LAURA FLANDERS & FRIENDS

LOUISIANA SURVIVED KATRINA. WILL IT SURVIVE THE PETROCHEMICAL INDUSTRY?

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– You know this thing is going to come in, and it’s going to come in hard.

– [Reporter] A flash flood warning for Orleans Parish.

– [Reporter 2] What has happened is a levee breach has occurred along…

– The path of Hurricane Katrina came from St. Bernard Parish and made its way through Orleans Parish.

– [Reporter 3] And what you hear are people screaming for help.

– The worst storm damage we’ve ever seen.

– New Orleans is in a state of devastation. We probably have 80% of our city underwater.

LAURA FLANDERS: Many remember the scenes of devastation and death after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. One of the deadliest hurricanes ever to strike the United States, Katrina killed 1,833 people and caused more than $100 billion in damage. Now it is hurricane season again, and Louisiana is facing another life-threatening storm. This time it’s not about rising water or bursting levees. The storm bearing down on the state right now is all about LNG, or liquified natural gas. LNG terminals receive, process and cool gas to liquid form for export. Louisiana is already this country’s top LNG-exporting state with four LNG terminals, one just 20 miles south of New Orleans and two more currently under construction. But despite warnings about locating these facilities in a high-risk area that has already seen many calamitous hurricanes even since Katrina, a bipartisan effort to increase U.S. LNG exports continues. One ambitious firm, Venture Global, was recently honored by President Trump in the White House.

– [DONALD TRUMP]: CEO of Venture Global, Mike Sabel. Mike, thank you very much, Mike. Investing $18 billion in liquified natural gas expansion in Louisiana. That’s going to work out good. Thank you very much.

LAURA FLANDERS: They want to expand their Louisiana operations into the largest LNG-exporting facilities in the country and one of the largest in the world. This and similar projects mean a storm of gas development has now become a clear and present danger to the people of Louisiana. Proponents of LNG expansion claim that it boosts the economy and strengthens energy security. Opponents argue it increases emissions, causing more climate warming and threatens the Gulf’s water and air with no benefit to local residents. To find out more, this June we returned to Louisiana to speak with Travis Dardar, an Indigenous shrimp fisherman and two-time climate refugee, Kimberly Terrell, a former Tulane University environmental scientist who quit when the university slapped a gag on her research, and Retired General Russell Honoré who directed federal troops during the recovery from Hurricane Katrina. Tucked away on the western edge of Louisiana’s Gulf Coast is the small rural fishing community of Cameron Parish. For generations, shrimp fishermen like Travis Dardar and his friends have made their living here, reaching the Gulf through the Calcasieu River Pass, once a quiet and storm-ravaged waterway. 

Did people ever told you, “You look different when you’re on the ship”?

TRAVIS DARDAR: Oh, yeah.

LAURA FLANDERS: How do you feel?

TRAVIS DARDAR: I feel peaceful.

LAURA FLANDERS: LNG terminals have been appearing rapidly here. They receive fracked gas via pipeline from around the country and super cool it to liquid before sending it overseas in huge tanker ships. Venture Global, which commenced commercial operations at its first plant, CP1, here this April has secured the Trump administration’s okay to build a second even bigger plant on the very same site. Its permits were put on hold after environmental advocates challenged them in court, but now they’re going ahead. All the construction has forced Dardar and his wife to leave their home and move inland. They’ve also formed a mutual aid and advocacy organization called FISH.

TRAVIS DARDAR: I’m founder of FISH, also commercial fisherman that fish the entire coastal Louisiana, Far East to the West.

LAURA FLANDERS: What does FISH stand for?

TRAVIS DARDAR: Fishermen Involved in Sustaining our Heritage. It’s a coalition of commercial fishermen, primarily from Cameron, but have members from along the coast, and at this point, all over the world. We moved because a LNG facility built before, built on our land in Cameron. You see, before this LNG came to Cameron, it was pretty much just a rumor. You see, nobody ever said anything. There was cow pastures behind us, in front of us, on the side. It was nice, peaceful, quiet. And then, you know, you started hearing the rumors, “LNG is coming, LNG is coming.” Nobody ever said anything, really, but then one morning we woke up and it was like an alien invasion, if you will. There was hundreds of yellow trucks everywhere and started going down that day. From then, they built, they worked all day, all night. They did not stop to the point where they would literally vibrate the pictures off our walls.

LAURA FLANDERS: And what were they building?

TRAVIS DARDAR: They was building… Venture Global was building their LNG CP1.

