This story is part of the Grist arts and culture series Remember When, a weeklong exploration of what happened to the climate solutions that once clogged our social feeds.

The camera pans slowly across a close-up of crispy, golden McDonald’s fries, standing tall like ears of corn. “We used to think this was the best thing a plant could grow into,” a deep voice proclaims during the commercial. “And then we made this.” Into view emerges a glistening cheeseburger topped with lettuce, tomatoes, and pickles. “Introducing the new McPlant,” the narrator continues, “made with the first plant-based patty worthy of being called a McDonald’s burger.”

The ad, from early 2022, seemed like a sign that plant burgers had made it big. Six years after they arrived on the market, America’s biggest restaurant chain had endorsed them. The news garnered cautious praise from some environmental advocates: Not only could meatless meat patties reduce animal cruelty, but they also promised to ease climate change. They looked, tasted, and bled like beef but had none of the drawbacks — no cows that burp methane, no butchered animals, and barely any cholesterol. 

By most metrics, plant-based meat has been a resounding success. Brands like Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and Gardein are sold in thousands of grocery stores and restaurants across the country. Dollar sales in the U.S. have tripled over the past decade. Ten years ago, you couldn’t buy fake-blood burgers anywhere. Today, they’re on the grill at Burger King, Carl’s Jr., and other restaurants all over the world. When Beyond Meat went public in 2019, its stock climbed more than 700 percent. The buzz was compared to that of Bitcoin.

Yet a tour of recent headlines suggests that something has gone awry. Last year, Forbes described a “lifeless market for meatless meat.” The Guardian asserted that “plant-based meat’s sizzle fizzled in the U.S.” A Bloomberg headline in January went further, declaring that fake meat was “just another fad.” As for the McPlant, McDonald’s erased it from its menu in the U.S. last August, less than a year after it started a trial run.

The industry had hit its first big stumbling block. In 2022, U.S. plant-based meat sales declined for the first time — 8 percent by volume. Beyond Meat, a behemoth in the sector and the supplier of McPlant patties, saw its stock price plummet 94 percent from its peak in 2020 as sales slid more than 20 percent last year. The company laid off one-fifth of its employees last fall. Impossible Foods — Beyond’s biggest rival — has fared better, but it also ended up laying off roughly 16 percent of its workforce this spring. The layoffs were intended to bring costs “more in line” with revenue and to position the company for “sustainable, balanced growth over the long term,” according to a statement from Impossible. 

“Today, basically, we’re in a little bit of this trough of disillusionment,” said T.K. Pillan, co-founder and chairman of Veggie Grill, one of the country’s biggest plant-based food chains and the first to sell the Beyond Burger. “Expectations and hype got fueled really high.” 

Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods said their inventions could do something earlier brands — Tofurky, Boca, Gardenburger — couldn’t. Although the two companies make discrete products with different ingredients and characteristics, they are often talked about in one breath because they share a novel and uncanny resemblance to meat. Impossible’s plant burger could compete with beef even among “uncompromising meat consumers,” Pat Brown, the founder of the company, claimed during a TED Talk in 2015. 

“People around the world love to eat meat. And who can blame them? It’s delicious,” Brown said. “The problem isn’t that people love meat. The problem is how we produce it.” 

As Brown described a “wildlife holocaust” caused by clearing forests around the world for agriculture, a woman behind him flipped an Impossible Burger on a griddle. “Cows aren’t getting any better at turning plants into meat,” Brown said. “And they never will. We’re getting better at it every day. And we’re going to keep getting better.” 

Climate advocates hoped that this new class of faux meat could lure people away from cow meat. Livestock contribute roughly 14 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and factory-farmed cattle are the worst offenders. “I know it sounds insane to replace a deeply entrenched trillion-dollar-a-year global industry that’s been a part of human culture since the dawn of human civilization,” Brown said in the TED Talk. “But it has to be done.” When he was interviewed by the New Yorker in 2019, Brown said Impossible could help end animal agriculture by 2035. 

Today, that ambitious goal sounds even more ambitious. Plant-based patties haven’t displaced real meat yet — the vast majority of people who buy plant burgers also buy animal protein, and they don’t seem to be buying less of it. According to a survey last year by the consulting firm Deloitte, half of U.S. shoppers have already purchased plant-based meat, but the market has reached a “saturation point.” The report found that people don’t view the food as favorably as they once did. So what happened?

There’s no shortage of theories. For starters, the burgers are made by machines. While they’ve been fine-tuned to include less fat and cholesterol than real beef, early products were full of sodium and used additives for taste and texture, like sugar and carrageenan — an extract from seaweed that’s the subject of health concerns among some scientists and nutritionists. Companies like Beyond and Impossible have tinkered with recipes to get rid of additives and make fake meat more nutritious, but the fact remains that their burgers are lab creatures.

“The big problem with plant-based meats is they fall into the category of ultra-processed,” said Marion Nestle, a longtime food studies professor at New York University. Even though plant-based meat might be healthier than red meat on a nutritional basis, it’s still part of a broader class of processed foods, including cereal and sodas, that have been linked to poor health outcomes. “There’s just tons of evidence that these are the kinds of foods to avoid,” Nestle said. “The ingredient list is lengthy and very impressive, and that has been the basis of attack by the meat industry.” 

