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The community of Cameron Parish, Louisiana has skin in the game.
On paper, the names look like a roster of nursing home residents: Rita and Katrina, Ike and Gustav, Harvey and Laura and Delta.
“I mean, literally, those are all hurricanes since 2005,” James Hiatt, the founder of the environmental justice organization For a Better Bayou, told me. “The storm that hit southwest Louisiana before that was Hurricane Audrey in 1957. So before 2005, we’d gone 50 years without really any storm.”
Now, though, few American communities are more obviously in the crosshairs of climate change than Louisiana’s Cameron Parish. It’s not just the influx of supercharged storms, which have repeatedly wiped out homes and driven those with the means to get out to flee north. The 5,000-or-so remaining residents of the parish, which borders Texas and the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana’s lower lefthand corner, also share their home with three of the nation’s eight currently operational liquefied natural gas export facilities, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Energy Information Administration. One more is under construction, according to FERC, with two more waiting to break ground and even more in the pipeline — including Calcasieu Pass 2, or CP2, a would-be $10 billion export facility and the largest yet proposed in the U.S., the fate of which has been cast into limbo by the Biden administration’s pause on new LNG export terminal permits.
It is now the Department of Energy’s job to determine whether new terminals are in the “public interest” once their climate impacts are considered. It’s a directive that has ignited debate around the energy security of U.S. allies in Europe, the complicated accounting of methane leaks, and the jurisdiction of the DOE. What has fallen through the cracks in the national conversation, though, is the direct impact this decision has on communities like Cameron, which have been fighting for such a reconsideration for years.
“In southwest Louisiana, where I live, my air here smells like rotten eggs or chemicals every day,” Roishetta Ozane, the founder of Vessel Project of Louisiana, a local mutual aid and environmental justice organization, told me. A mother of six who started the Vessel Project after losing her home to hurricanes Laura and Delta in 2020, Ozane stressed that “we have above-average poverty rates, above-average cancer rates, and above-average toxins in the air. And all of that is due to the fact that we are surrounded by petrochemical, plastic-burning, and industrial facilities, including LNG facilities.”
Hiatt, a Lake Charles native, told me something similar. “The other night, [a terminal] was flaring like crazy, and people were just like, ‘Well, we gotta put up with that if we live here,’” he told me sadly. “That’s a lack of imagination of what better could be.”
Activists like Ozane and Hiatt — and the United Nations — refer to places like Cameron Parish, Calcasieu Parish directly to its north, and the stretch of the Mississippi River in Louisiana known as “Cancer Alley” as sacrifice zones. “The industry wants people to believe that this is rural land, that nobody lives here, that it is just wetlands and swamp,” Ozane said.
LNG export terminals cool natural gas into its liquid form to prepare it for overseas shipping, an energy-intensive process that releases pollutants that environmental groups claim are underreported. Such pollutants often have known health risks, including sulfur dioxide (linked to wheezing, shortness of breath, and chest tightness), volatile organic compounds (suspected and proven carcinogens that also cause eye, nose, and throat irritation, nausea, and damage to livers, kidneys, and the nervous system), black soot (linked to asthma and heart attacks), and carbon monoxide (which can cause organ and tissue damage). All that, of course, is in addition to methane, the base of natural gas and a potent planet-warming greenhouse gas that has cascading global effects, including hurricane intensification.
The region’s history of slavery has made the land around Cameron Parish cheap and easy to exploit, which is part of the reason for the area’s high concentration of terminals. “A lot of predominantly Black communities and predominantly Black neighborhoods, very low-income white neighborhoods, and fishermen towns are where these facilities are located,” Ozane went on. “It’s easy for them to get land there because those masses of land are owned by only a few people — a small family who can say yes to the money and sell that land to industry.”
Politicians, lobbyists, and interest groups like the American Petroleum Institute — which recently announced an eight-figure media campaign promoting natural gas — like to argue that LNG export terminals create American jobs. Both Ozane and Hiatt were rueful when I asked about the industry helping to lift up locals, though. “If the jobs are so good, and the folks are getting the jobs in these communities that are surrounded by these projects, then why is Louisiana still the poorest state in the nation?” Ozane asked me. “Why is our minimum wage still the lowest? And why do we have the highest unemployment rate?” She went on, “We have all of these billion-dollar industries here: They are not hiring local people.”
Hiatt emphasized that it’s hard to understand how little the community is benefitting unless you see it for yourself. “If you drive through Cameron, it looks like the hurricane happened yesterday in a lot of places,” he said. “All these churches are just skeletons, just the framework of what was once there. There’s no grocery store — there’s nothing. If economic prosperity looks like that, then no thank you.” He paused, then corrected himself: “It’s definitely economically prosperous for the owners of these companies,” which are based out of state in places like Virginia and Houston, he said.
These companies often don’t pay state or local taxes; the abatement for Calcasieu Pass LNG alone is valued at $184 million annually, or more than $36,000 per person in Cameron Parish every year — roughly $2,000 more than the area’s average annual income.
While climate activists have celebrated the Biden administration’s LNG pause, local organizers were more reserved in their praise. “We’re not going to take a victory lap here because there’s so much more to do,” Hiatt said, reminding me that “this fight did not happen overnight. This fight for environmental justice has been going for over 40 years in Louisiana.”
Kaniela Ing, the director of the Green New Deal Network, which promotes public support for climate justice, was similarly measured in his enthusiasm when I asked if the pause would have political upsides for Democrats in November. “A lot of the people Biden relied on to win in 2020 — it’s not clear whether they’re motivated enough to turn out again,” he told me. “Especially in BIPOC, low-income communities, and youth voters.” And while the administration’s LNG pause could be viewed as a direct appeal to such a voting bloc, Ing sees the move more as “a highlight reel played at halftime. What matters is how you play the game and right now, we don’t know the plan for the second half.”
An LNG permitting “pause” means nothing for the export terminals that are already under construction or operating. And once the pause is over, more approvals could come. For now, yes, Cameron has its hard-won reprieve. But the status quo of high cancer rates, respiratory health problems, poverty, and environmental exploitation remain unchanged for those who currently call it home.
“My children have asthma,” Ozane said, “and they’re dealing with this pollution every day.”
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.