Louisiana advocate reflects on two decades of climate devastation and the choices that are shaping her home and our climate future
Published August 28, 2025
By Jane Patton, US Fossil Economy Campaign Manager at the Center for International Environmental Law
I was five the first time I saw a tree ripped from the ground by hurricane winds.
Andrew. Ivan. Katrina. Rita. Gustav. Isaac. The 2016 floods. Laura. Zeta. Ida.
My memory is pockmarked by named and unnamed storms ravaging my home state. When we lost
power for days after Andrew, my siblings and I ate so many cold Pop-Tarts in that sweaty, interminable week that I now seek them out as hurricane comfort food.
The first time I hunkered down in my own place, not yet 18, was during my first semester of college (Ivan). It was 4 years later when I evacuated to my grandmother’s house, after picking up her best friend of 65 years from a nursing home without power (Gustav). We drank Irish whiskey nightcaps and did crossword puzzles together until the power came back on at home.
The first time I helped someone ‘muck and gut’ their house wasn’t even a named storm – just hard rain, bad zoning, and even worse luck (2016 floods). I made a friend for life when I welcomed into my home someone I knew only from Twitter with her five children and two cats, running from a storm that shared her name and wrecked her town (Laura). Two months later, my family rode out a direct hit, the first hurricane to pass over our 100-year-old New Orleans shotgun home (Zeta).
A year later, my husband and nephew celebrated their birthdays – a day apart – with grocery store cupcakes in an Alabama hotel (Ida). We spent the next 10 hot, humid, confusing days at my dad’s house on generator power until we could go home.
This recounting skips Katrina and Rita. They often don’t feel like my stories to tell. Yes, my home city of Baton Rouge was forever changed by the storm. I volunteered for graveyard shifts at a triage center in the LSU Fieldhouse, chatting with Kansas National Guardsman on the door to stay awake. My parents gave up their house to host and transport a rotating crew of radio newsmen, station DJs, and broadcast engineers — crucial but often-forgotten first responders in a crisis.
But I didn’t ride out the storm itself. I was incidentally out of town, and my return home two days later was harrowing—revealing a landscape forever changed in the only place I’ve ever called home. Katrina and Rita marked the first time I witnessed news companies filming stranded people instead of helping them to safety. It was the first time I saw hungry and terrified people labeled as ‘looters’ and shot at while their wealthier, whiter neighbors were helped as ‘foragers’ or ‘refugees’. It was an omen.
Since then, every storm, every hotter– and longer-than-the-last summer, and every permit granted despite vocal community opposition has reinforced a key lesson of Katrina: This is not ‘natural’. This is the disastrous and deadly combination of fossil fuel expansion, financial complicity, and government abandonment.
Despite incredible acts of community protection and collective resurgence, the policy choices that could protect us from future devastation are not being made. The US government is actively retreating from warning or repairing us by decimating weather data collection, weakening chemical safety rules, and canceling FEMA disaster assistance. Just last year, communities won hard-fought protections from chemical plant emissions, but the Trump administration just exempted dozens of chemical facilities from those rules. Louisiana leaders continue to actively court new fossil fuel projects, even bypassing standard approval processes. They’re ignoring our inevitable fate if we don’t roll back our reliance on fossil fuels.
And the costs of living in harm’s way are skyrocketing. My annual homeowner premiums have more than doubled since I bought my home in 2017. On average, New Orleans metro homeowners spend nearly 1/5 of their median annual income on insurance coverage. Those standard homeowner insurance policies, like mine, don’t cover flood damage — a necessity, not a luxury. The cost of my separate flood insurance policy has also doubled for me since 2017. So now, my monthly insurance tab amounts to a second mortgage payment — despite having never made a claim on either policy.
Across Louisiana, over 42,000 people — 9% of policyholders — have dropped flood coverage since 2022. My own mother had to choose between adequate insurance and groceries on her fixed income. When the 2016 floods hit Baton Rouge, she scraped out of pocket to fix her water-logged house. It’s still not fully repaired.
Worse, my home insurer – the only one who would offer me a policy aside from Louisiana’s over-burdened last-resort public option – is among a cadre of young insurance companies accredited only by a tiny ratings firm with a questionable track record.
Every homeowner or renter I know in Louisiana is worried about losing their insurance or the consequences of increased insurance premiums; I’ve already been dropped by two insurance companies in less than a decade. Renters live with dread that their landlords might pass insurance increases onto them. This is on top of a housing market already enduring gentrification, a flood of short-term rentals, and disaster capitalism across the city.
Families in Louisiana are being priced out of the only homes they’ve ever known, while the red carpet is being laid out for oil, gas, and chemical companies to expand right next door. Fossil fuel infrastructure is magnifying storm risks and poisoning communities. These facilities emit not only climate-wrecking gases but also chemicals that threaten health, safety, and life—even on a calm day.
Louisiana leaders are now proposing “clearing” residents from 17,000 acres of land in Ascension Parish for new fossil industry development. The largely Black river community of Modeste would be forced out, but residents haven’t even been consulted. As you can imagine, people have questions:
- Who decides what our property is worth and how, or whether we even have a clear title for it, if it was passed down through generations?
- How will we keep our families together if everyone has to move elsewhere?
- Most importantly, where can we even go, when this is the only place we’ve ever lived and nowhere seems truly safe from climate change?
These are not small things – these are existential and heartbreaking choices.
Despite having worked and been educated around the globe, south Louisiana is the only place I’ve ever called home. At least five generations of my family are buried here. How will I lay flowers on my grandmother’s grave – the very one who took me in and fed me whiskey after Gustav – if I can no longer live here?
Our pollution and climate change woes are being caused by the fossil fuel industry, backed by the complicity of banks, insurers, and politicians. Our leaders claim we ‘depend on’ fossil fuels, but the industry makes up only 4.5% of Louisiana’s annual revenue and doesn’t deliver nearly the jobs it promises to the people it often promises them.
Climate change will cost Louisianians at least $4 billion in property damage. The toxic emissions from fossil fuel facilities cost lives and massive healthcare bills every year. Continuing to allow the tax-exempt LNG buildout in Louisiana will cost parishes more than $21 billion in lost revenue in the next 15 years. We are losing a football field of coastal land every 100 minutes. Yet our politicians continue to choose the oil and gas industry over the survival of this state and its people.
I know I will have to leave. I have already begun to pre-process the grief of losing this place that lives in my soul, just as I live in it. I find myself tattooing symbols of Louisiana on my skin, to keep it with me always – a pelican, a cypress tree, a magnolia bloom, and figures for each of my family members.
We’ll have to leave, but we owe it to ourselves, our home, and our ancestors to fight for every day that we get to stay.
Our leaders could choose a just transition— to solar, wind, and well-paying jobs improving energy efficiency, electrifying buildings, and repairing abandoned wells. They could choose to protect our air, water, and us. Insurers and banks could opt to stop investing in and financing destructive fossil fuels. Leaders could finally act in the people’s interest. These things are possible, precedented, and even profitable, but they are choosing not to do it.
We have to make and demand different choices. We deserve so much better than the future planned for us by the fossil fuel industry. We have to plan our own future, to make sure we even have one.