New Orleans is already living through climate change. While other cities plan for a future of rising seas and intensifying storms, we’ve been navigating that reality for decades. The storms come faster. The heat lingers longer. And the systems that are supposed to protect us? Cracking at the seams.
This isn’t just a climate story. It’s a survival story.
A City Surrounded by Water and Running Out of Time
New Orleans is cradled by water — the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain, and the Gulf of Mexico — and built on unstable ground that sinks a little more each year. Some parts of the city sit seven feet below sea level, and that gap is growing.
Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost more than 2,000 square miles of coastal land, much of it swallowed up because oil and gas companies carved through the wetlands. Those wetlands once buffered us from storms. Now they’re disappearing, and we’re left exposed.
Storms Don’t Knock — They Kick the Door In
Katrina should have been a turning point. But almost two decades later, we’re still scrambling after every storm.
Hurricane Ida arrived in 2021 with terrifying speed and power. It knocked out power to more than a million people. The levees held — barely — but the grid didn’t. And in the sweltering days that followed, the silence from those in charge was deafening.
The problem isn’t just hurricanes. It’s that the storm season is stretching longer, the rainfall is heavier, and the line between normal and disaster is disappearing.
Some Neighborhoods Are Always in the Path
Climate change doesn’t hit everyone equally. In New Orleans, Black and working-class communities are placed directly in harm’s way — on the lowest ground, near the dirtiest industries, with the fewest resources.
From Gordon Plaza to Cancer Alley, environmental racism is the backdrop to every so-called natural disaster. The neighborhoods that flood the worst are the same ones that get ignored the longest when it’s time to rebuild.
The trauma isn’t just physical. It’s generational. It’s systemic. And it’s by design.
The Oil Industry Still Runs This State
Louisiana is practically governed by the oil and gas industry.
For decades, fossil fuel companies have wielded outsize influence over everything from tax policy to environmental enforcement. Efforts to hold them accountable are routinely crushed by lobbying pressure or blocked outright by the state legislature. When coastal parishes filed lawsuits to make oil and gas companies pay for wetland destruction, lawmakers passed legislation limiting local governments’ authority to pursue damages (ProPublica, 2020).
At the heart of this stranglehold is the Industrial Tax Exemption Program (ITEP)—a corporate tax giveaway that allows manufacturing companies, especially in oil and gas, to avoid paying local property taxes. Since 1998, Louisiana has granted over $20 billion in local tax breaks through ITEP (Together Louisiana, 2023). Communities should be collecting millions in taxes from refineries operating in their backyards—but instead, they’re underfunding schools, roads, and emergency services.
And it doesn’t stop at tax breaks. ConocoPhillips was sued by the Louisiana Department of Revenue for underpaying $390 million in state income taxes between 2008 and 2011. The state quietly settled the case in 2020, without disclosing the terms to the public (Invest Louisiana, 2020).
Then there’s land. Companies have bulldozed wetlands, forced pipelines through communities, and treated places like St. James Parish—which is over 85% Black—as sacrifice zones. The Bayou Bridge Pipeline, part of the Dakota Access Pipeline network, faced massive community opposition and lawsuits. But with support from the state and industry lobbyists, it was completed anyway, cutting through the Atchafalaya Basin and Indigenous and Black communities along the way.
Meanwhile, Governor Jeff Landry and other state leaders continue pushing to gut environmental regulations and expand fossil fuel infrastructure in the name of “freedom” and “jobs”—a freedom that rarely extends to those living next to refineries or drinking contaminated water.
The oil and gas industry in Louisiana fuels elections, writes policy, and decides who gets protected—and who gets pushed out.
Still, the People Fight
Despite the odds, this city keeps pushing.
Groups like RISE St. James, Healthy Gulf, and the Alliance for Affordable Energy are organizing on the front lines. Mutual aid networks, solar co-ops, and grassroots environmental justice efforts are picking up where politicians fall short.
Because when the storms come — and they will — we know it’s going to be neighbors, not the state, who show up first.
If We Lose New Orleans, What Does That Say About Us?
New Orleans has always been a test. Of character. Of systems. Of values.
If we can’t protect this city — a cultural cornerstone, a historically Black stronghold, a place unlike anywhere else — then we’re not just failing to address climate change. We’re choosing who gets left behind.
And we’ve made that choice too many times before.
The post Why New Orleans Is Ground Zero for the Climate Crisis in America appeared first on Big Easy.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
