Why Life in Louisiana has Become Impossible

Louisiana, by nearly all logic and

reason, should be among the wealthiest

and most prosperous states in America.

It truly just has so many built-in

advantages going for it that it would be

hard for an outsider who's never heard

of Louisiana before to imagine any other

outcome. In southern Louisiana is the

delta of the Mississippi River, which

drains out the largest river system of

the North American continent that spans

roughly 41% of the total territory of

the United States. Throughout this vast

interconnected river system exists the

largest continuous network of inland

navigable waterways that can be found

anywhere on the planet enabling river

barge trade from as deep in the interior

as Minneapolis, Omaha, Kansas City,

Nashville, Louisville, Cincinnati, and

Pittsburgh. All access to the global

ocean through the Delta in southern

Louisiana. Historically, whoever

controlled the delta of this river

system in Louisiana controlled the

access to and from this entire built-in

system of inland continental river

trade, which is why New Orleans, built

about as close to the mouth of the river

as was physically possible, became such

a large and influential city since it

could facilitate all of this trade

between the interior and the outside

world. Offering up warehouses and

storage solutions for riverborn cargo to

transfer onto oceanbound cargo and vice

versa. New Orleans was once the third

largest city in the entire country back

in 1840, and it was the largest city in

the American South for the entire

nation's history until the 1950s when it

was surpassed by Houston.

All on its own, Louisiana frequently

ranks as one of the top producers in the

country of multiple agricultural

products. Basically, the entire state is

located on top of a massive salt

deposit, which is why Louisiana almost

always ranks as the number one or two

salt producer in the country. The state

is usually the third largest producer of

rice and the second largest producer of

sugar cane in the US as well. And even

more importantly, Louisiana is one of

the epicenters of the American oil and

gas industry due to the state's location

nearby to the huge offshore fields in

the Gulf of Mexico and the massive oil

fields in Texas. Along with its ability

to handle shipments throughout the

interior with the Mississippi River

Delta, Louisiana possesses the second

largest oil refinery capacity of any

state. Capable of refining roughly 3.3

million barrels a day. Nearly 1 in every

five barrels of oil that gets refined in

the US takes place in Louisiana. And

when including the nearby offshore oil

fields in the Gulf, Louisiana is one of

the top 10 producers of crude oil in the

US as well. On top of that, Louisiana is

one of the top three largest producers

of natural gas in the country as well,

producing roughly 10% of all the natural

gas in America. Even more importantly,

Louisiana completely dominates the

country's liqufying natural gas or LG

export capacity, too. Roughly 2thirds of

all American LG exports to the outside

world currently takes place through

Louisiana primarily from massive LG

export terminals in the state like

Sabine Pass, Calcasu Pass, Cameron LG,

and Plaamine LG. This isn't only because

of Louisiana's proximity to the Gulf of

Mexico and huge hail fields and its vast

refining infrastructure, but also

because Louisiana is the epicenter of

the American pipeline network as well.

To give you just a sense of how central

Louisiana is to this system, consider

this small town in the state that you

probably never even heard of before now

called

is home to the Henry Hub, a critical

junction point where 11 different

interstate pipelines from all across the

country converge at. It is where the

price of natural gas for the entire

North American market primarily get sent

at. And it's also the starting point for

most global LG pricing formulas as well.

All of these pipelines enable natural

gas to be carried into Louisiana from

across the country and then liquefied

for export on ships to go across the

world. A critical component of American

geopolitical power in the 21st century

that since 2024 has helped to enable the

United States to become the largest

exporter of LG in the world. Aided by

all of these advantages, Louisiana is

also among the largest producers of

chemical products in the country as

well. The state is generally regarded as

the second largest producer of chemicals

in the country, primarily concentrated

along an 85m long industrial corridor of

the Mississippi River between New

Orleans and Baton Rouge. Home to more

than 150 petrochemical plants that

accounts for nearly 25% of all

prochemical production in America. This

stretch of the Mississippi River is home

to the largest concentration of

refineries and prochemical plants

anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. So

much so that his more generous nickname

is the Silicon Valley of prochemicals,

producing roughly $80 billion in output

annually. Huge investments from abroad

in a Louisiana's massive prochemical and

oil and gas industries have also made

Louisiana among the top three largest

per capita recipients of foreign direct

investment in the US since 2008 as well.

