Louisiana’s crumbling coast would suffer devastating flooding and dramatic land loss, leading to mass evacuations within a few decades, if President-elect Donald Trump carries through with his pledge to pull the U.S. out of a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
As The Courier reports, that was the consensus of three prominent researchers who are experts on Louisiana’s coastal crisis and the state’s plan to address it. They say there is little hope of keeping the Gulf of Mexico from swallowing Louisiana’s coast if the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases reneges on its promise.
“The implications for coastal Louisiana would likely be devastating,” says Torbjörn Törnqvist, chairman of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Tulane University.
Under such a scenario, he says, “my prediction would be that within the next one or two decades, planning will have to start for relocating metropolitan areas like New Orleans.”
Donald Boesch, a New Orleans native and president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, said U.S. withdrawal could lead to as much as 6.5 feet of sea-level rise by the year 2100, and many meters more in the next century.
“In that case, the coast would be up against the bluffs at Baton Rouge,” he said.
Trump, like many Republican leaders, has denied the scientific consensus that humans have caused warming. He has said the research is a hoax and a plot by the Chinese government, and reducing greenhouse gases would be too costly to American industry.
During his campaign he pledged to pull out of the Paris climate agreement and to roll back Obama administration regulations aimed at reducing emissions from power plants and other sources.
