Martha’s Vineyard. Cape May. Rehoboth. These coastal communities are famous for their charm and for the people who frequent them, like President Joe Biden, who visited his beach home last weekend.
On the East Coast, beaches and towns like Rehoboth are so well protected, it’s easy to take for granted the sense of tranquility that visitors and residents alike enjoy.
On America’s forgotten Gulf Coast, it’s another story. Our beaches are bulldozed without regard for wildlife, fisheries or the communities they support. Our coastal wetlands are dredged and filled with concrete. Pollution of our air, land and water is so common, it’s a fact of life for those of us who live there.
That’s why we’re spending our summer in Rehoboth: to show you what’s happening to our communities and our coast – and to ask for your help. We’ll be here sharing our food, our culture, and our stories. We want to show you the harm that’s being done to our homes and our way of life. Because if it can happen to us in Louisiana, it can happen here in Rehoboth.
The story of our Gulf Coast is one of resilience in the face of injustice and neglect. It’s where the fossil fuel industry has littered the landscape with abandoned oil wells, infected low-income and historically Black neighborhoods with toxin-spewing chemical plants, and covered wetlands with pipelines and oil rigs.
In the southeastern corner of Louisiana, pollution from the oil and gas industry has earned one area the gruesome moniker of “Cancer Alley.” In our hometown of Lake Charles, the same industry has been expanding for decades, killing plants, birds, and other wildlife — not to mention our friends and family.
Now, the same malignant industry plans to metastasize through the wetlands outside of town and down the coast. Not content with their record-shattering profits, oil and gas executives are plotting to build nearly a dozen terminals to liquefy and ship gas overseas.
All this in the same region that has been ravaged by increasingly powerful hurricanes and where many families, including one of our own, still live in FEMA trailers. The cruelty of building more climate-warming facilities in an area already being sacrificed to climate change is not lost on us.
Yet the industry loves its positive spin. It claims it’s producing “American energy” to secure “energy independence.” What it never discloses is that its shiny new product — the liquified gas it spins as “natural” — doesn’t benefit American businesses or families. It is a fossil fuel that’s warming our planet. And it’s destined for foreign markets, often in hostile nations like China.
Today, the industry claims they can liberate Europe from Russian gas. Sadly, our government is falling for it. From the start of the invasion, the industry has pushed what it always wanted: more gas exports from the U.S., but not once have they mentioned that it would take half a decade from now to build a new gas export terminal.
Rather than energy independence for America or freedom from tyranny for Europe, the oil and gas industry has its eyes on the one value it stays true to: higher profits. Worst of all, they are more than willing to sacrifice an entire region of our country to achieve their goals.
No one should ask you to abandon your home or your way of life just so they could line their pockets. Yet that’s what thousands of Gulf Coast families are expected to do for the oil and gas industry. What would you think if they did the same thing to your community here?
President Biden, when you see us at Rehoboth Beach this summer, talk with us. Join us for a boudin ball, some crawfish, or a bowl of gumbo. And when you get back to D.C., tell members of FERC to stop permitting the terminals that are destroying our coast and our culture.
James Hiatt is a Lake Charles native, a former oil and gas worker and Southwest Louisiana coordinator for the nonprofit Louisiana Bucket Brigade. Roishetta Ozane is organizing director at Healthy Gulf and is the founder, director and CEO of the Vessel Project of Louisiana.