LAURA FLANDERS: Cameron wasn’t the first place from which Travis was forced to move. He grew up on the Isle de Jean Charles, an island off the coast occupied mostly by Native Americans, which in 2019 became the first community in the US to be bought out by the federal government because of climate change.

TRAVIS DARDAR: I’m originally from Isle de Jean Charles, Isle Jean Charles, an island about 60 miles south of Houma.

LAURA FLANDERS: What was that place like?

TRAVIS DARDAR: The place was like a paradise. It truly was. The beautiful trees, I remember I was there. You wanted softshell crabs like I just showed you, all you had to do was walk on the side to bayou and get ’em. All the shrimp you could catch. It was trees everywhere. It was just like a paradise.

LAURA FLANDERS: What did that place mean to your people?

-TRAVIS DARDAR: Well, I mean, everything. There’s people… Out of the 200 families they had living down there when I was a kid, they relocated most of the tribe to Schriever.

LAURA FLANDERS: Why did you have to leave the island?

TRAVIS DARDAR: Well, storm after storm after storm, we watched tree after tree disappear. I literally watched every tree in my yard and we’d come home from one hurricane, not to mention you could see through the house, you know, you would clean it up, rebuild and move back in. Us, we would rinse the mud out, bleach everything, and then sleep on blankets on the floor and, you know, move back in like that. And every storm, we’d get back and there’s two, three more trees missing, and then two, three more trees missing after the next one to the point where there was none left.

LAURA FLANDERS: What do you say to people that think that climate crisis and becoming a climate refugee is something that’s just happening to other people elsewhere in other countries?

TRAVIS DARDAR: Wake up. Very simple. Wake up, open your eyes. Climate refugee. More than once. More than once. I had to move from the island to Cameron and move from Cameron to here. That’s twice. That’s twice. And it’s just getting worse and worse and worse. There’s no doubt about it. The storms are getting worse. I mean, these last storms we had, the worst we’ve ever seen. There’s a reason for that. You know, I’m no scientist, but I’m more of an expert than the experts, you know? Living, it’s a whole different ballgame. I’ve seen it.

GENERAL RUSSEL L. HONORÉ: Well, we’re standing here in the night ward and 85% of it is still vacant.

LAURA FLANDERS: General, the last time you and I spoke was 10 years after Hurricane Katrina. When you look back at that hurricane, what stands out in your mind from those days 20 years ago?

GENERAL RUSSEL L. HONORÉ: Well, a lot of changes have been made in the government and how we respond to hurricanes. A lot of infrastructure has been improved. The above ground infrastructure in and around the Gulf Coast with the hurricane protection system that was put in around New Orleans, and yet there’s still challenges. Because the bottom line, Mother Nature can break anything built by man. You build a 21-foot levee, you get a 22-foot flood, either from rain or from surge from the storms.

LAURA FLANDERS: Do you feel secure that this community is safe now, is protected now, has the protections and the resilience and preparedness that it needs?

GENERAL RUSSEL L. HONORÉ: We’re better off, but in a real disaster, a real disaster, not an inconvenience, is going to break stuff and it’s going to kill people. A real disaster. Are we better prepared? Yes, but the Gulf is warmer than it’s ever been. When we look at it, last year was hotter than the year before. When we had Hurricane Milton and Helene come ashore, that is the hottest the Gulf has ever been. The hottest.

LAURA FLANDERS: General Honoré has been sounding an alarm about oil and gas expansion in his state for decades. What role are the oiL and gas and petroleum industries, chemical companies playing in this state right now?

GENERAL RUSSEL L. HONORÉ: Well, they demand big tax incentives to come here. But when the state give them the tax incentives, our roads don’t get down. We are last in transportation, last in healthcare, last in education. We may not be last in one area, thank God, the Mississippi, but we almost last in every measurable area because we give tax breaks to the big oil companies and petrochemical companies. Do they create jobs? Yes, but it comes as a risk because the more petrochemicals we get, the more greenhouse gas we create and the hotter that the Gulf get because we have become a sanctuary for LNG plants, liquified natural gas plants, which is created from natural gas. But in order to transport it, they have to process it. And when they process it, it emits methane. And that’s the number one driver of global warming. Our state in a way has sacrificed a lot for the rest of the country because we are a major oil and petrochemical producer. We are cancer alley to the people who live here.

LAURA FLANDERS: Venture Global’s latest megaplant could increase greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of 51 coal-fired power plants, say environmentalists. But unlike coal dust, you can’t see those emissions with the naked eye. Sharon Wilson of the group Oilfield Witness uses a special optical gas imaging camera to document the massive plumes of hydrocarbons emitting from the CP1 export facility as she shows in this video.