Soon after Beyond and Impossible burgers took off, the Center for Consumer Freedom — a corporate-backed advocacy group perhaps best known for defending the tobacco industry — launched a campaign targeting plant-based meats. “Fake meat or dog food?” read a full-page ad the group placed in the Los Angeles Times in 2019. One of the organization’s main tactics has been to highlight that plant burgers come from factories, not farms.

“The meat industry really made a concerted effort to make people think [plant-based meat] is not healthy,” Pillan said. “They do a great job. They’re good marketers. They’re good lobbyists.”

The industry’s push came at a convenient moment: Around the same time, a health movement promoting “clean” foods — meat and vegetables that aren’t processed — entered the mainstream. “The meat alternatives have run up against this other trend,” said Jayson Lusk, an agricultural economist at Purdue University. Lusk often hears the refrain: “If I wanted plants, I’d just eat plants.” 

Plant-based meat now finds itself in a strange spot, simultaneously seen as healthy and unhealthy, with attitudes starting to tip toward the “junk food” designation. “Healthfulness” was the top reason people bought plant-based meat in 2021, according to an International Food Information Council survey. That same year, a Deloitte survey found that 68 percent of buyers thought the novel burgers were healthier than beef. In 2022, that figure slipped to 60 percent.  

Even more than health perceptions, “Taste and price are the two main reasons people don’t buy” plant patties, said Tessa Hale, director of corporate engagement at the Good Food Institute, a think tank that promotes alternative meats. “They don’t want to try it because they just have this idea that it’s going to taste bad,” Hale said.

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Or they simply can’t afford to shell out for a pricier product, made even more expensive by inflation. Plant-based meats often cost two or three times more than their cow-based counterparts at the grocery store. In 2019, the average retail price of meat alternatives was $9.87 per pound, while that of conventional meat was $3.53. Today, Walmart sells Beyond Burgers at $9.68 per pound and beef patties for as little as $3.94 per pound. Some compare the cost gap to that between electric and gas-powered vehicles: Until prices come down, the premium, climate-friendly option won’t be widely adopted. 

For each of the top concerns — price, health, and taste — proponents say there’s reason to be optimistic. They observe that inflation has been worse for real meat than the products that imitate it. As production scales up and new technologies get perfected, the price curve for plant-based foods “is expected to keep on coming down,” said Chris Bryant, an alternative proteins researcher in the United Kingdom. 

Impossible Foods cut sale prices by 20 percent in 2021, and Beyond Meat has said it plans to sell at least one of its products for less than the going price of meat by 2024. In the Netherlands, growing demand and government support for faux meat reportedly have helped fake burgers achieve price parity with real ones. “We seem to be at the tipping point,” Bryant said. 

As for the health question, Pillan acknowledged that plant-based burgers aren’t always the healthiest option — next to, say, a salad or lentils. But he said what matters is that they’re healthier than beef. They have less cholesterol and fat, and some research suggests they lower risk of heart disease compared to red meat. 

A Beyond Meat spokesperson cited a similar case made by the company’s chief executive, Ethan Brown, on an earnings call in February. Brown criticized the “drummed up misperception that our products are overly processed and utilize complex ingredients” and pointed to a study suggesting that eating Beyond’s products instead of animal meat could lead to lower cholesterol levels.

Veggie Grill, for its part, has closed several locations in recent months, but also plans to launch a franchise program. In the company’s early days, “The West Coast was really where we could put multiple Veggie Grills and make the concept work,” Pillan said. “Now we could put multiple Veggie Grills in Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Miami.”

Meanwhile, producers aren’t done fiddling with the recipes for fake meat. Scientists are honing techniques like precision and biomass fermentation to reduce the number of ingredients needed to turn plants into meat. One company, Meati, is marketing steak and chicken products made almost entirely from mushrooms, touting it as being simultaneously low in fats and high in protein, vitamins, and minerals. 

All in all, the industry’s supporters aren’t that worried about the dire tone of the recent media coverage. “I still believe there is a lot of hype,” Hale said. “It’s a very nascent category, all things considered.” There remains a sense among proponents, much as there was 10 years ago, that meat made from plants could one day make a meaningful dent in the market for animal meat, living up to its many promises.

Consider the assurance that Brown, Impossible’s founder, offered to a group of kids four years ago when they toured his startup’s office to learn about his team’s invention: “I promise that by the time you are adults, the meat you eat will not come from dead animals,” Brown told the kids, who had donned white lab coats for the occasion. “You can come find me and beat me up if I’m wrong.”

*This piece has been updated to include a response from Beyond Meat.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What happened to the thrill of plant-based meat? on Aug 3, 2023.

Quick Key Facts

• The largest wildlife corridor in the world — the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over the Highway 101 freeway at Liberty Canyon, California — is currently being constructed, and is expected to be completed in 2025.
• It is estimated that one to two million motor vehicles get into collisions with large animals like deer in the U.S. each year.
• Wildlife-vehicle collisions make up nearly 20 percent of reported crashes in rural states like Wyoming.
• A 2018 Center for American Progress study found that just 12 percent of land in America had been conserved as protected areas like national parks and wildlife refuges.
• One of the largest collections of wildlife crossings in the U.S. stretches across 56 miles of Montana’s U.S. Highway 93 North, where there are 41 wildlife and fish crossings, including overpasses and underpasses with fencing to direct animals like deer, grizzly bears, elk and cougars to the safe passageways.
• The top 10 U.S. States most at risk for wildlife-vehicle collisions are West Virginia; Montana; Pennsylvania; South Dakota; Michigan; Wisconsin; Iowa; Mississippi; Minnesota and Wyoming.
• More than 24 million acres of natural lands were lost to human developments like cities, roads and farms in the contiguous 48 U.S. states from 2001 to 2017.
• The Florida Wildlife Corridor is composed of almost 17.7 million acres.
• Eighty percent or more of the habitat of about half of all endangered and threatened species is located on private lands.
• A collaboration between Canada and the U.S., the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative has a goal of protecting connected habitat along a 2,000-mile stretch of North America’s Rocky Mountains for wild species like black bears and pronghorns.

