America’s New Climate Delusion

Gray Stream’s family has thrived in Louisiana oil country for generations. One great-aunt was the heir to an oil fortune. (She was also a prominent Fabergé-egg collector.) His grandmother inherited large tracts of land, partially dedicated to oil and gas production. His father opened a country club in Lake Charles, where the tanks and twisted towers of an oil refinery arc along the shore. The evening I met Stream, he had spent all day helping pick the next president of a local university that had recently opened an “LNG Center of Excellence” to support the liquid-natural-gas industry.

But Stream is trying something new, something that might make him look like an outlier in his family: He wants to be among the first in the state to try stuffing the carbon emissions from petroleum back underground, ostensibly for all time. This business, carbon capture and sequestration—Stream intends to do the sequestration part—is widely said to be a necessary, if untested, solution to climate change. And the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s blockbuster climate bill, has set up the country to spend billions of dollars, maybe tens of billions, to spur the industry’s expansion and make it profitable.

Stream’s new company, Gulf Coast Sequestration, is hoping to get a permit—once the state starts issuing them—to inject carbon dioxide into vacant pockets under his family’s properties. Louisiana’s geology is ideal for storing carbon, and because the IRA is giving oil and gas companies a tax credit for capturing and stashing their carbon, the industry is all in. Roughly one-third of proposed carbon-capture-and-sequestration projects in the United States are here. For Stream, this business is appealing not as a climate solution but as a way to keep thriving in oil country. It’s a complement to his other ventures, which include a Texas-based energy business, a company that manages oil and gas exploration on his family’s lands, and a wetlands-restoration service. “You always try to keep creating new value for the future,” he told me.  

In some ways, Louisiana’s carbon-capture push fits neatly into the climate plan that the world’s governments recently agreed to. At last winter’s United Nations climate conference, in Dubai, the assembled countries committed to collectively moving away from fossil fuels and aggressively pursuing lower-emissions technologies—including carbon capture. The agreement aims to avoid more of the kind of climate-related damage Louisiana already lives with, as more intense storms and higher sea levels erode the coast and push people inland.

But carbon capture is, if anything, helping the oil and gas industry justify its continued operations, and the march of new LNG terminals along Louisiana’s shoreline. The question of whether climate change will reshape our world has a clear answer: It already has. But the question of how people will reshape our world in response is wide open. One possibility is that people will make dramatic changes—creating entirely new industries meant to curb emissions—and still fail to alter the fate of places such as Louisiana.

The liquid-natural-gas facilities that have been going up along the Gulf Coast are one of the great contradictions of Joe Biden’s presidency. In recent years, LNG expansion has been justified by American foreign-policy interests—supplying European allies with gas to replace what they had sourced from Russia. As demand in Europe for American LNG is set to peak within a year, thanks to Europe’s renewable build-out, the security argument for exporting natural gas is falling apart. But the economic argument is not. By the end of last year, China was becoming American LNG’s new favorite customer, and the United States was the world’s top exporter of LNG.

Before the U.S. had a foreign-policy reason for selling natural gas, though, it had a climate argument for supporting the industry. Two decades ago, gas executives said expanding natural-gas production would help wean the world off dirtier energy sources, such as coal. And it did, for a while. During the Obama years, America’s progress in lowering emissions came largely from swapping out coal for gas. But after the fracking boom left the country awash in more gas than anyone wanted to buy, Congress lifted its ban on gas exports, which changed the math of gas emissions. To transport natural gas, it must be supercooled to a liquid, loaded onto refrigerated tankers, and then regasified someplace across the world. This all takes energy to do. LNG’s climate advantage over coal becomes questionable, even nonexistent, especially if the gas delays other countries’ transition to renewable energy sources.

