people think about the wetlands.
ROSINA: I think we've turned natural resources into commodities. That's all we see. When we look at the land, many people, they see real estate. For me, I see home and I see habitat. We're losing habitat. You know, that's what it is. It's rookeries, you know. It's nurseries
EVE: What do you think of this term, Coastal Restoration?
ROSINA: Do something already. Something we know will work.
EVE: What would you do? First thing?
ROSINA: Close the canals. Plug them up, fill them up
The canals. You’ve likely heard about the canals -- tens of thousands of them – ever-widening, shredding through the wetlands. What some scientists say is Louisiana’s major cause of land loss.
ROSINA: We have thousands of canals that were dredged for oil and gas industry, for transportation, for you know, locating well heads and pipes and whatever the uses they were for. But a lot of these canals were supposed to be closed when the activity that they were dredged for ended. Well, some of them were; the majority of them were not.
The vast majority were not.
SCOTT: there's this myth that coastal erosion is the dominant force of land loss in Louisiana, and it's not.
Scott Eustis is the Community Science Director at Healthy Gulf, formerly known as the Gulf Restoration Network, whose mission is to quote “reverse the long pattern of over exploitation of the Gulf’s natural resources.”
SCOTT: the magnitudes of losses that we've suffered in the interior marshes, away from the forces of erosion —
EVE: away from the coastline
SCOTT: – away from the coastline, because of these oil fields is much larger, twice as much.
GENE: the more canals you have, the more land last you have. The fewer canals, the less land loss. If you have no canals, there is no land loss.
Gene Turner is a coastal ecologist at LSU, and he’s single-minded when it comes to the causes of coastal land loss. Also a bit of an outlier. Most wetlands scientists think land loss is due to both canals and levees channelizing the Mississippi. Not Gene -- who’s been studying these canals for the last half century.
GENE: I am retired, but I’m not retired
Which is partly how I convinced him to take me out in a boat. First up, a marsh hydrology lesson.
GENE: So I’m going to get off and maybe then you could toss the equipment to me?
We’re near Lake Salvador and Bayou Segnette, not far from Jean Lafitte National Park. About 15 miles southwest of New Orleans as the crow flies.
EVE: so we're walking on Marsh right now?
GENE: Yup
I follow this octogenarian through the marsh. Gene has a bushy, white mustache that curls around the sides of his mouth. Eyebrows to match. And he’s wielding a post hole digger – think giant salad tongs -- which he promptly plunges deep into the ground. As you can hear, things get wet pretty quick.
When marshes are healthy, like this one, Gene refers to them as a green toupee rising above the mineral matter below. Gene twists through the toupee and eventually pulls out a core of sediment, chock full of roots, leaving a deep hole in the marsh.
GENE: We took out a core and several pieces. So what's down there is what?EVE: water in the bottom of the hole that you dug
GENE: Where is that coming from? From the side.
In other words, even though our feet are dry, the land below us is saturated with water, flowing through organic soil – comprised, for the most part, of roots and rhizomes – horizontal plant structures, anchoring the plant underground.
GENE: Water is filtering through the marsh below ground all the time. It's percolating in the soil below ground. You can see it's already starting to fill up. This is not a cement wall. It’s a living system. And if you change that below ground flow with a spoil bank, you're changing how the system behaves.
Spoil banks are what you get when you scoop out marsh to make canals. The first material scooped is the marsh surface. And it’s not that heavy. As you dig deeper, you scoop heavier material
GENE: The last, at the end, is this very heavy mineral matter, and that's put on the top. And that presses down on the marsh. So over time, the spoil bank sinks a little bit, little bit, little bit. So water that normally would go below ground sideways can't do that. And that could be half the water flow in a marsh.
So that water I just saw seep into the hole Gene dug with his post hole digger -- that probably wouldn’t happen in a marsh which had been cut up by canals and weighed down by all that heavy material.
GENE: And then above ground, it has this spoil bank in the way, three to 15 feet high,
Kind of like a levee
GENE: and that means water is blocked completely to go side to side.