And we still haven't even talked about

Louisiana's ports either. Because of all

these geographic advantages and critical

industries, Louisiana has by far the

largest total port tonnage out of all of

America's states today. Out of the top

15 busiest ports in America by port

tonnage, Louisiana is home to five of

them, including the second and sixth

busiest ports at the Port of South

Louisiana and the Port of New Orleans.

Compared to every other state, Louisiana

has more port tonnage than Texas and

more than double the port tonnage of

California, who sits in third place,

which makes Louisiana the biggest port

tonnage hub in the entire country. And

yet, despite all of these advantages and

leads in numerous critical industries,

and despite boasting a seemingly high

GDP per capita of $74,000,

that's even higher than Sweden,

Louisiana is in reality one of the most

deeply impoverished states in the union

with arguably the lowest quality of life

in the country that even rivals still

developing countries. Going through just

a few of Louisiana's quality of life

rankings, the state currently, as of

2026, places 45th in the nation in

infant mortality rates, 49th in the

nation in maternal mortality rates, 46th

in overall violent crime rates,

including 47th in property crime, and

50th in homicide rates, 47th in overall

life expectancy, 48th in food

insecurity, with nearly 18% of

households classified as food insecure,

48th in median household income, and

then last 50th place in multiple other

categories including poverty rates with

nearly 1 in5 Louisianans living beneath

the poverty line which is double the

national average 50th place in

incarceration rates per capita with more

than 1% of the state's total population

currently in prison 50th place in

national reading scores and 50th place

in gender pay gap with men in the state

earning nearly 37% more than women do on

average US News, which ranks all 50

states for the best ones to live in

every year based on 47 different

measured metrics, consistently ranks

Louisiana dead last in 50th place as the

worst state in the country to live in

year after year, behind even neighboring

Mississippi, who generally has the worst

reputation. Louisiana's population is

currently crashing as thousands more

people leave than enter every year.

While a newly published paper in the

journal Nature suggests that due to

multiple factors, the shoreline will

likely migrate as much as 62 mi inland

within only a few decades by 2070, which

could end up stranding both New Orleans

and Baton Rouge as dangerously exposed

islands in the Gulf, which will also

wreck the entire state's prochemical and

refinery industries that are located in

between them and force hundreds of

thousands of the region's residents to

migrate elsewhere. where and in order to

understand how Louisiana can

simultaneously be home to such wealth in

terms of resources and geographic

advantages and such poverty in terms of

quality of life rankings and why

significant amounts of the state might

vanish completely within our own

lifetimes. It helps first to understand

how Louisiana's political situation

differs dramatically from any other

state in the country because a large

amount of Louisiana's ailments all stem

out from this. The basic thing that you

need to understand is that Louisiana is

still being administered effectively as

a colonial resource extraction economy

that's only been adapted for the modern

age. The whole state is basically run by

and for a variety of industrial

supercorporations.

much more so than any other state in the

country is. There's an organization

called Good Jobs First that maintains a

subsidy tracker database online which

tracks the amount of publicly disclosed

corporate subsidies within each state

given to companies since around the

1990s. Based on their provided data, I

adapted it to display the amount of

corporate subsidies given out by state

on a per capita basis shown here. If

you'll notice at the very top of the

list the huge anomaly that is the state

of Louisiana on a per capita basis.

Louisiana hands out dramatically more

corporate subsidies than any other state

in the country does to the point where

it's truly in a league of its own.

Louisiana hands out nearly twice the

amount of corporate subsidies per capita

as the states in second and third place

do New Jersey and New York. And it hands

out nearly nine times the amount as the

US nationwide average. And 80% of all

these corporate subsidies that the state

of Louisiana has handed out over the

years have come through a single unique

and obscure program in the state that's

known as the Industrial Tax Exemption

Program or the IT, the largest corporate

subsidy program in America. Started all

the way back in 1936,

the IT granted a state level board

called the Louisiana Board of Commerce

and Industry the extraordinary authority

to approve corporate exemptions from

local property taxes without any

approval, say, or even knowledge from

the local authorities who would be

impacted the most negatively by those

exemptions like municipalities, parish

governments, sheriffs, and school

boards. This broad authority granted to

the state level board to approve local

property tax exemptions for corporations

statewide without any input or say from

local authorities was unique in America.

