Louisiana Republicans Seem Content to Let New Orleans Drown

In the coming century,* New Orleans will be surrounded by ocean. That’s the contention of a paper published this week in Nature Sustainability. It finds that the city has already passed a “point of no return.” The authors recommend taking immediate action to start relocating the more than one million residents there and across coastal Louisiana who are being placed “in harm’s way” by the rapid loss of coastal wetlands, a loss increasingly driven by rising sea levels. The study suggests that the “widespread conversion” of low-elevation coastal zones in the Mississippi Delta into “open water” is “probably unavoidable.” 

“Between the chronic stress of land loss and sea level rise, New Orleans’s days are numbered—at least as we know it today,” said Jesse Keenan, a co-author of the paper and an expert in climate adaptation at Tulane University. To some extent, this transformation is already happening: Louisiana is losing a football field’s worth of land every 100 minutes. New Orleans has lost 25 percent of its population since 2005, when Hurricane Katrina caused more than 1,500 deaths and more than $150 billion worth of damage. Some neighborhoods are sinking by as much as two inches per year. 

Rather than planning for a looming inundation exacerbated by climate change, politicians in Louisiana have been busy trying to keep Democrats in majority-Black districts from governing. Republican leaders there recently moved to eliminate the New Orleans clerk of criminal court position just days before the Democrat voters had  overwhelmingly elected for that job was due to take office. The Supreme Court late last month sided with Louisiana Republicans’ bid to throw out the state’s congressional maps; the decision significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Republican Governor Jeff Landry promptly suspended primaries for Louisiana’s U.S. House seats from May 16 to July 15, when redrawn maps are expected to eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black Democratic districts. 

Landry appears devoted to the project of one-party rule. He has been much less enthusiastic about preparing for a future where large parts of his state no longer exist. Last year, he ditched a project to rebuild more than 20 square miles of coastal wetlands over the next 50 years, aimed at restoring the natural flow of the Mississippi River in select areas and directing sediment toward eroded areas. Landry argued that the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project was too expensive, but it was primarily funded by the fees and settlement BP was forced to pay out from its role in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster—the largest oil spill in the history of marine oil drilling operations, which deposited four billion barrels of oil from a damaged well, devastating wildlife, coastal residents, fishing operations, and tourism. The project would buy time, Keenan said, but would hardly preserve coastal Louisiana as is. 

Instead of putting BP’s money to use protecting coasts, some Louisiana Republicans have fought to keep oil and gas companies from having to pay for any other damage to the state’s shrinking coasts. As with the attacks on voting rights, the Supreme Court recently handed them a major win. In April, SCOTUS voted 8–0 to allow energy companies to move lawsuits over their environmental damages to friendlier federal courts. A bill currently making its way through the Louisiana legislature—House Bill 804—would “effectively give energy companies legal immunity from liability related to illnesses, injuries, deaths or other damages stemming from the climate effects of industrial air pollution,” the Louisiana Illuminator reports.

Louisiana’s representatives in Washington aren’t keen to talk about their state’s increasingly dire situation. Just one member of the state’s congressional delegation responded to multiple requests for comment about how Louisiana should prepare for the events described in the Nature Sustainability paper; what role local, state, and federal governments should play in that process; how it should be financed; and whether lawmakers should act to mitigate climate change so as to stem additional displacement. I also asked if they agreed with Landry’s decision to cancel the diversion project. The lone respondent was Republican Clay Higgins, whose coastal district stands to be largely swallowed by the three to seven feet of sea level rise the Nature Sustainability paper notes that southeastern Louisiana is “probably committed to.” 

Higgins’s response was brief: “I read the paper yesterday. ‘The Earth’s going to change’ … is most certainly true. Always has been true. Always will be true.” The phrase “the Earth’s going to change” does not appear in the paper. When I asked a spokesperson for Higgins to clarify why he had formatted that phrase like a quote, he responded that it “isn’t a quote from anything; it’s more of an idea my boss is emphasizing, like an old adage, with his use of the quotations.”

Keenan and his colleagues propose, optimistically, that Louisiana might yet offer a model for other low-lying areas to lead the world in planning for relocation. They write that “a carefully calibrated combination of planning and coastal restoration can define the difference between orderly managed relocation and disorderly market-driven movement of people and their assets.” For now, Keenan told me, disorderly movement is already happening. “The market is adapting much faster than consumers and public institutions can keep up,” he said, and the state’s poorest residents are struggling to adjust. The price of a standard private home insurance policy in Louisiana, for instance, rose by more than 40 percent between 2021 and 2024; and costs are high not just for wind and property insurance—which homeowners hope will pay out in a bad storm—but for car insurance too. The state’s Republican insurance commissioner, Tim Temple, has blamed high premiums on overregulation. He’s accordingly backed legislation that makes it harder for residents to sue over unpaid claims, and easier for insurers to raise rates and drop customers.

An “orderly managed relocation,” meanwhile, doesn’t seem like anything Louisiana’s ruling Republicans are eager to pursue. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t crafting their own responses to the climate crisis. The people who can least afford to weather the next few decades of climate-fueled loss are—in many cases—the ones Republicans are moving to disenfranchise; they’re trying to help corporations with funds to spare avoid having to pay up for the damage they’ve caused, or should cover. “Right now the fundamental question of public policy is who drowns,” Keenan said. There’s a very real possibility of today’s GOP seeing that reality as an opportunity. Building a one-party state is easier when lots of Democrats are underwater.