What Are ‘Wildlife Corridors’?

A wildlife corridor is a strip of native habitat — either natural or human-made — connecting two or more natural habitats that have been disrupted by highways, cities or dams.

Habitats of wild animals can span smaller areas like a riverbank or stretch thousands of miles across an entire continent. The routes they take to find food, water and mates are called natural wildlife corridors. Wildlife refuges are essential for maintaining these expanses that mammals, birds and fish need to complete their life cycles. This is especially true as humans increasingly encroach on their domains, bisecting and cutting off their natural corridors with roads and development.

When roads have already cut through habitats, disrupting natural ranges and creating barriers to migration, human-made corridors may be constructed to provide the opportunity for safe passage for wildlife. Large mammals like elk can travel hundreds of miles between their summer and winter ranges, and fence breaks called “elk jumps” allow them to enter the western boundary of Wyoming’s National Elk Refuge, but limit their ability to leap out of the protected area near highways.

Landowners living next to wildlife preserves can work with the preserves to help provide safe passage for migrating animals on the many stretches of private land that lie between the patchwork of public lands and wildlife refuges across the country.

Why Are Wildlife Corridors Important?

The wildlife who share our planet with us have had their habitats systematically destroyed and overtaken by human development. Their natural ranges often span much larger areas than national parks, state parks or wildlife preserves can provide. Some mammals like caribou, wolves, birds, salmon and pumas travel hundreds or even thousands of miles throughout their lives, and maintaining safe, consistent pathways for them to migrate has become increasingly rare and difficult.

Wildlife corridors provide the space animals need to migrate to find food and water and reproduce so that they can thrive in their natural environments.

Types of Wildlife Corridors

Natural Wildlife Corridors

Natural wildlife corridors are strips of land that act as pathways for animals to travel between areas of fragmented habitat. These natural avenues offer refuge for traveling species and can increase their survival rates by providing access to food sources, as well as important escape cover or shelter.

The corridors can be established and developed through the cultivation of natural vegetation such as trees, shrubs or other herbaceous cover next to a stream or as a roadside buffer. No matter what the corridor is made of, its purpose is to provide safe passage so that wildlife may be able to access larger surrounding areas of habitat.

The types of habitat the corridor may be connecting can include wetlands, grasslands, fields, woods or other types of open terrain. The corridor should be at least 50 feet to 200 feet wide in order to provide a spacious enough lane for animals to travel, nest, find food or take cover.

Some of the species that will use wildlife corridors to move between larger areas of habitat include fox, deer, turtles, reptiles and raccoon. Species that use field buffers and corridors to nest and forage include turkeys, pheasant, quail, songbirds, cottontail rabbits and insects. The insects that use field borders are an essential food source for many of these animals. 

Human-Made Wildlife Corridors

Human-made wildlife corridors are most commonly those that are built as overpasses or underpasses to provide a passageway for animals who need to cross busy roads in order to access their natural habitat or to migrate within their range. Typically, animals using human-made crossings have had their habitat diminished or destroyed by agricultural, housing or commercial developments.

The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over Highway 101 in California is an example of the complexity of natural habitats and the human-made wildlife corridors that try to emulate them. The crossing will be covered with soil and an acre of native plants that will allow it to blend in with the natural habitat on either side. The impressive corridor will be equipped with sound walls covered in vegetation to create a buffer for nocturnal animals against urban light and noise pollution. The green bridge will provide safe passage for animals like mountain lions, coyotes, reptiles and amphibians.

Which Species of Animals Use Wildlife Corridors?

Mammals

Large mammals can have extensive ranges, some spanning hundreds of miles and crossing many different types of terrain, including the human urban landscape.

Animals like elk, pronghorn and mule deer travel long distances between their wintering lowlands and the higher elevations where they spend their summers. As time has passed, new roads and developments have begun to crisscross and, in some cases, destroy the habitats of these majestic creatures.

Wildlife corridors help to soften the clash between wildlife habitat and human development by providing animals with a way to maneuver through urban landscapes and cross roads without encountering humans or their dangerous vehicles.

There are only two populations of endangered ocelots left in the U.S., most of their habitat having been destroyed by farming and residential development. This is why the 14 underpasses built by the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge are essential to their survival in this country. Other animals caught on camera using them have been bobcats, possums, raccoons and coyotes. Two more wildlife bridges are slated for completion this year.

Amphibians & Reptiles

Roads have a high impact on amphibian and reptile species — including frogs, toads, turtles, salamanders, snakes and lizards — as they must cross them in order to get to essential foraging and breeding grounds. This can be especially true if roads bisect annual migration routes between habitats where the animals mate and hibernate.

These creatures move slowly and are often too small for drivers to spot and avoid in time. Lizards and snakes can also be drawn to paved roads, which usually absorb heat and retain it.