And it's a system that lasted completely

unchanged and little noticed in

Louisiana for decades until very

recently in 2016. Between 1998 and 2016

alone, when the IT was finally reformed,

16,923

applications for corporate property tax

exemptions were submitted under the

program, and only eight of them were

ever rejected by the board, giving the

whole process a ludicrous approval

rating of 99.95%.

Practically any company that applied for

any property tax exemptions under the

program was granted an automatic

approval for decades. And these

exemptions could cover up to 100% of a

corporation's applied for property for

up to 10 years. According to a 2016

analysis that was conducted by the

Institute for Energy Economics and

Financial Analysis, a nonprofit based in

Ohio, about 63% of all industrial

property statewide across Louisiana,

valued at about $45 billion was

completely exempted from property

taxation because of the IT program,

including significant percentages of the

property values of massive and extremely

expensive industrial plants owned by

companies like on mobile, Shell, Dupant,

and others. Because of the IT, it was

estimated in 2016 that Louisiana's local

authorities like school districts,

sheriffs, and municipalities were losing

out on around $720 million per year of

corporate property tax income that they

otherwise would have been receiving

without the IT. That was hundreds of

millions of dollars every single year

being kept by the industrial

corporations in Louisiana and hundreds

of millions of fewer dollars every

single year to help fund Louisiana's

public services and needs like schools,

police, fire, hospitals, libraries, and

infrastructure. And it's a policy that

continued unabated with no say by any

local residents or authorities for 80

years in the state between 1936 and

2016. Since 1998 alone, it's been

estimated that the IT has ultimately

cost the state of Louisiana roughly $20

billion and missed out local property

taxes, which as you can imagine has left

the state schools, infrastructure,

police, and other public services

critically underfunded relative to other

states. And of course, there has never

been any comparable policy to exempt

Louisiana residents from their own

residential property taxes. And in order

to help offset some of the difference,

Louisiana employs a crushing sales tax

rate that averages 10.11%

statewide. The top number one highest

sales tax burden in the entire country

that is borne more by the lower and

middle classes in the state since

purchases of taxable goods represent a

higher share of their total income than

the upper classes.

In 2016, the IT was theoretically

reformed in Louisiana to finally give

local authorities the ability to approve

these industrial property tax exemptions

and on their own terms, giving local

residents some theoretical ability to

determine what goes on in their own

communities for really the first time in

modern Louisiana history. However, many

of the giant industrial corporations in

the state immediately initiated a

heavily funded lobbying campaign that

has continued since then, which has

pushed for convincing local school

districts, municipalities, and other

local governing bodies to grant them

automatic approvals to IT applications

anyway, which has proven to be quite

successful for them. Many of the

parishes in Louisiana have since then

simply agreed to automatically approve

all future IT applications site on sea.

A review of 336 post 2016 applications

to the IT in Louisiana revealed only 15

cancellations and four withdrawals,

showing that even after the reform, the

IT has still been able to maintain a 94%

approval rating for every piece of

corporate property that gets submitted.

Meaning the local entities across the

state are still being deprived of

massive amounts of revenue they need to

offer basic amenities and services to

their own residents. And remember when I

said earlier that the more generous

nickname of that 85m stretch of

prochemical plants and refineries

between Baton Rouge and New Orleans was

the Silicon Valley of prochemicals.

Well, the much more common and less

flattering nickname for this region than

many more people know it by is Cancer

Alley. Due to the hugely elevated

environmental risks posed to the

region's local residents because of all

of the polluting emissions emitted by

the hundreds of petrochemical plants and

oil refineries that are located all

around them. The risk of contracting

cancer from industrial air pollution has

been estimated to be more than seven

times the national average in Cancer

Alley, which is the highest risk

anywhere in North America. Residents of

Cancer Alley can expect low birth weight

rates more than triple the nationwide

average, pre-term births nearly 2 and

1/2 times the national average, and

severe respiratory ailments in addition

to the dramatically higher risks of

developing cancer. And all of this is

born on a local population in the region

that is also largely black, which has

led to accusations of the state

committing environmental racism. 23 of

all of Louisiana's annual greenhouse gas

emissions come from cancer alley. And

the situation is so bad that

representatives of the UN have

unironically referred to the area as a

sacrifice zone and as a violation of

human rights.

