As it turns out with the now-halted and controversial Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project, the climate alarmism behind it injected into its formation by the Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards Administration ended up hoisting it onto its own petard into suspension, if not downsizing or even termination.
Upon taking office, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry expressed skepticism that the project, the initial stages of which were underway and which would cost $3 billion. Its goal was to divert sediment from the Mississippi River at points around 60 to 70 miles above its outlet into the Barataria Basin in order to rebuild about 21 square miles of land over 50 years. However, there would be spillover effects including destruction of marine habitats that would disrupt oyster and shrimping industries plus other marine life (pushing one species to the brink of extinction) and disrupting negatively flood insurance administration in Plaquemines Parish which would bear the brunt of and opposed from the start the project. The final analysis of it concluded that it would convey slightly higher benefits compared to costs in resources and damage.
Then last month Landry announced a halt of work on it. Last week, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers revoked the environmental permit associated with it, citing the suspension. But it also listed other factors into the decision, including that the state “deliberately withheld information … that the state knew it should provide … [for] consideration whether to include that information” for the purposes of issuing the permit. In other words, the Edwards Administration deceptively kept information from the Corps that could have altered the final decision.
Landry said a hidden report was to blame, which he said indicated the state would have to pay in the neighborhood of $50 million annually to provide dredging. Edwards, now safely away from the levers of power ensconced as (of all things) an environmental lawyer, who for eight years acted as the most relentlessly partisan governor in the state’s history, used his tiresome it-bounces-off-of-me-and-twice-onto-you usual schtick in commenting that Landry was wrong and scapegoating that served as an example of “why partisan politics has no place in Louisiana’s coastal restoration work.”
That assertion is worthy of cringing and guffawing. Cringeworthy, because Edwards didn’t deny the report in fact wasn’t made available to the Corps in its decision-making process, and deserving of a good belly laugh because coastal restoration work in the state under him was infused with politics through and through, principally infected with the faith that he shares in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming welded onto the two coastal master plans that appeared during his years in office – plans from which came the project that served as the linchpin of their recommendations.
Specifically, the plans accepted uncritically CAGW-imagined changes in eustatic sea level rise that bear no relationship to historical trends or current reality. The sequestered report based its modeling on relative sea level rise, the difference being that includes not only sea level rise emanating from the oceans but also rise caused by land subsidence. Dispassionate data analysis of the latest plan showed at most a 200 cm ESLR was appropriate up to 2100 – which itself is over twice the historical average the rend of which hasn’t changed including the most recent annual data – but instead it based project priorities on a higher 770 cm rise, and the report, which came out a year before the latest plan and using RSLR adding subsidence, for its analysis doubled that to 1500 cm for its main emphasis.
The significance of this is that this wild overestimation reduces the benefits and increases the cost of the project and its maintenance, specifically the dredging about which Landry spoke. The higher the RSLR, the less effective the diversion becomes as it has to increase in volume to keep up with the supposedly rising water/lowering land. Further, dredging has to commence about a dozen years in order to keep enough volume flowing into making new land.
Thus, Edwards’ CAGW fantasy assumptions incorporated into the plan that filtered into the report reduced the benefits and raised the costs of it, information not made available then to the Corps. And as it rated the environmental impact only slightly positive, this information on balance had it been known by the Corps might have produced a negative opinion and deny permit issuance. The Edwards Administration invested in the project had every motive to suppress the report, and special interests wedded to climate alarmism and its former apparatchiks continue to try to deflect from this.
Further, had the report used a realistic assessment of RSLR, it would have argued for a scaled-down version that was less costly both in resources needed and damage done. This option the Landry Administration has floated as a resolution.
The irony, of course, is that the very evidence-free CAGW belief held by Edwards and his mandarins likely would have sabotaged the permit for the project they wanted, and still may as the Corps reevaluates it. Let’s hope more realistic data are used this time and perhaps a smaller-scale project will reap enough benefit without the economic and habitat destruction and cost to taxpayers for it to continue in some way.
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