A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it

Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty

As this newsletter goes out, the remnants of Hurricane Ida will be making their way over the mid-Atlantic and northeastern United States. Residents of those regions have been warned to expect thunderstorms, flooding, and possibly even tornadoes. None of it will come close to what southern Louisiana has faced since Sunday, when Ida made landfall—or what they will continue to experience in the coming weeks and months.

As of Wednesday, hundreds of thousands in the area remain without power (meaning no air conditioning amid 105-degree heat indices) and under boil water advisories. The storm flooded entire towns outside the New Orleans levee system, temporarily knocked out emergency communications, and damaged several hospitals grappling with the region’s Covid spike, forcing them to evacuate patients.

There’s an understandable human impulse at times like these to refrain from incisive commentary and instead merely mourn the scale of devastation. But there’s also a growing moral imperative: If prior generations found it crass to “politicize” such tragedies, today it seems even more crass to pretend that knowingly exacerbating such tragedies doesn’t matter.

Jake Bittle, reporting for TNR from southern Louisiana as the storm hit, pulled no punches: “In every meaningful sense,” he wrote, Hurricane Ida “was the perfect storm of the climate change era—not just in terms of meteorology but also in terms of geography, history, and victimology.” Ida’s rapid intensification and Louisiana’s vulnerability can both be laid at the feet of the fossil fuel industry that continues to dominate the American Gulf Coast.

The storm’s sudden strengthening last week, which made full evacuation impossible, occurred when the cyclone “passed over a deep eddy of water that registered a temperature of almost 90 degrees,” Jake explained. “The Gulf of Mexico is very complex, and it’s hard to say with certainty why any part of it is hot at any given time, but more than 90 percent of anthropogenic warming has been absorbed by the oceans, and the process of planetary heating makes high sea-surface temperatures like the ones we are observing now much more likely.”

Support Our Journalists

Our writers and editors are bringing you vital reporting, explanation, and analysis to understand the current climate crisis—but they need your help.

Here’s a special summer offer to subscribe to The New Republic.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

Try The New Republic for just $10

The same industry that remains one of the primary drivers of global warming also made the Louisiana coastline more vulnerable to flooding:

The Gulf Coast of the state used to be lush with land, thousands of barrier islands and peninsulas that slowed down approaching storms and shielded coastal residents from the worst surge flooding. When oil companies like Texaco arrived in the early twentieth century, they and their enablers in the state government carved the bayou up, dredging dozens of canals to allow for the transportation of oil and laying down several gas pipelines as well.

These new canals allowed salt water to push up through rivers and streams, and within decades the marshland had begun to erode. When the warming of the ocean accelerated in the later part of the century, the waters expanded and rose, furthering the process of erosion.

The result, as one can see from even the most cursory glance at a satellite map, is that the “boot” of Louisiana frayed and fell apart. Solid land that had once supported gardens and cattle pastures became muddy and impossible to traverse, and year by year the flooding from hurricanes and rainstorms got worse.

It’s important to remember that Louisiana residents have already been poisoned by the fossil fuel industry’s petrochemical arm over a series of decades. (For more on this, see ProPublica’s reporting on “Cancer Alley.”) While the industry has brought jobs, they have come at an almost unthinkably high cost.

But the fossil fuel industry isn’t the only culprit here. Yesterday, Earther’s indispensable Dharna Noor took a closer look at the transmission tower and lines that collapsed into the Mississippi River on Sunday, leaving all of New Orleans in darkness. The utility company in question, Entergy, is a founding member of the Edison Electric Institute, which has known about climate change “since at least 1968,” when the subject was aired at its annual convention. It has known since 1988 that climate-intensified storms could imperil the electrical grid. “Entergy saw a clear illustration of that fact,” Dharna added, “when Hurricane Katrina knocked its energy infrastructure offline and left more than 2 million people without power—and now it’s once again dealing with a similar problem post-Ida.”

Instead of moving toward renewable energy and grid resilience, the company has been engaging in all-out war on both local and federal sustainability initiatives. Check out this incredible section of Dharna’s report (emphasis mine):

Last year, it announced a plan to reach net zero by 2050 … by expanding the use of carbon-polluting natural gas. The previous year, the firm pushed to gut a plan to pay customers for excess solar energy that they sell back to the grid, and according to emails obtained by Energy and Policy Institute, Entergy’s president of utility operations Rod West baselessly accused the “solar lobby” of stoking a “class war.”

The company loves gas so much, an independent investigation found that it even hired actors to show up at a 2018 city council vote in a show of astroturfed support of a new gas plant in New Orleans despite widespread local opposition.

Hurricane Ida is a disaster—the proportions of which will only become clear in the coming weeks, as the death toll rises and communications are restored. Is it a “natural” disaster, though? As vacationers flee famously idyllic Lake Tahoe, rescuers search southern Louisiana parishes for stranded residents, and a new tropical storm strengthens in the Atlantic, ignoring the man-made aspects of today’s severe weather events is feeling less morally defensible by the day.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

Advertising

Stat of the Week

That’s how long some residents of southern Louisiana may be without power, following Hurricane Ida.

Good News

A federal judge on Monday ruled against a Trump administration policy that stripped protections from streams, wetlands, and marshes.

Bad News

Birds of prey across the globe are in serious trouble.

Elsewhere in the Ecosystem

Why the South Is Decades Ahead of the West in Wildfire Prevention

NPR’s Morning Edition had a fascinating report on controlled burns this week. A method long practiced by Indigenous nations, controlled burns are one of the best ways to reduce the risk from wildfires. Western states are still in the process of returning to this practice. But remarkably, the Southeast is way ahead:

In 1990, Florida passed a law to encourage prescribed burns, recognizing that the state would lose significant biodiversity without it. After firestorms burned almost 500,000 acres in 1998, the law was strengthened.

Florida set up a certification system for burn managers, also known as “burn bosses,” requiring candidates to get special training on weather and landscape conditions for safe burning. With that certification, burners are protected from liability lawsuits in the rare event a burn gets out of control, unless it’s shown there was “gross negligence” on their part.

In total, 11 Southern states have burn manager certification programs. As a result, controlled burning has become part of the social fabric.

Lauren Sommer | NPR