The development of all of this

prochemical and oil refinery industry

between Baton Rouge and New Orleans took

place shortly after the end of the

Second World War and were most often

placed on former plantation sites

directly adjacent to communities with

significant or majority black

populations. One particularly egregious

case happened in 1969 when the Dupont

Chemical Company built a chloropine

rubber manufacturing plant in the town

of Reserve St. John the Baptist Parish,

Louisiana. In 2015, the plant was sold

to a Japanese chemicals company called

Dena. The area immediately adjacent to

the Dupont Dena plant has been

recognized by the EPA is having a

likelihood of its residents contracting

cancer from air pollution more than 700

times the national average. And it is

notably located directly next to an

elementary school in multiple

residential neighborhoods. Production at

the plant only halted in May of 2025,

just a year ago, but not because of any

federal lawsuits, which were all dropped

against the plant a few months

previously, by the Trump administration.

For decades, the EPA, the Louisiana

state government, and particularly the

Louisiana Department of Environmental

Quality have all repeatedly failed to

address the harms caused by the

industrial development of Cancer Alley

by refusing to enforce even the most

minimum of environmental standards set

by the federal government within the

state. And a lot of this from the IT

policies effectively plundering

Louisiana's tax base to the

environmental catastrophe that came out

of the development of cancer rally stems

from the fact that Louisiana's politics

are just really really corrupt. To give

you just a sense of the scale of the

corruption problem in the state,

consider a report that the KO Institute

released last year in 2025 which

measured convictions for public

corruption by state on a per capita

basis between 2004 and 2023. That report

concluded that Louisiana is the top most

corrupt state in the nation with a rate

of per capita public corruption

convictions that is about double or

worse than every other state in the

country other than Montana, South

Dakota, and Kentucky, which are

Louisiana's closest corruption

competitors. In Louisiana though, the

public corruption is historically

extended throughout the entire system

from sheriffs to mayors to congressmen

to governors. And there are some very

notable and colorful examples from

history. Richard Leche, a former

governor of Louisiana between 1936 and

1939, who was the first one to introduce

the IT in the state, resigned in

disgrace over corruption allegations,

and he was eventually convicted of mail

fraud in 1940 that involved a scheme

with a dealer selling trucks to the

state's highway department at

exorbitantly inflated prices and then

giving Leche personal kickbacks. His

successor to the governorship, Earl

Long, was charged with embezzlement

himself, but never convicted. And in

more modern times, there's the case of

Edwin Edwards, who served as the state's

governor on and off four times between

1972 and 1996. His entire time in office

was dominated by an almost endless

stream of criminal investigations. But

he was finally convicted on felony

raketeering, moneyaundering, extortion,

and wire fraud charges in 2001 and

served an 8-year stint in prison. While

serving his final term as Louisiana's

governor in the 1990s, Edwards and his

associates came up with a scheme to

transform the state's riverboat casino

licensing system into essentially a

bribery machine. Applicants to the

program were pressured by Edwards into

paying him personal bribes for his

approval, which were conveniently

relabeled as consulting fees. In one

particular case, the then owner of the

San Francisco 49ers, Edward J. Dearalo

Jr., paid Edwards a $400,000

bribe in exchange for being granted a

riverboat casino license, something

which he later pleaded guilty to doing

in court. And perhaps most infamously in

recent Louisiana corruption history was

William Jefferson, who maintained an

18-yearlong career representing his

district in Louisiana in the US House of

Representatives until the FBI initiated

an undercover investigation into him in

2005 under allegations that he was

accepting bribes by businesses in order

to advance their interests. During this

investigation, Williams accepted a

$100,000 cash bribe from an undercover

FBI informant. And then during a

subsequent raid of his house, 90,000 of

those exact same dollars were discovered

stashed away in his freezer, hidden in a

box of pie crusts. Reign again, a former

mayor of New Orleans for years between

2002 and 2010, was convicted on more

than 20 counts of bribery and fraud

after he left office, including a scheme

that netted him a free source of granite

that supplied the countertop business he

ran on the side. And as recently as

2025, another former mayor of New

Orleans, Latoya Contrell, who served

between 2018 and 2026, was also indicted

on corruption charges relating to her

alleged usage of public funds to

facilitate a romantic relationship with

one of her own bodyguards.