– [SHARON WILSON] We were looking at CP1 Venture Global LNG terminal, where they export U.S. LNG to other countries, and just massive amounts of pollution everywhere. Methane, mostly methane probably, but volatile organic compounds too. Climate harming and health-harming pollution just coming out everywhere. The only reason they are getting to do this is because you cannot see this pollution with your bare eyes. You have to have an OGI camera to see it. And if you could see it with your bare eye, you would see that there is just pollution everywhere, coming out all over the place. Clouds of it.

LAURA FLANDERS: Louisiana gives tax breaks worth billions of dollars to companies like Venture Global on the basis that the companies will bring in jobs. Here is Governor Jeff Landry this April announcing yet another terminal project near Lake Charles, about 22 miles north of Venture Global’s CP2.

GENERAL RUSSEL L. HONORÉ: And let me just say this again, every time these projects come to Louisiana, every time we announce these numbers, this gives the people of our state the ability to have their incomes raised.

LAURA FLANDERS: But who is actually benefiting? Kimberly Terrell, an environmental scientist at Tulane University’s Environmental Law Clinic, did research that revealed that Black, Indigenous, and minority populations here were getting few of the jobs in nearby petrochemical plants while suffering disproportionate impacts from the pollution.

KIMBERLY TERRELL: So my job at Tulane Environmental Law Clinic was to conduct independent research using publicly available data to address knowledge gaps related to how industrial pollution impacts communities. And so I’m a scientist, right? Like, I’m not a politician, I’m not an organizer. And I thought if I stick to science and data, I’m good.

LAURA FLANDERS: Sticking to the science didn’t turn out to be so good for Terrell.

KIMBERLY TERRELL: And then this past April, I published a study demonstrating that people of color are not getting their fair share of petrochemical jobs across the U.S., but Louisiana is one of the worst offenders. And so, you know, I mean, it’s like basic arithmetic, right? Proportion of people in the population who are of color, proportion in the industry, publicly available data. Like, anybody could do this work. And so the study was published, it got a lot of media attention and apparently the president of the university was really unhappy with that media attention. I got an email from somebody in the administration saying that major donors and elected officials viewed the clinic and the type of work that I do as an impediment to giving funding for Tulane generally and for a specific project. And so a week after that study hit the news, I was put under a gag order and I was told that I could not send any emails, I couldn’t publish any studies, I couldn’t talk to the outside world without each and every communication being pre-approved by the dean. Honestly, it took me a couple days to get over the shock, right? Like, you know, these were people who I respected in positions of leadership, and it was really hard to swallow.

LAURA FLANDERS: Tulane denies this version of the story, but Terrell received an email stating that the board was concerned that environmental activism was impeding the university’s effort to fundraise.

KIMBERLY TERRELL: I mean, you know, they put an email that the priority of the university is raising money for a particular project and that the work of the Environmental Law Clinic was standing in the way of that. You know, it’s surprisingly clear cut, but it is shocking. Absolutely. And it’s hard to believe. It’s hard for me to believe. I still struggle, you know, to process what happened at, you know, what I considered to be one of the most respected universities in the South and also my alma mater.

LAURA FLANDERS: Rather than submit to the university’s demands, Terrell quit.

– [REPORTER] News of former Tulane University researcher Dr. Kimberly Terrell’s resignation is causing an uproar, putting pressure on President Michael Fitts.

– [ANNE ROLFES]Instead of standing up for the Law Clinic and instead of standing up for the research he has decided to cave.

LAURA FLANDERS: So, 20 years after Hurricane Katrina, what lessons did you hope we might have learned by now?

KIMBERLY TERRELL: I think like in the aftermath of Katrina, I thought that there’s no way we would go back to business as usual, right? Like, there’s, you know, there’s no way we would operate under the assumption that an oil refinery isn’t going to be torn apart by a hurricane, right? With homes right there. We’ve been dealing with, you know, the impacts of industrial pollution for a very long time, and we’ve been dealing with a regulatory agency that is not protecting the health and wellbeing of the people of Louisiana. But when we have a federal administration that also doesn’t care about environmental health, then we see what little protection we have get stripped away.

LAURA FLANDERS: Donald Trump just says, “Drill, baby, drill”.

KIMBERLY TERRELL: Donald Trump doesn’t live next to an oil refinery. And he never will.

LAURA FLANDERS: But every day, more and more people are living near fossil fuel plants in Louisiana, and more and more tankers are cramming into the Gulf’s narrow waterways.