Types of aids for crossing roads and highways for reptiles and amphibians include underpasses, wildlife pipes, culverts or barrier fencing that guides amphibians in the direction of tunnels.

Some species like the California red-legged frog, the desert tortoise, the red diamond rattlesnake, the sierra newt and others have been highly ranked for being negatively impacted by roadways.

Birds

The long annual migrations of birds — sometimes thousands of miles — is well known. Many of them sleep during flight, resting half of their brains at a time, but they also land at known stopover sites to eat and sleep in a safe location, free of predators.

Wildlife refuges support all types of birds on their migration journeys — from waterfowl to songbirds — by being strategically spaced to provide havens for those migrating along the four main flyways that run north to south in the U.S. The refuges are a combination of state conservation areas and privately owned land. The four routes on the American Flyways cross the entire U.S. and include the Atlantic, Mississippi, Central and Pacific Flyways.

These havens for traveling birds are increasingly important as more and more wild bird habitats are swallowed up by agricultural land and urban and energy development.

Insects

Pollinators and other insects migrate, too, and they need a network of connected stopovers to rest and feed as they make their journeys.

Monarch butterflies travel as far as 3,000 miles between their northern breeding grounds and their overwintering sites in California and Mexico each fall and spring. On the southern route, they rest to feed on milkweed and other nectar-producing plants. In the northern parts of their territory, their larvae eat only milkweed, which is becoming harder to find due to increased use of pesticides, development and mowing. The planting of milkweed by private individuals and national wildlife refuges is essential to monarchs as they make their way along their ancient migration routes.

The “bee highway” in Oslo, Norway, was created in 2015 and includes meadows, rooftop gardens and potted flowering plants across the city to help the essential pollinators be able to breed, feed and migrate. Individuals and businesses worked along with the government to save the city’s bees and help them thrive through this unique wildlife corridor.

Fish

Wildlife corridors aren’t just for mammals and birds. Fish need to be able to swim freely through the rivers and streams that are part of their habitat.

There are approximately six million human-made fish barriers in the U.S., like dams and culverts, blocking the ability of fish to have clear passage through waterways to complete their natural life cycles.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been replacing or removing some of these barriers, and nearly 4,500 miles of streams and more than 15,000 acres of wetlands have been reopened to fish passage, including many on wildlife refuges.

Benefits of Wildlife Corridors

Safe Passage

For millennia, North America was the undisturbed habitat of many majestic creatures who lived in harmony with the land and Indigenous Peoples. Wildlife corridors allow these animals to cross highways and roads safely as they migrate along ancient routes. This is especially important for species that travel long distances like elk, wolves, caribou and other species.

Prevent Habitat Fragmentation

Habitat fragmentation due primarily to agricultural, residential and commercial expansion has destroyed or cut off the habitats of many species, isolating them and leading some of them to become endangered. One important function of wildlife corridors is to connect these patchworks of wild domains so that species are able to access enough food, rest, find mates and reproduce. These passageways can also offer animals refuge if their habitat is shared with predators.

Help Plants Thrive

The protected environment of wildlife corridors can benefit a variety of native plant species, allowing them to flourish and provide nourishment and cover for wildlife passing through, nesting, giving birth or making long-term homes in corridors.

Prevent Vehicle-Wildlife Collisions

As many as two million large mammals are killed in wildlife-vehicle collisions each year, as well as many smaller animals. Wildlife crossings are essential for animals to be able to cross the increasing number of roadways blocking their movements. Crossings can be underpasses or bridges built especially for animals ranging from elephants to land crabs.

Minimize Wildlife-Human Interactions

By helping animals have access to adequate habitat, wildlife corridors can help keep them from feeling the need to venture into areas where humans live in search of food or to escape predators, thus minimizing wildlife-human interactions. This is important for both, as it keeps them safe from possible harms they could cause each other, and helps keep wildlife from becoming too familiar with humans and their food.

One study showed that the gut microbiome of wild black bears in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula became less diverse when they consumed human junk food.

Help Animals Have Access to Adequate Food and Water

The quest to find fresh water and food often leads animals on migrations of hundreds of miles. Different seasons bring different challenges for animals in meeting their basic needs, including drought, seasonal changes, flooding and human encroachment on their habitats.

Zebras, for instance, migrate hundreds of miles each year in order to find vegetation and water. The natural range for wolves can lead them to move as much as 30 miles each day in search of prey. In the U.S., elk have been migrating along the same routes for thousands of years.

Without wildlife corridors and adaptations to fencing on private land, many of these animals would not be able to find adequate food and water, greatly impairing their chance of survival in the wild.

Help Wildlife Species Find Mates and Promote Genetic Diversity

In order to maintain the genetic diversity that keeps populations healthy, animals need to be able to travel freely to find suitable mates. Metropolitan areas, roads, fencing and other barriers can block their movements. When animals are stuck in a particular habitat without freedom to roam, they are prone to inbreeding and unhealthy genetic isolation. This can leave them more susceptible to diseases and birth defects, lower their reproductive success and ultimately lead to population decline.

The expanded freedom of movement wildlife corridors give species promotes their genetic diversity, helping them to avoid the genetic disorders that can result from inbreeding.

Alleviate Wildlife Encroachment During Natural Disasters

If a natural disaster like a flood or a wildfire occurs, wildlife corridors can provide the escape route animals need to find safety rather than fleeing into a nearby town or city. This can help prevent human-animal conflicts, protecting both species.