The history of corruption within the

state is extremely deeprooted and

pervasive, and it's a very difficult

problem for anyone honest to actually

solve. The sheer scale of this

corruption in Louisiana has long been

one of the biggest roadblocks holding

the state back from achieving its

potential and a very long history of

policy mistakes and errors made by this

leadership over the generations have

also helped contribute to the state

becoming arguably the most dangerously

exposed place anywhere in the world

today to the modern threat of climate

change which is now the biggest

existential threat to Louisiana's future

existence. You see, the Mississippi

River itself isn't a static fixture of

geography. It's actually a living,

moving thing. And over the eons of

history, it has been constantly shaped

and molded by natural forces like

erosion, floods, earthquakes, tectonic

movements, and more recently, even

man-made alterations. It has naturally

meandered around its current route for

millions of years. And there is ample

geological evidence to suggest that it

switches to a newer, shorter route out

to the Gulf of Mexico roughly once every

1,000 or so years. And the last time

that the Mississippi shifted course to

its current route was around 1,000 AD,

which as you can immediately tell was

roughly 1,000 years ago. Since the river

drains a massive area, equivalent to

about 41% of the entire US, the river

usually brings a colossal amount of

sediment from across the interior of the

continent to the wetlands of southern

Louisiana, which gets deposited through

floods and helps to build up and nourish

the muddy, marshy wetlands that southern

Louisiana is well known for. The muddy

land just barely above sea level that

the sediment helps form naturally

subsides and sinks beneath the sea over

time. But historically, there was a

natural balance in place in southern

Louisiana where the amount of new

sediment getting deposited through the

Mississippi River, building new land

along with the rate of new plant growth

that was anchoring and protecting that

new land from erosion was higher than

the rate of natural subsidance, which

resulted in thousands of years of

continuous land growth in the region.

However, this natural balance in

southern Louisiana began being severely

and irreversibly altered by humans

around a century ago in the early 20th

century. In order to protect the growing

community's economic and industrial

infrastructure that was going up all

along the lower Mississippi's banks, a

series of enormous levies utilizing

industrial technology were constructed

along the river beginning in 1928, which

effectively straight jacketed the

Mississippi and prevented it from

flooding out as much as it otherwise

would have. The problem with doing this

is that it directly eliminated the

ability of the river to continue

replenishing the coastal wetlands around

the delta with the sediment it needed to

continue growing or to even remain

stable. Rather than being deposited

across the wetlands through floods, the

levies forced almost all of the river

sediment out of its mouth and directly

into the Gulf of Mexico, effectively

wasting it in the process.

And then there was the manner of the

Mississippi River itself wanting to

shift its course again after the 1,000

years running the same course started

expiring in the late 20th century. By

the 1950s, it became obvious to civil

engineers that the Mississippi was

naturally wanting to shift its course

just north of Bannon Rouge towards the

Achafallaya River instead, which by that

point was a shorter, steeper, and more

efficient route for the river to take

into the Gulf. Without human

intervention, the Mississippi was

projected in the 1950s to fully shift

over to the Achafallayia by the 1990s.

However, were that to ever happen, it

would eliminate the usefulness of both

New Orleans and Baton Rouge as ports

with no possible replacements in the new

channel. Since the new Delta would be in

a much shallower location, it would be

disastrous for the prochemical and

refinery industries dotted along the

river between Baton Rouge and New

Orleans. It would completely wipe out

Morgan City, home to more than 10,000

people, which is basically already

surrounded by water. It would eliminate

the freshwater supply to the entire New

Orleans metro area. And it would sever

all of the critical oil and gas

pipelines in Louisiana that run to the

east coast. In other words, it would be

absolutely catastrophic for just about

everyone involved. So the US Army Corps

of Engineers built the old river control

structure in the early 1960s to force

the Mississippi to continue flowing down

its historic course past Baton Rouge in

New Orleans. The consequence, however,

was that the old river control structure

blocked even more sediment from upstream

reaching the Mississippi Delta further

downstream, while it also created a

single point of critical infrastructure

failure within the state. likely the

most vulnerable single place in America

to a super villain or a terrorist

attack. Were the old river control

structure ever destroyed, it would

immediately result in the destruction of

all of the communities in Louisiana

between Baton Rouge and New Orleans and

the state's entire prochemical and

refinery industries.

Then even more sediment became trapped

behind the dams and locks that were

built along the Mississippi, Missouri,

and Ohio rivers even further upstream.