Earlier this year, the Biden administration paused approvals of new LNG-export facilities, citing the need for climate-related vetting and to suss out the exports’ effect on domestic gas prices (they have reportedly raised the cost of gas for Americans). That was welcome news to John Allaire, who is determined to shut down the LNG plants next to his property in Cameron, Louisiana. He’s the reason the state knows that a nearby plant built by Venture Global flared almost daily during its first months of operation, despite a promise that it would do so rarely; he also reports any permit violations he sees at the site of a now-paused Commonwealth plant, which borders his own yard.

Allaire isn’t against fossil fuels. He was an oil and gas man for 30 years—an environmental engineer who worked in refining and then exploration and drilling. He’s also a made-in-America kind of guy, who flies an American flag by his driveway and wears an American-flag baseball cap. He’s proud that the projects he worked on fueled American industry. But destroying the fragile coastal ecosystem to send natural resources to other countries—especially when, in his view, the U.S. and everyone else will have to go fully renewable in the next 30 or 40 years—just makes us chumps, he told me.

After all, burning more gas doesn’t square with the world’s agreement to transition away from fossil fuels. The Biden administration has set a goal of 2025 for a pollution-free energy sector and 2050 for an economy that produces no net emissions at all, which will certainly require more renewables (if not necessarily 100 percent). Emissions are meant to go down, sharply. But, should each of the new LNG plants under construction or planned come online, the U.S. will be set up to keep exporting LNG for at least 30 years from now, contributing more emissions annually than the entire European Union. The idea of capturing that much carbon isn’t even on the table. And the Biden administration’s pause could fall apart soon: A Trump-appointed federal judge sided with Louisiana and 15 other red states that sought to strike it down. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill celebrated the decision, noting LNG’s “enormous and positive impact on Louisiana, supplying clean energy for the entire world, and providing good jobs here at home”—an additional 18,000 jobs and $4.4 billion of contributions to its economy, according to the state. (Most of the jobs that the industry has created have been temporary construction jobs.) A Harris administration may fight to keep the pause in place, or it may not; if Donald Trump is reelected, he has promised that the LNG building spree will resume.

Allaire doesn’t want to abandon this quiet and rugged place, where migrating birds flock to the brackish marsh and he can walk sea-glass-strewn beach for miles. But if LNG plants presage future dangers from climate change, they also compound the work of surviving on Louisiana’s eroding coast. The last hurricane left a 30-foot shrimp boat marooned next door to Allaire’s plot, several hundred feet inland. The LNG plant beside Allaire plans to build a sea wall. But what if a storm still damages the facility? Explosions are not out of the question at LNG terminals. Allaire, his RV, his garden, his duck pond, and his three dogs would be right in the middle of a disaster zone.

Already, the plants are giving people a reason to leave. Some locals certainly think as the attorney general does, that the plants could be an economic boon. But around Cameron, if you don’t work for the oil and gas companies, you’re likely fishing or shrimping. When massive tankers come to pick up the liquid gas, “you hear the wave coming way before you see it”—wakes that can make fishing boats nose-dive under the water, Travis Dardar, a shrimper who worked in Cameron for years, told me. If another plant is built here, he said, no fisherman will be able to stay.

Climate change had already driven Dardar inland to Cameron: He grew up on Isle de Jean Charles, a largely Native community in the bayou now famous for being almost entirely displaced by rising seas. But any number of bayou towns are emptying out. Justin Solet, a former oil-rig worker, drove me through his hometown, Dulac, which consists of one road flanked by water on either side. When he was young, the bayou teemed with life, before the BP oil spill in 2010. Now the water is rising, in part because pipeline canals have sliced away the land, and the school, the grocery store—everything but one restaurant—have shut down. “This is forced migration with a smile,” Solet told me—not an exodus, but a slow trickle of people moving from town to town, until the old ways of life are too frayed to hold. The Inflation Reduction Act is now funding plans for communities like these to relocate more deliberately: The Houma Nation—which has some 17,000 members, including both Dardar and Solet, in six Louisiana parishes—received $56.5 million to help keep communities safer from storms but also to help them make a plan to leave, eventually.