Help Animals Adapt to Changes in Their Environment Due to Climate Change

As the planet warms, the vegetation or lack thereof that defines terrain either perishes or adjusts by adapting to the warmer temperatures or slowly shifting to higher elevations. Small animals may also shift their habitats with the changing climate.

As vegetation and prey species change or move, animals may need to explore new territory to find the sustenance they need.

During a drought, animals may need to go farther afield in search of fresh water. As snow lines move farther north, Canada lynx and other alpine species that rely on snowpack for making dens and to hunt may be forced to move northward or seek higher elevations.

Wildlife corridors can offer animals refuge and help them move safely from one pocket of habitat to another as they try and find ways to adapt to our rapidly warming world.

Promote Biodiversity

A 2019 study found that the linking together of habitats through wildlife corridors enhances biodiversity. The researchers discovered that, after 18 years, the habitats of South Carolina pine savanna that were connected with corridors had 14 percent higher levels of biodiversity, as well as an average of 24 more plant species, than the habitats that were not connected.

The support corridors offer pollinators means more pollen and seeds are spread, which strengthens the resilience of the ecosystem and boosts biodiversity. It also means more crops are pollinated, which in turn prevents soil erosion, sequesters carbon and helps keep flooding at bay.

Challenges Facing Wildlife Corridors

Funding

Wildlife corridors are desperately needed to mitigate the impacts of human development on wildlife populations, but one of the biggest obstacles to expanding the network of wildlife corridors is a lack of financial support.

For example, an Oregon State report from 2020 indicated that $22 to $35 billion was needed in “immediate” funding for statewide wildlife crossing projects. Funding is necessary not just for construction of wildlife corridors, but also for maintenance of existing structures.

Funding for conservation, including wildlife corridors, can come from local, state and federal agencies through legislation and appropriation, such as allocated funds from the sale of hunting and fishing licenses. Through the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, $350 million became available to Native American Tribes and state and local governments throughout the country to build wildlife corridors.

Research

Wildlife crossings and corridors must be tailored to the specific needs — such as types of vegetation and migration patterns — of the animals who inhabit the land they are being built upon. This requires studies to be conducted to make sure they are meeting the needs of particular species.

What Can We Do to Support Wildlife Corridors?

As a Society?

As a society, we can become more educated about ecosystems, biodiversity, conservation and the wildlife corridors that connect our protected areas. We can vote to elect officials who support the construction of wildlife bridges, underpasses and corridors, the restoration of wild spaces, rewilding and economic incentives for wildlife projects on private lands.

Rural landowners can turn parts of their property into wildlife corridors by partnering with public agencies that are working on corridor projects. They can modify their property with fencing that is conducive to wildlife migration and add buffer zones for animals. Areas that are not being used for agriculture can be planted with trees to create more habitat for a variety of species.

We can support nonprofit land trusts and work with them to make sure they are including wildlife corridors in their land management plans.

Urban planners can design wildlife crossings and make integrating them into municipal planning standard practice. One wildlife crossing can save as much as $443,000 each year by reducing animal-vehicle collisions.

Researchers can benefit society by studying the many climate benefits wildlife corridors provide, including providing shade to combat the effect of urban heat islands, carbon sequestration and minimizing the risk of flooding.

Another thing we can do as a society is to recognize Indigenous land rights and support the creation of wildlife corridors on Tribal lands. We can work with local and Indigenous communities, recognizing the cultural and spiritual connections they may have with the animals that migrate across their lands. By doing so we can gain valuable knowledge of the animals and their migratory patterns.

Animals have no political boundaries, so we can protect wildlife corridors that cross borders between countries by implementing international agreements to safeguard them, as well as work with global organizations that help coordinate corridor protections.

In Our Own Lives?

Depending on where you live, it may seem like wildlife corridors are far removed, but we can actually help them from our own backyards. Each green space is an opportunity to help create refuge, habitat and stepping stones for the wildlife who share our environment. You never know who will be passing through on their epic migrations to stop and rest, find food, make a new home and even bear young.

The more diversity of plant life we nurture in our gardens, the more animals will feel welcome to stop there — trees and nesting boxes for birds, grass for rabbits, flowering plants for pollinators, all free of pesticides and prohibitive fencing.

Think of your garden as a network, rather than an enclosed space. What animals are native to your area, and is there anything you could plant or modify that would help nurture and build the ecosystem you share? What are the wild spaces surrounding where you live like? Are they forest, orchard, grassland? These wild spaces are often where the animals that pass through your garden are headed to or coming from, so they can give you some clues as to what might help those animals on their journeys.

Other ways to help include learning more about wildlife corridors, volunteering with a local rewilding project or starting a pollinator garden or corridor in your neighborhood. Collaborate with neighbors on what native grass, flower and tree species would be most beneficial for animals in your region, stop or reduce mowing and either remove fencing or cut holes to allow animals like hedgehogs and rabbits to travel safely from garden to garden without having to veer onto sidewalks or roads.

Individuals can also speak up through public comments, sign petitions, attend community meetings and encourage government officials to support wildlife corridor projects.

By creating havens for biodiversity within areas where humans live, we can make transitions between landscapes more seamless, safe and nurturing for wildlife.

Takeaway

Human development, whether it be agricultural, residential or commercial, has replaced natural, balanced environments with concrete, steel and glass. Roads and highways have bisected ancient migration routes and cut off species from their known habitats, leaving them with no choice but to attempt to cross human-modified landscapes to find food, shelter and suitable mates.