TRAVIS DARDAR: When I first moved to Cameron, you had three docks. Well, they slowly moved in to every single one of ’em, bought ’em out, what have you. Where the hell you going to put the boats when they take the last dock? As far as the fishing goes, there’s no way fishermen will coexist with this. We seen a 80% drop with one plant. Now they want to put five? I mean, hello. If one did that much damage, what in the hell you think is going to happen when they put the rest?

LAURA FLANDERS: We spoke to a fisherman yesterday who talked about the building of LNG plants where he used to fish, where his Indigenous people had their home and how he had had to be moved several times. How common is that, and why are more licenses being given to these plants? Are they safe from sea level rise themselves?

GENERAL RUSSEL L. HONORÉ: No. Many of ’em are built right above sea level rise. When you look at the ones down in Cameron Parish, Hackberry and in Cameron, we’ve seen 20-foot tidal surge before. Those plants could fail because of storm surge. Now, did they put walls around ’em? Yes, but again, you build a 20-foot wall, a 22-foot surge come. And we don’t know what would happen because that’s a lot of explorative material in the last storm that came through, they just released it in the air. And what’s that word, the fancy word? Well, it’s act of God. Force majeure. There’s nothing we could do about it, bro. We just let the stuff go in the air. But that come back to you in terms of next year hurricanes. Because the Gulf is going to be warmer and the impact on the terrain, like the fishermen, they suffer because the big ships they bring in, they have to constantly patrol that area and keep it deep enough, and it disturbs the ecosystem where the crabs and the shrimp are. So, the local people become a casualty of a LNG plan.

LAURA FLANDERS: 20 years after commanding federal troops in the Hurricane Katrina recovery, General Honoré is now directing a different army, the GreenARMY, an alliance of civic, environmental, and community organizations.

Do you worry about our democracy?

GENERAL RUSSEL L. HONORÉ: I do worry about our democracy. I worry about our democracy because for little less than 250 years, it survived based around our constitution that the purpose of government is to serve the people. And I see a switch here where the purpose of government is to serve the business. Our country has been captured by the fossil fuel industry. They run everything.

LAURA FLANDERS: So what difference does Trump make to that?

GENERAL RUSSEL L. HONORÉ: He’s a cheerleader for ’em because it’s about making money. It’s about being energy independent he’s talking about. We produce more fuel in the last four years prior to him coming into office than we’ve ever produced before. We were not in an energy emergency. We’ve never produced this amount of fuel before. So they have regulatory capture of both parties. In my estimation, it’s all about the moolah. And these people control the politicians through the donations. Go look at Senate donations and see where they’re coming from. And look, I drive a car that use fuel. I’m not stupid. I’m not going to protest here, I’m not going to use fuel again and not be able to take care of my horse or take care of my family. I’m not stupid. All we were saying in the organization I created, the GreenARMY, “Let’s find solutions for pollution.” And we were driving carbon rate down. And doing already didn’t make much of a difference in the bottom line to the companies, but now he’s telling the EPA, “You don’t have to go out and check all these power plants.”

LAURA FLANDERS: So if I’m hearing you right, it sounds to me like you’re saying he’s kind of like putting lighter fluid on an already existing crisis.

GENERAL RUSSEL L. HONORÉ: And we got a crisis, global warming. It’s an impact. And as I said earlier, The destruction that’s coming from the increase in fires and floods and hurricanes and tornadoes, and the scientists say it’s related to global warming. The heating of the earth. And what he’s said to the companies, “Go do what you want.” And that’s scary as hell.

TRAVIS DARDAR: I’d probably take you all around this way to. It’s a lot closer than the Gulf.

LAURA FLANDERS: How would all of this have been different maybe 10, 20 years ago, or even in the time of your grandparents?

TRAVIS DARDAR: Well, 10, 20 years ago on, there’s a lot of land that’s gone. A lot of land that I’ve seen that was there before, and that’s not there now. Now, my grandpa on the other hand, what I’ve seen, imagine what he’s seen. A lot of it just disappeared.

LAURA FLANDERS: And do you connect this to climate change?

TRAVIS DARDAR: Oh, yes, definitely. Definitely. It’s just back then, you know, when somebody said climate change, I’d look right through them just like any other fishermen would because, you know, I didn’t know I was living it.

LAURA FLANDERS: So when you think about your kids, would you have liked them to go into fishing?

TRAVIS DARDAR: Not anymore. It’s just everything’s against us.

LAURA FLANDERS: Does that make you sad?

TRAVIS DARDAR: Very. You know, I grew up doing this. I provided for my family this whole time off of fishing. Paid the bills. I don’t know what to feel anymore. I’m kind of numb to it all, I guess. I mean, you don’t know what your future holds.

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