Poor state, even poorer leadership

A grim new report about Louisiana's economy and environment should be an urgent call to action for everyone who cares about its future. Instead, our leaders work overtime to make us a pariah state.

Feb 17, 2025

Anyone who cares about Louisiana’s future should read a sobering new report from The Data Center in New Orleans, “Pathways to Prosperity: Louisiana.”

Authors Allison Plyer, Taylor Savell, and Anissa Hyde paint a grim portrait of a state mired in decades-old, accelerating problems. And there’s no evidence our leaders have the integrity and courage to face these and other challenges.

Simply put, this report offers little cause for optimism about Louisiana’s future.

However, by quantifying some of the state’s significant challenges, the authors show us where to focus our reform efforts in the coming years, assuming we elect a new governor with good sense and integrity.

Here are just a few challenges and crises that Plyer, Savell, and Hyde have identified (with my interpretation in bold):

While our leaders double down on corporate welfare for the fossil fuel industry, Louisiana may be the state most exposed to climate change.

Every Louisiana parish has experienced at least 13 FEMA disaster declarations since 2020, four times more than the national average. All in all, Louisiana has had over 900 disaster declarations since 2020.
In Louisiana’s southern parishes, more than half of all properties are at major or extreme risk of flooding within the next 30 years.
Billion-dollar weather disasters in the U.S. are increasing in size and impact. Since 2020, Louisiana has experienced the most damage, with at least $20 billion per million residents.
Heat-related deaths in Louisiana have skyrocketed since 2020, from an annual average of 12 over the previous two decades to a yearly average of 44 since 2020.
Once full-risk prices are completely implemented, the median cost of flood insurance is projected to increase by 87 percent in Louisiana compared to 64 percent across the U.S.
Chart from The Data Center

The authors write: “According to the National Climate Assessment, without substantial efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to our changing climate, the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather disasters will accelerate, leading to massive property and infrastructure losses and slowing economic growth (FEMA disaster declarations). Even with significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the impacts of extreme weather events are expected to worsen over the next decade, with the increasing likelihood of compound events — where two or more disasters occur simultaneously.”

Despite all that we know about the dangers that climate change poses to Louisiana, our state’s official subservience to the fossil fuel industry continues unabated.

From 1990 to 2022, industry sources accounted for nearly 60 percent of all emissions in Louisiana.
Large facilities in Louisiana’s river parishes produced 38 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2023.
Since 2013, Louisiana has experienced 198 hours of power interruption, the most of any state and three times more than the national average.

The authors wrote, “Reducing greenhouse gas emissions will not only help address climate-related risks but also will create numerous new job opportunities and it will decrease air pollutants that lead to serious illnesses and premature death.”

Louisiana continues to punish people for being poor or middle-income. In particular, high energy costs are particularly hurting those living in poverty.

Low-income Louisianans pay a disproportionate share of their income on home energy, 9 percent compared to 6 percent nationally.
Nearly one in three Louisianans who rent a house or apartment spend most of their income on housing.
Over 220,000 Louisiana households have no internet, not even a cellular data plan. A disproportionate share (19 percent) of these homes is in rural parishes.

The authors offered this hope on broadband access: “The state [under Gov. John Bel Edwards] established the Louisiana Office of Broadband Development in 2020 and dedicated $140 million in American Rescue Plan funds to expanding access in 48 parishes. This positioned the state well for quickly securing approval for its plan to deploy more than $1.3 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to bring internet access to more rural and low-income areas of the state.”

Louisiana does a terrible job of creating economic opportunities.

In 2023, 74 percent of working-age white men in Louisiana were employed, down from 79 percent in 1980. Only 56 percent of Black men in Louisiana were employed in 2023, down from 61 percent in 1980.
Hispanic incomes are 12 percent lower, and Black incomes are 46 percent lower than white incomes in Louisiana.

Our health outcomes are pathetically poor.

Louisiana has one of the lowest life expectancy rates, at 72.2 years. Only Alabama, West Virginia, and Mississippi have lower life expectancy rates, at 72, 71, and 70.9 years, respectively.
Drug overdose deaths, more likely in the face of extreme heat and other natural disasters, exploded from 188 in 1999 to 2,463 in 2021 before decreasing slightly to 2,224 by 2023.
In 2023, Louisiana had 42 pregnancy-related deaths per 100,000 live births, more than twice the national rate of 19.