Wildlife corridors are essential to provide safe passage to wildlife as they make the journeys that are part of their natural life cycle. Corridors have been shown to be effective, in some cases dramatically increasing the survival rates of species and the biodiversity of landscapes.

Humans must keep adding to the network of wildlife crossings, passageways and corridors, but also always be on the lookout for novel ways to restructure and rewild our environments. By doing so we can create environments that are more seamless with the natural landscape, as well as more inviting, secure and supportive of the animals with whom we share our planet.

The post Wildlife Corridors 101: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on EcoWatch.

This story was co-published with The Lens.

To visit the country’s newest hub for exporting liquefied gas to Europe, follow the Mississippi River southeast from New Orleans, past the recently shuttered Phillips 66 refinery in Alliance and deeper into Plaquemines Parish, a ribbon of land that flanks the lower Mississippi River before dropping off into the Gulf of Mexico. There, strip malls and highways give way to wide expanses of cypress and low marshes that are home to white-tailed deer, alligators, and pelicans. The border between land and water, solid ground and swamp, seems to dissolve. In this part of the Louisiana coast, most exit roads lead over levees and into wetlands traversed by local fishermen and pipeline workers. You’ll pass small fishing hamlets, clusters of trailers lining bayous, and carcasses of old houses.

Towering over this patchwork of lowland and swamp is a massive liquefied natural gas export terminal owned by the Virginia-based Venture Global LNG, one of three in Louisiana. Built on 630 acres of former swampland, an area larger than New Orleans’ French Quarter, the facility known as Plaquemines LNG extends along more than a mile of the Mississippi River. It encompasses thousands of feet of coiled steel pipes for supercooling gas, 130-foot cylindrical storage tanks, and flare stacks that expel tall, airborne flames while the plant operates. At a break in the levee wall that surrounds the property, a sign warns of the hazards inside: “WORK THE PLAN. DON’T RUSH. GET HOME SAFE.” A large metal pipe extends out of the facility and over the highway, bound for the river. 

Venture Global’s terminal in Plaquemines Parish will cool natural gas down to its liquid form so it can be loaded onto ships and exported around the world. When the facility becomes operational in 2025, tanker ships will be able to plug into it and offload more than 25 million tons of natural gas each year, enough to power more than 15 million homes over the same period. The opening will represent a triumph for gas drillers that have sought to sell more of their product abroad and for President Joe Biden, who has championed American gas exports to ensure “the reliable supply of global energy” as Europe weans itself off gas imported from Russia following that country’s invasion of Ukraine. 

In the 18 months since construction on Plaquemines LNG began, Venture Global has transformed the lives of people who have lived in the 23,000-person parish for generations. The streets around the plant became choked with truck traffic, the marsh threaded with pipelines, and the quiet was replaced with the din of construction. Acres of wetland disappeared beneath concrete. The broad ocean skyline of the parish vanished behind a maze of steel. And Venture Global is already working on another plant in the parish, known as Delta LNG.

“I said it would never happen, then you wake up and here it is,” said Henry McAnespy, a fisherman who grew up in the parish and lives down the road from the project. He described the roar of pipeline workers’ airboats at 6 a.m. each morning and the light pollution from the company’s round-the-clock construction. “I live in a place that never gets dark no more.”

A father and son go shrimping in Calcasieu Lake. Grist / Lylla Younes

Fishermen hold up an alligator gar, a type of fish native to the Louisiana marsh. New liquefied natural gas plants now threaten those wetlands. Grist / Lylla Younes

Emboldened by a surge in global demand for natural gas, a small group of companies rushed to build an industry along the Gulf Coast, from the southern tip of Texas to southeastern Louisiana, carving up thousands of acres of vulnerable shoreline to clear the way for massive plants and send American fossil fuels overseas. Liquefaction terminals are among the most complex industrial facilities in existence, with footprints that rival those of the largest chemical plants and oil refineries; the first to open — Cheniere Energy’s plant in southwest Louisiana — encompassed an area the size of nearly 700 football fields.

Building them often requires dredging through shorelines and wetlands to build loading docks and lay hundreds of miles of pipelines. Seven of these facilities have started up in the continental United States in as many years, and at least two dozen more are in various stages of planning and construction along the Gulf Coast. A decade ago, the United States had never exported LNG, but earlier this year it became the world’s top exporter of the fuel, surpassing the gas-rich nation of Qatar.

The growth of the LNG industry in the United States has reordered world markets, offering a new energy source to Europe and Asia even as gas exports drive up domestic energy prices. But it’s on the Gulf Coast, and in particular on the rural fringes of the Louisiana coast, that the consequences of the boom have been most visible. Grist reviewed dozens of state and federal records and found that in their haste to greenlight new terminals, regulators are exposing residents of coastal parishes to new and dangerous sources of air pollution from flares and leaks. Louisiana environmental regulators recently cited numerous violations at Venture Global’s LNG terminal in Cameron Parish, but has allowed the company’s project near McAnespy’s home in Plaquemines, on the other side of the state, to move forward. And as gas exporters build their plants on eroding swampland, they are increasing the risk of catastrophic accidents and explosions during floods and hurricanes. People like McAnespy, who live in neighborhoods surrounding the terminals, are right in the blast zone.