SCOTT: We have a very gentle tide in the Gulf of Mexico. It's a very soothing massage of water over these Marsh grasses. And so when you create a spoil bank that's three feet tall, you end up creating impoundments that prevent that massage of water from going over the marshes, and the marshes drown.
Meaning, die. Subside into open water.
Which is why so many people – like Rosina Phillipe -- want to close the canals, starting with backfilling them. Every scientific paper of Gene Turner’s on this topic – going back decades – concludes: canals are the problem, and backfilling, the solution.
Now, there isn’t enough material in spoil banks to fill the canals completely, because, again, the marsh is organic: roots and rhizomes, not rocks or minerals. And just like.. the vegetable scraps you throw into compost, once you dig this organic material up, and pile it somewhere else, it shrinks. But backfilling helps narrow the canals, and if canal water is free-flowing, new vegetation takes hold, and the canals continue to narrow over time.
Gene’s research consistently finds: backfilling repairs marsh -- which means: rebuilds land. And yet. less than 1% -- in fact, something like 1/100th of one percent
GENE: it's minuscule.
-- of all the canals –
GENE: It's a piece of salt on a piece of meat.
--have been backfilled.
MARK: The history of Canal backfilling is we don't have a history of Canal backfilling.
Mark Davis directs Tulane’s Institute on Water Resources, Law, and Policy. Mark says, for starters, the problem with backfilling canals is each canal has its own permit – and remember, there are tens of thousands of them.
MARK: many of the permits do have a provision that when the activity ceases, that you will restore.
But permit holders always claim activity hasn’t ceased.
MARK: When you stop using a canal for one purpose, you may say, Well, I'm just waiting for the price of oil or gas to change, then I'll go back. So you've not abandoned the canal. It's a dormant canal.
But come on, says Environmental Scientist Scott Eustis. Look at the last half century of oil drilling in the wetlands.
SCOTT: we're not seeing boom and bust and boom and bust. We're just seeing boom and bust, bust, bust, bust. If a well has been shut in for 11 years realistically, they're not coming back. They should be made to go in: plug it with cement, remove the steel, and then the law says they need to backfill the canal in 90 days.
EVE: And so why don't company companies plug them?
SCOTT: Because we don't make them.
MARK: unless it's in your permit condition, or in your contract, there is no implied responsibility to backfill anything and so the reason we haven't done more with canals is because nobody's made anybody do it. And even where you have obligations, it normally requires litigation to prove that obligation, and then someone has to enforce it.
Another reason backfilling is so tricky is most of Louisiana’s coast is privately owned by landholding companies. The single largest landowner is oil and gas giant Conoco Phillips. But Jean Lafitte National Park’s Barataria Preserve has a few canals – ones they’ve backfilled. Gene Turner – of bushy eyebrows and mustache fame -- has been monitoring their progress for decades. This is what I wanted him to show me.
GENE: So they took down a spoil bank 100 feet ahead.
We pass great egrets and great blue herons and motor into a canal.
GENE: This was -- imagine this being 70 or 90 feet wide.
EVE: Are you kidding me?
GENE: Yeah
EVE: It's like maybe 20 at most,
GENE: Right. Isn’t that great?
EVE: And when was this filled.
GENE: 2011
EVE: so that's not even, not even 15 years
GENE: Right.
Gene says: canals that have been properly backfilled, have an 85% recovery.
GENE: I mean, people need to get in their heads that this is working. It's what we have, and this is something that is low cost and quick, that can be done all across the coast. This is something we can deal directly with the problem. So why shouldn't we be directly involved with a solution?
CARLYLE: So if this is such an easy solution, Far cheaper than diversions or dredging which we heard about in earlier episodes…Why aren’t we doing it? Experts say it’s because the state has rarely made the oil and gas companies clean up after themselves.
And yet As we just heard, these tens of thousands of miles of canals dug through Louisiana’s wetlands are a huge contributor to land loss.
