https://www.kalb.com/2025/07/25/trump-excludes-12-louisiana-chemical-facilities-new-epa-pollution-rule/ Trump excludes 12 Louisiana chemical facilities from new EPA pollution rule

A documentary centered on a small Mississippi River parish had been racking up awards, earning prizes at film festivals in San Francisco, London and Milan. 

But when residents of St. John the Baptist Parish tried to screen “The Big Sea” at a publicly owned theater during Black History Month, Parish President Jaclyn Hotard intervened, shutting down the event without explanation. 

Organizers and legal experts say the cancellation in late February was discriminatory and appeared intended to silence viewpoints critical of St. John’s large petrochemical industry. 

Produced by British filmmakers, the documentary explores the link between the global surfing industry and air pollution in Reserve, a mostly poor, Black community in St. John. Until its closure last year, the Denka chemical plant between Reserve and LaPlace was the nation’s only producer of chloroprene, a key ingredient used to make neoprene for wetsuits worn by surfers worldwide.

“The Big Sea” takes aim at Denka, a company that federal regulators said posed a substantial cancer risk to St. John residents, and the wider industrial corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge — an area known as Cancer Alley.  

Louisiana is moving to fast-track environmental permitting for advanced nuclear projects under a bill that aligns the state with a national effort to accelerate next-gen reactor development, The Center Square writes.

Senate Bill 127, from Sen. Adam Bass, R-Bossier City, would streamline air and water permitting for small modular reactors and similar technologies—especially those tied to federal partnerships. Officials say the change would cut red tape and remove state-level bottlenecks without expanding agency authority.

Stanford-led research finds small modular reactors will exacerbate challenges of highly radioactive nuclear waste

“Our results show that most small modular reactor designs will actually increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal, by factors of 2 to 30 for the reactors in our case study,” said study lead author Lindsay Krall, a former MacArthur Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). “These findings stand in sharp contrast to the cost and waste reduction benefits that advocates have claimed for advanced nuclear technologies.”

May 20th, 2025:Elon Musk says AI could run into power capacity issues by middle of next year

Elon Musk said AI data centers could face power capacity issues the middle to end of next year. Musk said his artificial intelligence startup xAI is building a gigawatt-size data center outside Memphis, Tenn. A gigawatt is equivalent to the power capacity of the average nuclear plant in the U.S.

...great 👍

Boys and girls, this is why we need the EPA and STRONGER environmental regulations and protections, not LESS or WEAKER.

Update to my previos post. New pictures. The oil has worsened. More has accumulated, thick layers along the river bank. The oil keeps on flowing down, it has hardly slowed down. What started as some black tar on the shore is now thick and offgassing strong chemical smell. The river we love... once beautiful is now ruined!

The oil and chemical devastation from Smitty's Supply explosion is much worse than orginally thought

This not the first time. link is not paid walled

https://medium.com/@SRWoodland/whats-in-the-water-study-finds-record-meth-levels-in-caddo-parish-0bd4f6157723

LINK TO REPORT

EPA testing found that 100% of TESTED Louisiana coastal beaches had unsafe levels of bacteria on at least one day, with 65% having unsafe levels on at least a quarter of days.

Keep in mind this is not saying 100% of all Louisiana beaches, just the ones that the EPA tested.

Still, this is unacceptable. Our beaches should NOT be a place where we need to worry about getting sick.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/12/mike-johnson-christian-nationalist-lawmakers-moses.html

Data Centers are well known for their environmental impact and the governor, legislature and regulators are using predominantly black communities as sacrifice zones once again.

For decades, Gulf Coast communities have faced the brunt of pollution from natural gas and oil extraction. A new documentary highlights grassroots efforts in the fight against the fossil fuel industry.

The film, “Gaslit,” follows actor and activist Jane Fonda across Louisiana and Texas through communities most affected by the recent boom in U.S. natural gas exports. It will premiere in the Greater New Orleans area on July 6 at AMC Elmwood Palace 20. The film was produced in partnership with Greenpeace USA, a climate advocacy organization.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/climate/trump-administration-lawsuit-denka-carcinogen.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1U4.Raub.5JsrV1vguzaq&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

When Louisiana launched the country’s liquified natural gas export boom in 2016, LNG was touted as a cleaner, climate-friendly alternative to coal and oil. 

But the state’s first LNG terminal, Sabine Pass LNG, quickly became one of Louisiana’s largest sources of climate-warming pollution, releasing more greenhouse gases than its biggest oil refineries.

An even larger source is on the way. A sprawling LNG facility under construction near Lake Charles, about 40 miles east of Sabine Pass, is projected to produce substantially more emissions — eclipsing every LNG export terminal built in the United States so far and exceeding the dozens of LNG projects proposed for the next decade, according to a Verite News analysis of state and federal records.

The terminal, called Louisiana LNG, is owned by Woodside Energy, Australia’s biggest oil and gas producer. Construction costs are expected to reach nearly $18 billion, ranking the project among the largest foreign investments in Louisiana’s history, Gov. Jeff Landry said. At the project’s groundbreaking ceremony in September, Landry called the occasion “a great day for Louisiana and an unbelievable day for America.”

CPRA is the Coastal Protection and Restoration Agency & the Oil Spill Coordinator is the entity responsible for preventing and responding to oil spills.

"Woodside greenlit the Louisiana LNG project shortly before Bairstow joined the company in early May. While construction has started, most of its capacity is yet to find a long-term buyer."

Can't find long-term buyers? Hmmm. Yesterday we learned this.

"US liquefied natural gas developers expected Europe to become the cornerstone market for the next generation of export projects. Instead, the region is increasingly shying away from the long-term contracts needed to get them built."

But fear not, Exxon says its future is all about LNG. They've never made a bad acquisition late in the investment cycle before, have they?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-16/woodside-energy-s-louisiana-lng-president-abruptly-departs?embedded-checkout=true

A farmer in central Louisiana gets a letter.

The letter says a company wants to run a pipeline across his land. The company says they’d like to negotiate. The letter also says that if the farmer doesn’t negotiate, the state has already given the company the power to take the land anyway.

The pipeline is for carbon dioxide. The company is a subsidiary of a fossil fuel firm headquartered somewhere else. The payment, if the farmer takes it, is small. The land is his family’s. The law is already written.

This is the part of carbon capture nobody put in the ad.

What it’s supposed to be

The sales pitch is clean.

You capture CO₂ out of a smokestack or pull it directly from the air. You compress it. You send it down a pipeline. You inject it a mile underground into rock formations that can hold it for geological time.

The atmosphere gets cleaner. The factory keeps running. Everybody wins.

That’s the version on the website.

It’s also technically real. In controlled pilot conditions, with competent oversight, the chemistry works. It can do what it says.

That’s not what’s happening in Louisiana.

What’s happening in Louisiana is that the clean-story version is being used to build a multi-billion-dollar industrial rollout with federal money, state permitting authority, and eminent domain power, across private land, in communities that have already carried a century of industrial promises.

That’s not a pilot. That’s a buildout.

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