The state of our democracy is deplorable.

Louisiana’s 2023 gubernatorial election saw the lowest voter turnout in a decade. In more than 80 percent of parishes, fewer than half of registered voters participated.
In the 2023 election, 46 percent of Louisiana’s legislative seats had only one candidate.

What can we do about this?

Among the advice the authors offered is this piece of low-hanging fruit that Gov. Jeff Landry and legislative leaders would be foolish to ignore.

“Louisiana has the chance to seize a rare opportunity,” the authors wrote. “Louisiana can deploy once-in-a-generation taxpayer dollars from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, combined with billions in fines received following the 2010 BP oil spill, to not only minimize the impacts of increasingly severe weather on Louisianans, but to also serve as the catalyst that diversifies Louisiana’s economy by adding specializations with growing global demand — water management, lower carbon fuel production. As Louisiana’s leaders come together to invest these funds, a shared, evidence-based understanding of location-specific climate impacts and opportunities will be key to building resilience, protecting our culture, and securing Louisiana’s competitiveness on the national and global stage.”

How can we reverse our brain drain? It’s not by extraditing doctors or killing 81-year-old death row inmates.

One of the key observations in the Data Center’s report concerns Louisiana’s persistent and decades-long population decline/exodus: “While Louisiana has experienced more than its fair share of disasters, these are not the main drivers of out-migration. The main reason Americans move long distances is for economic opportunity, and since 2000, Louisiana has had among the lowest job growth rates in the nation at 2 percent.”

Wouldn’t you think that the leaders of a state with this variety of deep and seemingly intractable problems would search for ways to make their state marginally more attractive to outsiders?

That’s what you and I would do.

But you would be wrong to expect this of Gov. Jeff Landry and other state leaders.

Consider these three recent developments, at least two of which will be national stories in the coming weeks and will further solidify Louisiana's image as anything but a progressive state attractive to young, well-educated, high-skilled workers eager to make a new life here.

The first is from the New York Times on Jan. 31.

A state grand jury in Louisiana has indicted a New York doctor for providing abortion pills to a Louisiana resident. The case appears to be the first time criminal charges have been filed against an abortion provider for sending pills into a state with an abortion ban.
The charges mark a new chapter in an escalating showdown between states that ban abortion and those that want to protect and expand access to it. It is challenging one of the foremost strategies used by states that support abortion rights: shield laws intended to provide legal protection to doctors who prescribe and send abortion pills to states with bans.
The charges were brought against Dr. Margaret Carpenter, who was operating under New York’s telemedicine abortion shield law, which stipulates that New York authorities will not cooperate with prosecutions or other legal actions filed against New York abortion providers by other states.

The second story that will soon make national news comes from New Orleans Public Radio on Feb.10:

Louisiana plans to begin executing people on death row using nitrogen gas, Gov. Jeff Landry said Monday.
The state has approved a new protocol that includes execution by nitrogen hypoxia, he said. The method forces a person to breathe pure nitrogen gas, eventually causing suffocation and organ failure.
The technique is controversial and has only been used a handful of times to execute people in the U.S. A group of experts from the United Nations believe execution by nitrogen hypoxia is “clearly prohibited under international law,” because they argue starving a body of oxygen can amount to cruel and inhuman punishment or even torture.

Among those set to die by torture is an 81-year-old severely ill man who is confined to a wheelchair.

And finally, there is this, as reported by ABC News on Feb. 14:

In a surprising announcement, Louisiana's surgeon general announced late Thursday that the state health department "will no longer promote mass vaccination."
In a memo to staff members, Dr. Ralph Abraham described vaccines as "one tool in a toolbox" to combat severe illness and that conversations about specific vaccines are best held between an individual and their health care provider.

I cannot imagine better, more effective ways to make Louisiana a pariah state than to extradite a physician and put her in prison for the crime of providing health care.

Well, maybe it would be the barbaric act of torturing an 81-year-old man before killing him.

Or perhaps it would be taking steps to ensure that thousands of young people die of measles, RSV, the flu, and other communicable diseases.

Whatever the case, we are currently led by a governor who lacks wisdom and basic decency.

He and his staff do their jobs guided, it seems, by this twisted philosophy: "I vigorously protect your 25-year-old former Kappa Sig son from hearing salty language in his law school classroom, but your two-year-old daughter can die of the measles, for all I care."

Something Like the Truth: By Robert Mann

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