“It’s not just that each of these facilities is like a giant death star on sinking land, it’s that there’s so many of them,” said Elizabeth Calderon, a senior attorney at the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice who has worked on cases challenging LNG terminals in south Louisiana. “This is how sacrifice zones are created.”

When John Allaire bought his 300-acre property along the Gulf of Mexico in the 1990s, the southwest coast of Louisiana was a very different place. There was no industry in sight, just wide expanses of wild grasses and wetlands leading to belts of oak trees, known as cheniers, that lined the sandy shore near the Texas state line. Since then, coastal erosion has wiped away almost all those old growth forests, and much of the landscape has been cleared for the construction of new LNG terminals like the one Venture Global built near the border of his property. 

Allaire lives in Cameron Parish, a once sleepy area dotted with fishing hamlets that has transformed over the last decade into one of the world’s most important hubs for exporting natural gas. Three terminals currently operate in the 5,000-person parish; another seven are on the way. If Cameron Parish is where gas companies go to set up shop, carving out pipeline networks and erecting massive liquefaction terminals, then the city of Lake Charles an hour to the north is where they broker business deals. Long a site of petrochemical development and its accompanying pollution, Lake Charles is trying to capitalize off the prime coastal real estate to its south, with local politicians luring gas executives from Germany to Japan with events like the so-called “Americas LNG & Gas Summit & Exhibition,” which they’ve hosted two years in a row at the Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino.

Local officials have celebrated the announcement of every new LNG development in the area, calling the industry a boon for economic growth and employment. Some residents like Allaire have a different perspective. As soon as the Venture Global terminal known as Calcasieu Pass began operating near his home in early 2022, Allaire witnessed a string of problems. 

“Right away you had black smoke, alarms going off at the plant, and flares going constantly,” he said.

Liquefying gas is a dirty process. Terminals like Calcasieu Pass operate nearly around the clock, sucking in gas from a national network of pipelines and liquefying it so it can be loaded onto ships. When there’s too much gas backed up in the pipes, or when other refrigerant chemicals start to build up, the company prevents explosions by burning off gas, which sends orange flames shooting into the sky from the company’s flare towers.

As a former oil and gas engineer, Allaire knows that a certain level of flaring is to be expected when workers attempt to control pressure variations within their equipment, but too much flaring can be a sign of larger problems. Flaring releases a cocktail of pollutants like carbon monoxide, black carbon, and volatile organic compounds like benzene and formaldehyde. These chemicals are especially dangerous for vulnerable people like pregnant women, whose odds of having a premature birth can double from regular exposure to pollution from flares.

Soon after Calcasieu Pass was up and running last year, Allaire began photographing the flares, which often burned throughout the day and into the night. His kitchen table is now littered with printouts of these timestamped images, which, added together, reveal the frequency of the plant’s mishaps. A report by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an environmental nonprofit, found that the facility violated the Clean Air Act by exceeding the pollution thresholds specified in its permit more than 2,000 times last year, according to the facility’s own records reviewed by Grist. This flaring led to the release of numerous chemicals, including between 19,000 and 37,000 pounds of nitrogen dioxide, a greenhouse gas that has been linked to chronic lung disease.

Despite these violations at Venture Global’s first terminal in the state, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality has signed off on the construction of Venture Global’s second facility in Plaquemines Parish, which the company itself describes as “technologically identical” to the first one near Allaire’s home in southwest Louisiana.

“Talk about an experiment,” Calderon of Earthjustice said of Venture Global’s two newest enterprises. “They want to be allowed to emit air pollution at the levels of their failed engineering rather than at the levels they promised.”

Last month, in a rare move, the same state agency issued a compliance order against Venture Global for “preventable” and “unauthorized” violations at Calcasieu Pass. In the order, regulators detailed the company’s “failure to timely report” its emissions and alleged that it misrepresented the extent to which its equipment had malfunctioned. 

Neither the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality nor Venture Global responded to multiple requests for comment on the company’s permit violations or any other details in this story. In a written response to the department, Venture Global’s lawyers said they will likely dispute certain portions of the order. 

Flaring is just one of multiple ways that LNG terminals release toxic chemicals into their surroundings. Supercooling natural gas until it becomes a liquid at minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit relies on engines known as turbines that burn fuel to produce massive amounts of electricity. The turbines at Calcasieu Pass near Allaire’s house have a generation capacity of 720 megawatts, enough to power more than 500,000 homes at once.

The Environmental Protection Agency considers gas turbines major sources of toxic air pollution, since the combustion process releases a slew of cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene and formaldehyde. That pollution can travel dozens of miles away, diminishing air quality in more densely populated inland areas like Lake Charles. What’s more, enforcement records from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality indicate that these machines are prone to malfunctions, sometimes for long stretches of time. Last year, three gas turbines at Calcasieu Pass failed repeatedly over two straight months, emitting thousands of pounds of pollutants into the air.

Emissions from LNG terminals across Louisiana and Texas are putting an outsize burden on lower-income neighborhoods. In Cameron Parish where Allaire lives, the median income is $64,000, but more than 14 percent of people are below the federal poverty line, $30,000 for a family of four. A federal analysis of the Venture Global plant in Plaquemines found that two-thirds of residents in a census block near the terminal live below the poverty line. 