And local governments are suing. Seven Coastal Parishes, which are like counties elsewhere, have filed lawsuits against companies including Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Shell in an effort to force the companies to pay for the damage they caused to the coast. The lawyer leading this statewide legal fight is John Carmouche. I asked what motivates him to take on such powerful players.
CARMOUCHE: our culture is being destroyed due to someone violating the law, but yet is not being held accountable. So it's time for them to face the jury and convince them that they're right or wrong. And have 12 people of Louisiana tell them if they're right or wrong. And if they're wrong, fix what you caused. They need to pay to fix this environment.
Since the 1970s, researchers – even those employed BY oil and gas companies – have shown that decades of fossil fuel extraction in Louisiana’s wetlands–the drilling, the pipeline canals, the dumping of toxic waste– is one of the major causes of land loss. And John says, the stakes are high.
CARMOUCHE: All you have to do is look at the USGS map in 2050. Every south Louisiana parish is underwater. That's not me. That's not an expert I paid for. That's not, that's an independent agency who’s saying, If you continue on the path you're going, you will lose all of South Louisiana's parishes.
CARLYLE: That's how big a deal this?
CARMOUCHE: That's how big a deal this is.
In this series, we’ve been hearing all about the land loss crisis here. And, the efforts to build back land –to restore the coast – are expensive. These coastal parish lawsuits are seeking billions in damages.
The trade association the Louisiana Oil & Gas Management Association has called the lawsuits baseless. And says they undermine Louisiana’s position as an energy leader and hurt the state’s economy.
This legal battle is not new, and John Carmouche, and the Coastal Parishes he represents in court, aren't the first folks to sue oil and gas companies over damage to Louisiana’s coast.
John Barry: I'm John Barry.
TRACK John Barry. You may know him as the award winning author of Rising Tide, a book about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. But his deeply researched books have also gotten him involved in public policy. So back in 2013, he was serving on what’s called the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East
John Barry: which is a long name for the levee board protecting most of Metro New Orleans.
It was after Hurricane Katrina when of course the levees failed. And John started thinking about how much land had been lost between New Orleans and the ocean. And how that made the levees more vulnerable to big storms like Katrina where strom surge overwhelmed the system. John knew the studies showing that oil and gas companies were partially responsible for the land loss. He figured They should pay to fix the damage they caused.
And the levee board – which he was on – they should file a lawsuit.
John Barry:I guess the first lawsuit in Louisiana filed against oil companies at least by a public body. I was pretty much the architect of that.
Carlyle: Okay, so why did you do this? Why'd you have this idea to take on this very powerful industry, especially in Louisiana, the oil and gas industry?
John Barry: Yeah, well it seemed everyone knew, including members of the industry, uh, that oil and gas and pipeline companies had caused significant damage. Um, and very simply, there wasn't any money coming from any other source to fix the problem, so it seemed pretty obvious that you should go to the people who caused the problem, uh, and ask them to fix it.
Carlyle:Or at least caused part of the problem.
[00:03:38] John Barry: You know, we never claimed that they were responsible for a hundred percent of the land loss, and they're not. There are, uh, multiple causes. Um, but they were a significant contributor. Uh, the American Petroleum Institute did a study and, and they admitted to 34%.Of the land loss being their responsibility. Uh, there were other studies also by the industry of specific sites that were badly damaged in which they said, quote, the overwhelming cause unquote, of land loss in those sites, uh, was industry.
Carlyle: Wow. So the industry's own studies point to, uh, their role?
John Barry: No question about it.
Carlyle: Ok so it’s 2013, 8 years after Hurricane Katrina. You’re on the levee board and you sue dozens of oil and gas companies. Your lawsuit ended up failing. But only months after the levee board filed a lawsuit, coastal parishes, starting with Plaquemines and Jefferson, also started suing oil and gas companies for their role in Louisiana’s coastal land loss. There are now 42 of these lawsuits. So what is their claim and what are the legal obligations of these companies?