Dardar’s second move—to Kaplan, farther inland still—had a different source of funding. His kids had developed health issues that his wife, Nicole, suspects are connected to the LNG terminals’ flaring. Dardar’s leadership among fishermen whose docks have been taken over by LNG tankers was causing issues in town: Nicole told me their family was followed one day by a black SUV. Then came Hurricanes Delta and Laura in 2020; they returned to find that all that remained of their two trailers, three trucks, and three boats was the concrete slab the trailers had sat on. Venture Global had offered several times to pay Dardar to move away, he told me. (The company did not reply to my question about this.) After refusing twice, he took the third offer in 2023. It was time to go.

The oil and gas industry, by contrast, is building to stay, however shaky the idea of siting LNG terminals on spits of land that feel more than anything like fingernails of sand afloat in the sea. And carbon capture is becoming a key part of the industry’s argument for its future—more emissions aren’t a problem, it says, if they can be stashed underground.

Precisely because of oil and gas exploration, geologists know more about the underground parts of Louisiana than almost any other place in the world, which makes it appealing for carbon capture, says Daniel Sutter, the vice president for storage and energy solutions at Climeworks, a start-up that plans to store captured gas beneath Gray Stream’s family land. Southwestern Louisiana has the right layers of reliable caprock and porous sandstone formations that could hypothetically trap carbon gas for hundreds of years, after which it will dissolve into the salt water deep underground and no longer be a flight risk. But Louisiana also has thousands of boreholes from abandoned oil and gas wells, which leak some 300,000 metric tons of methane each year. Skeptics wonder if they’d serve as escape routes for injected carbon too. (Sutter told me those wells either aren’t deep enough to matter or are vetted for safety by a review process.)

Still, no one has done carbon capture and sequestration successfully at scale yet. Even the most hyped projects have managed to capture and store only a fraction of what they promised to. Climeworks’ job, as part of a consortium funded by the Department of Energy, is to prove it can do the capture part: It’ll build a facility demonstrating that siphoning carbon dioxide out of the air, rather than at an industrial operation, is possible (and economically feasible, which it currently is far from being).

If everything goes as planned, the carbon that Climeworks captures will count against the world’s total emissions budget, and will perhaps have a marginal benefit for stabilizing Earth’s atmosphere. But most of the other carbon-capture projects proposed in Louisiana are attached to oil and gas endeavors; Stream told me that the carbon from the Climeworks project would represent a small part of his company’s portfolio, which would focus more on commercial clients. The oil and gas industry argues that the world still needs its product, and that this semblance of carbon stewardship justifies them providing it. In a sense, the U.S. government agrees: IRA tax credits cover (at a somewhat lower rate) even projects in which oil companies use the captured carbon for more oil drilling. In those cases, the carbon goes toward forcing more petroleum from nearly empty wells—perhaps the least climate-friendly use of the technology imaginable.

People involved in carbon capture say that humanity needs it. And the IPCC has said that, without carbon removal, countries’ current emissions-cutting plans will not avoid the most significant climate impacts. But the same IPCC report ranks carbon capture and sequestration among the most expensive solutions, with the least potential for impact. At the United Nations’ COP meeting in Dubai last year, then–U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry warned that carbon capture must be used judiciously, and not as an excuse for building more fossil-fuel projects. Some academics warn that the IRA tax credit could offer exactly that.

In Louisiana, new LNG terminals are now being proposed with carbon capture attached. Each new terminal represents greenhouse-gas emissions of up to 9 million tons. Carbon capture cannot yet hope to keep up. Climeworks’ DOE-funded project hopes to capture just 1 million tons a year, and likely won’t begin building until several years from now. Meanwhile, Louisiana produces more than 216 million tons of greenhouse gases a year. The entire state is operating under a logic that cannot hold: As its population faces acute consequences of climate change, its central, carbon-heavy industry is digging in its heels. Even if carbon capture is technically necessary as long as other decarbonization attempts fall short, it very quickly starts to look less like a solution to climate change and more like part of a future that the fossil-fuel industry designed for itself. Louisiana is the prototype.