The marshes that blanket this pancake-flat parish south of New Orleans stretch for miles, strewn with small streams that flow into the Gulf of Mexico. A lone four-lane road goes south past a Navy air base, an idle industrial site, a coal export terminal and a handful of small storm-battered communities.
“It highlights the irony that they’re having to armor these facilities at considerable expense to guard against extreme weather that is their own doing,” said Bradley Campbell, president of the Conservation Law Foundation, an environmental advocacy organization. Alexander Kolker, a professor at Louisiana State University, gives a walking tour of the levee system surrounding Venture Global’s Plaquemines LNG export facility on Feb. 26.
The site of the Venture Global plant offers a deep shipping channel, proximity to natural gas supplies and support from local leaders. Van Heerden and other experts argue, though, it also poses a number of risks that were not closely analyzed by federal agencies during the permitting process.In addition, the Venture Global plant both contributes to an epidemic of sinking land here and will be steadily undermined by it.
Richard Glick, who served as a FERC commissioner under Trump and as chair during Biden’s first two years in office, said his predecessor Neil Chatterjee pushed strongly to hasten LNG permit approvals. Glick dissented strongly from the approval of the Plaquemines LNG facility, saying the agency didn’t properly study the climate implications.
community of Ironton has seen this story play out before. Over the years, it has existed near coal export terminals and an oil refinery that has now closed its doors, while being repeatedly hammered by floods and hurricanes. “The build out of LNG is reproducing the same racist siting patterns and economic destruction patterns that started post-World War II,” said Robert D. Bullard, a professor at the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University. “Ironton is a textbook case of those toxic trade-offs.”
Ida also flooded and demolished much of Ironton, ripping coffins from the ground and dumping them on front yards. Following Ida, community members started rebuilding the church, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is paying for the reconstruction, ordered them to hold off until the structure could be lifted at least 12 feet off the ground. Rev. Johnson said it would be raised close to 15 feet with an elevator and an entrance on a new third floor.