$100B Louisiana Oil Industry Flooding Sets Fossil Fuel Profiteers Crazy

By Deborah Dupré

Today, as southern Louisiana is in a state of emergency due to the second deadly “1000-Year Louisiana Flood” this year, still claiming lives, the state’s Big Oil profiteers are wringing their hands, not due to the 13 deaths nor some 40,000 residents’ homelessness. Fossil fuel profits are in jeopardy, Big Profits. The $100 billion energy infrastructure of oil-cursed Louisiana is threatened by combined rising sea levels and erosion. Fossil fuel facilities intended to remain above ground are going under, reports Bloomberg on Thursday, maintaining the oil mafia’s code of silence about justifiably suspected refinery leaks this week.

[Above: “Photo shows land loss due to sea level rise. The people of Louisiana are rapidly losing the land they have lived on for generations, in large part due to the activity of the fossil fuel industry.” Credit: Greenpeace)

Emotional ‘Louisiana Flood Adopt a Family’ Soars

Under this week’s Louisiana Flood articles harsh, comments have been slung regarding people “choosing to live” in flood-prone areas. Bloomberg notes, however, that even oil and gas-related facilities built by the most highly skilled and highly paid technicians and engineers, however, face the same ever-increasing environmental crisis, according to Bloomberg.

Louisiana’s coastline is rapidly receding, as coastlines are globally — whether drilled and “developed” or not.

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In South Louisiana, however, as sea level rises and erosion continues, endless miles of tangles of pipeline are exposed to corrosive seawater and refineries, tank farms and ports are at risk. That means, as this author highlighted again this week, that in turn, residents throughout South Louisiana also are at risk.

“Refinery accidents often happen during severe weather; flood waters causing the most damage, overflowing treatment tanks, sending oil and its toxic chemicals into nearby canals and neighborhoods. The worst, most deadly damage from Hurricane Katrina was from flooded oil refineries. Media has kept a tight lid on refinery incidents throughout this event to date.

“The petrochemical industry continues to  lack transparency and accountability regarding emergency preparedness in a region tested time and again by catastrophic events,” reports Anna Hrybyk, Louisiana Bucket Brigade program manager in a commentary on the present Louisiana flood.

READ: Deadly Louisiana Flood Coverup. 16 Startling Truths

Mother Nature Turns Back on Louisiana Big Oil

Fossil fuel energy consultant and former director of Port Fourchon and others say that nature is no longer protecting the vast maze of refineries, pipelines and fossil fuel-related support facilities.

Louisiana has had an expensive plan to “protect both its backbone industry and its citizens” from the dangerous flooding threat. It also has, however, a $2 billion deficit looming next year.  The oil-rich, oil-cursed, cash-poor state lacks funds to adequately address global warming’s sea level rising crisis. This means Big Oil is facing new pressures to bankroll critical environmental projects — by choice or by force.

“The industry down there has relied on the natural environment to protect its infrastructure, and that environment is now unraveling,” said Kai Midboe, the director of policy research at the Water Institute of the Gulf. “They need to step up.”

Every year in Louisiana, over 20 square miles of land is swallowed by rising waters of the Gulf of Mexico and erosion.

“The oil and gas sector is already losing an average of $14 billion a year to environmental threats to its infrastructure, according to a study by America’s Wetlands Foundation and Entergy Corp. By 2030, those losses could exceed $350 billion.” (Bloomberg)

“The problems are real. We need to deal with them now,” Midboe told executives. “The public funding needed to protect this infrastructure is going to fall far short.”

In the catastrophic flood from heavy rainfall and water overrunning levees along several tributaries this week, Exxon Mobil Corp. shut units at its Baton Rouge refinery, the fourth-largest in the U.S. Activists began gathering in New Orleans this week to demand the oil giant remain shut. Exxon finally admitted (after email evidence surfaced)  that it not only knew as far back as 1981 that burning fossil fuels increases global warming due to the buildup of greenhouse gases. It also admitted continuing to pay non-scientific operations to create and repeat propaganda to convince the naive public that there is no scientific evidence for a link between fossil fuel use and global warming.

The oil giant took out full-page advertorials in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal with titles such as “Climate Change: A Degree of Uncertainty” and “With Climate Change, What We Don’t Know Can Hurt Us.” (Rolling Stones)

Above: Bill McKibben of 350.0rg on Why Exxon Is the Next Big Climate Fight:

In November, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman opened a fraud investigation. He subpoenaed the company for 39 years’ worth of internal memos, e-mails and other documents related to climate change. The FBI is circling the 70,000-person company. Its alleged fraud has influenced mainly right-wingers to become staunch anthropogenic climate change deniers.

People from across the Gulf region are preparing to protest an upcoming auction of huge chunks of the Gulf of Mexico for oil drilling. The auction will be held at the infamous Superdome, where Hurricane Katrina human rights abuses and violence have crossed the minds of many Louisiana surivors of today’s flodding catastrophe.

A march on August 20th, called “Gulf Coast Interdependence Day,” organized by over  20 local and national groups united under the vision that Another Gulf is Possible, calls for the Obama Administration to halt to the auction and all new drilling projects in the Gulf South.

On the 21st, organizers will hold a “Just Transition Solidarity Summit,” aiming to “deepen and ground the personal, interpersonal, and systemic dynamics of oppression, solidarity, privilege and power,” and endeavor to imagine a fair and equitable transformation out of a fossil fuel-driven economy. On the 24th, the day of the slated auction, an action directed at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is slated to hold the agency accountable for trying to lease over 20 million acres of the embattled Gulf of Mexico. (Greenpeace)

Even “Exxon investors are worried about how global efforts to curtail rising temperatures will hurt the company’s profits”, Bloomberg says.

This week, approximately 40,000 families have become displaced in southeastern Louisiana. That’s another 80,000 plus American environmental refugees. The death toll stands today at 13. An untold number of flood swamped homes have not been checked and officials say it will take another two weeks for search and rescue workers to reach them.. Officials also say they believe that the total dead toll will be fewer than Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath caused.

Louisiana Flood Death Toll ‘Unknown,’ ‘Probably Fewer Than Hurricane Katrina’

“Unquestionably, oil and gas activity has impacts,” said energy consultant Falgout, who owns large swaths of marshland affected by erosion and subsidence. “But oil and gas did what government let it do, like everyone else.”

Chris Dalbomb of the Tulane University Water Institute says: “I don’t think any of us can say we are not responsible to some extent.”

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