John Barry: Well, for, for us, you know, our claim, the levee board's claim was more general. It was saying, you are sending storm surge against our levees. We want you to stop sending the storm surge. And the only way they could stop sending storm surge was by rebuilding the levies. The parish lawsuits are more that this particular, well, at this particular place and in our parish has destroyed the land around it. They're site specific, whereas ours was more general.
And, you know, there are crystal clear regulations and, and laws, going back at least to 1920. In the state of Louisiana that prohibits all sorts of activities. You know, one of the defenses at the oil companies, uh, claim all the time is that, well, geez, we had permits, so how can you, how can you attack us when we had a permit for this?
So that is a, it sounds good when they say it on tv. Uh, but in terms of the law, it's a ridiculous argument. The permit explicitly. Says they are not excused from liability if they do something wrong and more to the point they violated the permits.
Carlyle: John says this is particularly true when it comes to the canals companies dug throughout the wetlands. For example, a pipeline canal might be 40 feet wide. But because of erosion, those canals are now hundreds of feet wide, sometimes a thousand feet wide.
John Barry: A study by pipeline companies, for example, said that every mile of canal destroys 54 acres of land. That was a study by pipeline companies.
Carlyle: The coastal parish lawsuits are also suing over toxic dumping. When you dig a well and you pump out the oil or gas, you’re left with what’s called produced water. John says there are ways to deal with the produced water that don’t damage the environment…
John Barry: But those ways were generally ignored. Or often ignored, if not always by industry. You, you get internal documents from Shell, for example, it says what we're doing, quote, flagrantly violates the law, unquote.
Carlyle: So did the state know that its own laws were being violated?
John Barry: Well, that's a good question. I guess re going back really and into some regulations and laws passed in the 1930s, what was then Texaco, fought them, took them all the way to the US Supreme Court lost, and then I guess they pretty much decided that it was cheaper to buy the politicians than to obey the law.
You know, the way they managed to handle this was, and to make sure there wasn't any enforcement, was to make sure there weren't any people out inspecting.
So you would have literally, literally thousands of wells. Thousands of them, and you'd have two or three inspectors. It was all the, was allowed to be hired to inspect thousands of wells.
Carlyle: Wow. Ok, so can you bring us up to date? What is happening now with all of these coastal parish lawsuits?
[00:11:28] John Barry: You know, as you said there, there are 42 of 'em. You know, we had one trial that I think the lawsuit was filed in December, 2013, and that was the industry managed to delay even a trial. Forget about the appeals process. They managed to delay a trial for almost 12 years. So they finally had one trial in Plaquemine Parish against Chevron, which the damage was done at the time by Texaco, but Chevron now holds that so that single lawsuit found, Chevron liable for $745 million.
Carlyle: So that settlement, that amount of money, what will that go to generally?
John Barry: Well, that will go to coastal restoration in Plaquemine Parish. By, by law that money would have to go to coastal restoration in Plaquemine Parish.
Carlyle: Okay. This was a big deal, the jury ordered Chevron to pay. Over $700 million that will go towards coastal restoration. That's a big deal. But what, what is happening now with that lawsuit?
John Barry: Well, right now people are waiting for the Supreme Court to rule as to whether or not that that lawsuit was in state court. And Chevron's is arguing that it should have been in federal court. Of course they argued that before the trial. That's part of why it was delayed. 12 years in every, in every federal judge as well as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is probably the most conservative court of appeals in the country, all said, no, this belongs in state court.
So they did manage to get the Supreme Court to intervene after the verdict, and the Supreme Court, I think should keep it in state court. But this is a very strange Supreme Court that apparently may be more conservative than even the Fifth Circuit. So they may require another trial in federal court.
That doesn't mean that Chevron is off the hook. It's just further delay. Further delay, further delay.