And as a result, since 1850, the amount

of sediment even reaching the lower

Mississippi at all has been reduced by

about 70%. And most of that remaining

amount is wasted by being dumped into

the Gulf of Mexico because of the

levies. Without any of the sediments

contributing to the growth of the land

since the late 1920s and the natural

balance broken, the rate of erosion and

subsidance has taken over instead, and

huge areas of coastal Louisiana have

been simply sinking for nearly a century

now. Then, to make matters even worse,

multiple other man-made factors have

only exacerbated the pace of coastline

loss in southern Louisiana as well.

Thousands of miles worth of canals were

dug across southern Louisiana by the oil

and gas companies to further accommodate

their energy infrastructure and

extraction and to aid with navigation,

which had the unintended consequence of

allowing salt water from the ocean to

penetrate ever deeper into the

freshwater ecosystems of the wetlands

and hastening their destruction. Then

the BP Deep Water Horizon oil rig

explosion in 2010 took place just

offshore of coastal Louisiana and

resulted in the largest oil spill ever

in world history, devastating hundreds

of miles of the fragile coastal

environment of southern Louisiana even

further. And then there was the

ill-thoughtout plan in the 1930s when

fur traders in Louisiana were allowed to

introduce the Nutria for trapping, a

semi-aquatic rodent that sort of looks

like a beaver that's originally from

South America. A hurricane that struck

Louisiana in 1940 caused many of these

nutria to escape from their enclosures

along with several other trappers who

simply released them into the wild,

which then were able to quickly

proliferate into a feral population of

millions who adapted extremely well to

the marshy environment. The problem with

the nutria is that they don't just eat

plants above the ground. They also rip

out entire root systems in the process,

which in the coastal wetlands of

southern Louisiana destroys the local

vegetation's ability to anchor the soil

and prevent erosion, which only further

exacerbates all of the other problems.

The nutria problem got so bad that by

2002, the Louisiana state government

introduced a bounty system on them that

has remained in place ever since.

Hunters and trappers can earn $6 per

nutria they kill under this bounty

system during the hunting season. And

some of the best of them can earn as

much as 60 to $120,000

a season doing it. So basically, you

have this dual problem in coastal

Louisiana right now where the low

elevation muddy wetlands are sinking

because of multiple man-made problems at

the same time as sea levels are also

rising because of anthropogenic climate

change. which is the unique combination

that makes coastal Louisiana arguably

the single most dangerously exposed

coastal community in the world right

now. And that's not even to mention that

coastal Louisiana is also one of the

most hurricane exposed regions in the

world as well. Powerful storm surges

from Hurricane Katrina and Rita in 2005

destroyed hundreds of square miles of

coastal wetlands in Louisiana in mere

days. And the further that the coastal

wetlands are destroyed, the less of a

barrier they can constitute against

further hurricanes and storm surges in

the future, and the more destructive

they'll ultimately become. Particularly

destructive hurricanes like Katrina have

already resulted in devastating

population loss in Louisiana that the

state has still never recovered from.

After Katrina struck Orleans's parish,

the parish lost about 1/4th of its

residents in the immediate aftermath,

and its population is still about 20%

lower today in 2026 than it was in 2005

before the hurricane. And then after

Rita struck the more rural Cameron

Parish just the next month, it lost

approximately half of its population and

is still never recovered to this day

either. It's also notable to point out

that while every single county that

borders the Gulf in Florida, Alabama,

and Mississippi have all seen population

growth since the year 2000, almost all

of the coastal counties in Louisiana

have seen population declines and often

very sharp population declines. Since

2024, Louisiana has been leading the

nation in population loss, and it is

notably the only state in the geographic

American South that is currently

actively losing population. Louisianans

face rapidly rising home insurance costs

as the pace of natural disasters in

their state is increasing to the point

where today the home insurance rates in

the state are already the second highest

in the nation. On top of the highest

sales tax in the nation, on top of the

lowest quality of life in the country,

the worst and most dangerous air

pollution in the country, the highest

rate of corruption in the country, the

highest incarceration rate in the

country, low education and employment

opportunities, and a deeply uncertain

future with climate change to top it all

off. All while the state continues

favoring the mega corporations that are

present with a continuation of its

generous IT program that grants them

almost no property taxes. It's almost

kind of a wonder that Louisiana's

population hasn't shrunk more than it

already has, which I would explain by

the fact that New Orleans and many other

cities and regions across the state have

the strongest, most beautiful, and the

most unique culture and sense of place

in the entire country, which is a hill I

will die on. I can't hide the fact that

I personally and very deeply love New

Orleans. And anyone who's ever spent any

amount of time in this city knows how

much it can charm you and take a hold of

your heart in a way that no other city

in the country can. It is a harder place

to leave than mostly anywhere else. And

its strong culture and history simply

can't be replicated again anywhere else.

