I grew up along the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Texas.

Louisiana is, frankly, a shitshow when it comes to making smart long-term decisions. Corruption is rampant and businesses generally have politicians in their pockets. Those businesses are able to effectively offload their externalities, so they are incentivized to destroy the environment while reaping the short-term profits.

If you want any prediction as to how things will go in Louisiana, the easy answer is "poorly" and you'll be right most of the time. It's honestly hard to expect better from a place whose largest city's motto is "Let the good times roll". The local culture is just deeply broken.

At the same time, I'm really disappointed that this article almost completely glossed over one of the major challenges facing Louisiana that has absolutely nothing to do with climate change. The only tangential mention is:

> Last November, Louisiana broke ground on a $2.3 billion project to shunt some of the muddy flows of Mississippi under and past Ironton into degraded wetlands to the west. The project is being financed largely with settlement money from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, and aims to halt losses of wetlands by mimicking the Mississippi River’s historic path.

When the article notes:

> Since 1932, the state has lost more than 1,900 square miles of land, an area equal to the state of Delaware

It implies that the loss was primarily climate change, but that's not true at all.

Most of this loss was driven by the way the Army Corps of Engineers has managed the Mississippi River. For millions of years, the Mississippi River went through periodic oscillations. As the river dumped more and more sediment into the delta, the delta would build up until eventually it started blocking the flow. The majority of the flow would then shift to the Atchafalaya river. That river would empty into the Gulf and its delta would build up sediment. Eventually, it would reach a level where the Mississippi was again the easiest route to the Gulf and flow would change again. That periodic meandering route to the Gulf is what created the entire southern half of Louisiana and is why it is such astonishingly fertile land (well, not so much "land" now).

But for the past hundred years, the Army Corps of Engineers has been instructed to build floodwalls along the Mississippi to avoid floods in the midwest. Those floodwalls increase the overall flow rate so that by the time the river reaches southern Louisiana, it's moving too fast to deposit sediment in the delta like it used to and instead it gets washed farther out into the Gulf.

At the same time, the Corps has been responsible for keeping most of the water flowing into the Gulf going through the Mississippi side instead of the Atchafalaya so that the Port of New Orleans doesn't get hurt economically. That also means that the river isn't allowed to meander and build up sediment across the southern edge of the state.

If you think of Louisiana as a boot, this is why the "toe" (where the Mississippi dumps into the Gulf) is getting longer while the instep (the middle of the state where the Atchafalaya) is disappearing.

All of this was true and has been happening for decades before any significant climate change occurred. It's still 100% human-caused, and known, and preventable. But it's not from carbon in the atmosphere and sea level rise, though those are now exacerbating it.

If you want to learn more about engineering the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers, read John McPhee's Atchfalaya, written almost 40 years ago: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya

If you want to learn more about Louisiana's paradoxical culture around the environment, read Arlie Russell Hochschild's "Strangers in Their Own Land".