Carlyle: So let’s talk about money for coastal restoration. After the BP oil spill, as part of that settlement, around 10 billion dollars came to Louisiana for coastal restoration. And it has been the main source of funding for the Coastal Master Plan. But that money is slated to run out around 2032…
John Barry: But nothing's been done about it. There's still no sources of money. I know that, uh, you know, some people say, oh, we're gonna get it from the federal government. I don’t think so.
Carlyle:Yeah, so the Coastal Master Plan has it, it says it's a $50 billion dollar plan
John Barry: which is nonsense. You know, it was called $50 billion when it first came out. I think it was 2007. I think I was on the CPRA back then. You know, this is 2025. There's been inflation. It wasn't $50 billion then. That plan would be well over a hundred billion dollars if you did everything in that plan today.
Carlyle: And so now that there's been one big settlement, um, that's being, you know, it's being appealed to the Supreme Court, but potentially 740 some million dollars from one parish. There are 41 other suits. I don't know how much they're all for or what they're, they'll settle for, but this could potentially be a lot of money going towards coastal restoration when the state needs it.
Can you talk about what the stakes are? These lawsuits, what are the stakes larger than that? What are the stakes for South Louisiana, New Orleans, where you live?
John Barry: Well, how about for the country? You know, 60% of the grain exports in the country go out to Mississippi River. 20% of the refining capacity is in Louisiana.
You know, when Katrina knocked out a few, uh, refineries, gasoline nationally went up a dollar gallon. Uh, you know, there are five of the 15 biggest ports in the country are in Louisiana.
Carlyle: So how important, how vital is coastal restoration to South Louisiana, to the country, and what happens if we run outta money to do it?
John Barry: Well, we may find out. I, actually am not that optimistic. Uh, you know, but all of that is threatened. The port system is threatened, the refineries are threatened. You know, the exports are grain are threatened. You know, we may find out, we may find out in 10 or 15 years.
Carlyle: Mm-hmm. And what about for people who live in this part of the state?
John Barry: Well, obviously if, you know, the coast is retreating as we speak. For the foreseeable future, New Orleans itself is probably fairly safe, but, I mean, the rest of the coast doesn't really have a levee system. Certainly the areas south of New Orleans, that are outside the levee system in the metro area, that not only is very vulnerable to hurricanes and increasingly vulnerable, but it's almost inevitable that that disappears. Uh, you know, if you move to the west, you have, you know, the same problems. It might move a little more, more slowly, uh, but it's not good.
And we're, we're, we're not talking about a hundred years from now, you're, you're really talking about 15 and 20 years from now.
Carlyle: Hmm. So is there anything else you wanted to add about holding industry accountable for their role in land loss?
John Barry: Well, it, it would be nice if they, I mean, since there's all their, every one of their scientific studies recognizes, uh, their responsibility or it would be nice if they recognized their liability as well.
CARLYLE: So what comes next? The Supreme Court will make a decision this spring determining whether the Plaquemines vs Chevron lawsuit, which Chevron lost, actually should have been tried in federal court. which is what the oil and gas companies want because they think they’ll have a more sympathetic audience. If the Supreme Court determines this case belongs in federal court, the $740 million dollar state court verdict already won against Chevron is at risk. Not only that, this Supreme Court decision won’t just impact the one Plaquemines case, but because all 42 Coastal Parish lawsuits are very similar, it will impact all the lawsuits and whether they will be tried in state or federal court. The long and short of it – billions of dollars for coastal restoration in Louisiana are at stake.
CREDITS
Thanks for listening to Sea Change! This episode was hosted by me, executive producer Carlyle Calhoun and Eve Abrams. Our theme music is by Jon Batiste and our sound designer is Emily Jankowski.
