Monday, March 05, 2007

Stacked Deck

Part two of the T-P's series on Louisiana's coastal erosion crisis focuses on the numerous obstacles to action laid by political and economic interests. Particularly noteworthy is the oil and gas industry's history of opposition to coastal restoration projects, given that industry's disproportionate culpability for the acceleration of the phenomenon.

The government built levees to protect communities from Mississippi River floods. It built jetties at the river's mouth to prevent sandbars from forming and blocking shipping traffic. Those projects worked, but they also accelerated land loss by cutting off sediment flow to the wetlands that once kept pace with subsidence, the natural sinking of soft marsh soils.

Still, the Louisiana coast might have survived another 1,000 years or more, Louisiana State University scientists said. But the discovery of oil and gas compressed its destruction into a half-century.

By the 1980s, the petroleum industry and the corps had dredged more than 20,000 miles of canals and new navigation channels from the coast inland across the wetlands. The new web of waterways, like a circulatory system pumping poison, injected saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico into salt-sensitive freshwater wetlands. Fueled by the advance of big business on the coast, the Gulf's slow march northward accelerated into a sprint.


As the article goes on to describe, oil and gas have not been the only opponents of a comprehensive solution to the problem. Restoration projects have been stymied repeatedly by the pervasive NIMBYism of fishermen, developers, hunters, farmers and all manner of private landholders who own 80 percent of the threatened region. Such situations call for strong political leadership in order to bring together these fragmented interests in the face of a common threat. Naturally, such leadership has been woefully inadequate for reasons of political pragmatism, rigid ideology, or good old capitulation to moneyed interests.

At the same time the state's congressional delegation begged for money to protect the coast, its members had joined the anti-regulation movement Republicans brought to Washington when they took control of Congress in 1994. And so they supported efforts to soften regulations protecting wetlands from industrial damage and a drive to require financial compensation to property owners facing wetlands restrictions, which inflated the potential cost of restoration projects.

"At the same time we were asking for help in protecting our wetlands, (the Louisiana delegation) was pushing for reducing regulations and protections," Davis said. "It was all to help the oil industry. People on the national level just couldn't take us seriously."

In one of many examples, former U.S. Rep. Billy Tauzin in 2000 pushed a bill through the House offering landowners compensation if environmental regulations lowered their property values. It didn't pass the Senate, but all but one of the state's delegation voted for the measure.

Most of the delegation have also supported a variety of drilling incentives for the oil and gas industry in the past decade, spurring activity that further ate into the wetlands. Industry officials counter that the drilling provisions boosted the economy of Louisiana and the nation , and that a variety of oil and gas companies now support the state's coastal restoration efforts, both politically and by cooperating with individual projects.


And, as always, even at the hour of Louisiana's most dire need it appears that the rest of the country.. as represented by its elected leadership.. has other priorities.

By 2000, state and corps planners had begun to turn Coast 2050 into a detailed 30-year, $14 billion blueprint called the Louisiana Coastal Area Ecosystem Restoration Plan.

After polishing the plan for another two years at Washington's behest, in 2002 the state and corps officials presented their effort to the Bush administration -- and ran into a brick wall.

The administration's Office of Management and Budget ordered the plan downsized to include only the first 10 years of projects, drastically cutting the price tag to between $1.2 billion and $1.9 billion. The reduction stemmed from unprecedented budget deficits spurred by a wave of tax cuts and the invasion of Iraq. The White House Council on Environmental Quality also weighed in, saying the larger projects weren't backed by solid science.


By now we all know what it means to be lectured by the Bush Administration about "solid science"

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