Nonetheless, the city is facing a

precipitous future along with the rest

of coastal Louisiana. Because of all of

the myriad of factors going on in

Louisiana that I've explained, more than

5,000 square kilm of wetlands have

already been lost beneath the sea just

since the 1930s. An area roughly twice

the size of Luxembourg. The rate of land

loss in coastal Louisiana is still so

rapid and ongoing that roughly an entire

football pitch-sized area is getting

wiped out every 100 minutes on average.

And unfortunately, that appears to be

only the beginning. A new paper

published in the scientific journal

Nature in May of 2026 suggests that

because of the rapidly sinking land and

the rising sea levels, southern

Louisiana faces a more severe loss of

coastline than anywhere else in the

world does that could become as bad as 3

to 7 m of relative sea level rise within

only a few decades by 2070, which could

result in up to 34s of all the state's

remaining wetlands getting lost under

the 3meter relative sea level rise

scenario. The paper estimates that the

coastal defenses of New Orleans will

likely remain successful, but that the

city will become transformed into

essentially a dangerously exposed

bull-shaped island lower than sea level

surrounded by the Gulf. And under the

more catastrophic 7 m relative sea level

rise scenario, the paper calculates that

no amount of defenses or money in the

world will be capable of saving the

city. and that New Orleans will be

buried beneath the sea. The paper argues

that either the three or seven meter

scenario is virtually inevitable at this

point, no matter what ends up happening,

and that New Orleans long-term condition

is terminal. New Orleans therefore might

have to end up becoming the first major

city in American history to actually

have to be abandoned by the end of this

century. Despite all of the massive

engineering efforts that have already

been put into saving it that have cost

tens of billions of dollars,

roughly 1.2 2 million people currently

live across the areas in coastal

Louisiana that'll likely be underwater

within a few decades, which is roughly a

full quarter of the state's entire

current population that will probably

have to be relocated at some point in

the next few generations.

In 2023, the state of Louisiana broke

ground on the Mid Baritaria Sediment

Diversion Project, a plan that aimed to

restore a more natural flow to the

Mississippi River Delta that would have

allowed the missing sediment to build up

in the coastal areas again where it had

been lost, which would have restored

some of the natural balance to the

wetlands and at least given them some

capability to replenish themselves and

stay afloat. Over 50 years, the project

believed that it would be capable of

restoring more than 20 square miles of

land in the wetlands while preventing

further losses at a cost of

approximately $3 billion.

But then just 2 years into the project

in 2025, Louisiana's government decided

to scrap the whole project entirely

under the argument that the $3 billion

price tag was too expensive and that it

supposedly also threatened the state's

fishing industry. And at the same time,

a recent US Supreme Court case this

month in May of 2026 is also allowing

Chevron to contest a Louisiana state

jury decision that had forced them to

pay $740 million to help fix the harm

they caused to the state's wetlands by

dredging those canals and drilling those

wells. which means that even the legal

effort to force the oil and gas

companies in the state to help pay for

the coastline collapse solution is also

very much in doubt. Now, the cumulative

consequences of all of these decisions

in the state over generations is that

Louisiana is effectively not even trying

to buy any more time for itself any

longer and for all practical purposes

has decided to abandon coastal Louisiana

New Orleans to its eventual fate within

a couple generations from now. New

Orleans isn't at any serious risk of

going underwater in the next decade or

two, but the bill is eventually coming

due, and it'll be paid by the future

generations who had no part in the

decision-making process going on in the

state today that so consistently and

blatantly favors short-term profits over

everything else at all costs, including

even sacrificing the hope of any kind of

a future at all. I truly grieve for

Louisiana's future and I hope against

all of the odds that somehow the people

and leadership of the state will fully

grasp their current trajectory and avoid

the leap into the abyss. It will require

enormous top-down structural reforms in

the state in a complete change of how

Louisiana has operated for generations

now. But there is no other alternative.

And when faced with desperate odds

before, humanity has always had a knack

for getting creative.

Difficult decisions and trade-offs,

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