And Wetlands Radio was reported and produced by me, Eve Abrams. Editing help from Rosie Westwood, Rachael Berg, Ann Gisleson, Marie Lovejoy, Garret Hazelwood, Melody Chang, and Laine Kaplan Levenson. Original music for Wetlands Radio was written and performed by Greg Schatz. Funding was provided by BTNEP, the Barataria Terrebonne National Estuary Program, through the Environmental Protection Agency's National Estuary Program. To hear all 12 episodes in Wetlands Radio, head to BTNEP.org That’s B-T-N-E-P. org.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Sea Change is also supported by the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux (Meer - O) Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
So John, back in 2013 you were a member of the levee board. And this lawsuit was your idea…why did you think it was important enough to take on a very powerful industry and file the lawsuit? What was your goal in taking on oil and gas.
(Claims: 1) most of the work was done under permits that required the companies to repair environmental damage. The board says that was never done.
2) the suit claims that by turning marsh into open water, the projects put more stress on flood protection levees. 3) by turning marsh to open water, the projects increased the amount of storm surge that moves into the metro area during tropical storms and hurricanes.)
For a lot of reasons, many or most political, your lawsuit failed. But Can you talk about how your lawsuit helped pave the way for future lawsuits, like the current coastal parish lawsuits, in going after oil and gas to comply with the law and clean up after itself?
So the state politicians that are against these lawsuits. Who do they think should pay to restore the coast?
We just heard about the industry’s vast network of canals. How and how much is the oil and gas industry related to coastal land loss? What is the relationship between them?
John said this: Everybody knew the industry had caused it, including the industry's own studies. Uh, you know, the only question was how do you make them pay for it? Um. You know, the, it's clear they violated laws and regulations up the kazoo. You know, their own studies say it, their own internal documents say it.
After coastal protections were adopted in 1980, companies were required to get state permits that forced them to restore the damage they caused to coastal lands, including backfilling dredged canals. Why hasn’t the state of louisiana made companies backfill their canals if that was part of their permit?
(What have been these companies' legal obligations to fix what they caused?)
The industry’s own studies show they knew their actions would lead to land loss. And it’s known these companies broke the law. Why has little been done to hold these companies responsible for their role in the damage?
Coastal restoration is expensive. The Coastal Master Plan is $50 billion dollars, but most say the real cost will be more than $100 billion. For the last 15 years or so, settlement money from the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster has been the major source of funding. But that money is going to run out. What happens then?
(Can you talk about what’s ahead in terms of money for paying for coastal restoration?)
The coastal parish lawsuits are also not new…they’ve been delayed by legal actions for a decade. And now the first one has gone to trial. Plaquemines vs Chevron. And in April of 2025, there was very a big ruling. Can you talk about what happened and why it’s potentially a big deal for the future of the coast? finding the actions bore 25% of the responsibility for coastal erosion in the parish.
( The jury ordered Chevron to must pay the local government more than $744 million in damages for impacts to Louisiana’s coastal wetlands.What will the money go to? ($575 million to compensate for land loss, $161 million to compensate for contamination, and $8.6 million for abandoned equipment.)
But this ruling has been appealed. The Supreme Court will now decide whether this lawsuit should be heard in state or federal court. These lawsuits have always had intense political responses. Can you talk about the politics of holding the oil and gas companies accountable for their role in Louisiana’s land loss? And have those politics shifted since your lawsuit?
What are the stakes in these cases?
EXTRA:
Something else I wanted to ask you about is about the wells themselves. There are thousands of abandoned wells throughout the wetlands. They are no longer in use by the industry, but they haven’t been properly plugged to prevent pollution that harms the ecosystem and also contributes to land loss. There seems to be a pattern by the oil and gas industry of selling off wells they no longer use to smaller companies that then go bankrupt. So that they never have to pay to clean up their mess. Is that a strategy?
How are you thinking about the future of South Louisiana and New Orleans where you live. Why is coastal restoration so important?
And then why do you think these lawsuits are important?
Actionable but not taking action…we can do these backfilling for low cost
And that’s b/c state afraid to take on oil and gas. And so much on private property…
If political will it could be done
They broke the law, they need to fix it
Discuss coastal parish lawsuits - connection to backfilling (or lack thereof), future of coastal restoration funding, and updates to holding oil and gas industry accountable