Advocates see the LNG buildout as part of a larger industrial expansion that has also disproportionately affected Black people. The cluster of terminals in Cameron Parish is just south of Lake Charles, where nearly half of all residents are Black. There, emissions from LNG terminals are compounded by already high pollution levels drifting in from the nearby town of Westlake, where a maze of chemical complexes emits thousands of pounds of cancer-causing chemicals such as vinyl chloride and 1,3-butadiene every year, causing the air to smell like burnt plastic.

“Our children are dying from asthma,” said Roishetta Sibley Ozane, an activist from Lake Charles who runs the Vessel Project of Louisiana, a local environmental organization. “People have cancer. And yet these industries are allowed to pollute and emit all of this right in our community and nothing is being done about it because it’s going under the radar.”

In a petition sent to the EPA in late May, seven environmental organizations from the Gulf Coast, including Ozane’s, alleged that regulators in Louisiana and Texas are illegally granting permits to oil and gas companies, including LNG operators such as Venture Global. The petition charged that in giving them permits to build new infrastructure without first requiring them to demonstrate through modeling that their facilities will be in compliance with the law, Louisiana has violated the federal Clean Air Act, which prohibits granting a company a permit that will “cause or contribute” to a violation of federal air quality standards. The organizations sent a separate civil rights complaint to the agency in June, arguing that allowing the industrial buildout discriminates against majority-Black communities in Louisiana like Lake Charles.

Regulators in Louisiana and Texas declined to comment on the petition, and the EPA told Grist that it would not comment on an open civil rights complaint.

Allaire said that he plans to continue documenting Venture Global’s flares, and he worried aloud about a new fight on the horizon. Another company, Houston-based Commonwealth LNG, is about to break ground on an export terminal and pipeline network just over his property line. In 2021, Allaire turned away representatives from Commonwealth who offered to buy his land. He said that he refuses to leave, no matter the offer. 

“This is a unique spot, all my kids grew up here,” Allaire said, gazing out his truck’s windshield at the bright green widgeon grass floating on the surface of his pond. “They grew up hunting and fishing and stargazing and campfiring. … It’s not for sale.”

John Allaire stands on his property in Cameron Parish. Grist / Lylla Younes

An alligator glides through the water in Plaquemines Parish. Nearby, a fisherman traps crawdads. Grist / Lylla Younes

Allaire said that after 40 years working in the oil and gas industry, the year and a half that he’s spent living near an LNG terminal has changed his mind about a few things. When he worked at an oil refinery in the 1980s and 1990s, he wasn’t aware that burning all that fuel would cause carbon to build up in the atmosphere, but now he’s certain about the industry’s impact on the climate. Though natural gas is a less carbon-intensive fuel than oil, burning it for electricity still releases carbon dioxide, and drilling for it can also cause significant leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Yet the companies building LNG terminals in Cameron Parish are assuming that international demand for the fuel will be robust for decades to come. 

“They’re selling it abroad to the highest bidder” with full knowledge of what it’s doing to the planet, Allaire said. He now sees oil as a finite resource, bound to dry up eventually, and believes that the country is going to have to switch to renewables at some point.

“It’s just a question of when,” Allaire said. “How much carbon do we put in the atmosphere hoping that it won’t have catastrophic effects?”

Since Venture Global began constructing its first gas hub in Plaquemines Parish in 2022, Henry McAnespy’s life has changed in numerous ways. A commercial fisherman since high school, the 64-year-old laments the way the company dredged the marsh where he goes fishing to lay 36-inch-wide pipelines. The water pressure in his home, already low after Hurricane Ida damaged the parish’s water system two years ago, is even weaker now; McAnespy and other locals think it’s tied to the company using the limited resource to build its terminal.

But the thing that keeps him up at night is the fear that, at any moment, Venture Global’s mile-wide terminal up the road could explode. 

“You don’t have a crystal ball, you can’t tell me what’s going to happen to this plant,” McAnespy said. “I don’t want to live by this and I don’t think any investor would move his family here either.”

Of the five liquefied natural gas terminals in operation on the Gulf Coast, at least four have suffered some kind of leak or blast, whether due to extreme weather or a mechanical malfunction. Multiple incidents at LNG facilities on the Gulf have already demonstrated what happens when supercooled gas escapes from pipelines and storage tanks, underscoring the potential for damage like the kind McAnespy fears. 

In early 2018, liquefied gas escaped through a crack in one of the storage tanks at a facility in Cameron Parish owned by Cheniere Energy, a Houston-based corporation that was the first American firm to export LNG. Workers discovered and patched the leak before any explosion occurred, but an investigation by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, part of the federal Department of Transportation, revealed other cracks in the tank. The regulator fined Cheniere $2.2 million and ordered the company to stop using two faulty tanks, deeming them “hazardous to life, property, or the environment.” 

A year later, during a separate, previously unreported incident at the same facility, a leak of an unidentified substance caused three construction workers to lose consciousness, according to a lawsuit filed by the workers against Cheniere in Texas state court. The three workers were on the job near one of the plant’s giant liquefaction machines when they became “overwhelmed with the odor of gas.”

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In an incident report provided to the court, one of the workers recalled that he “started to feel weak and [dizzy]” after smelling a “strong odor of unknown chemicals,” and after that he “didn’t remember anything until [he] arrived at the Port Arthur hospital.” Cheniere said it couldn’t figure out the source of the leak, according to court documents, calling its investigation “inconclusive.” (A judge ruled in Cheniere’s favor on procedural grounds last year, but the workers have since filed for a new trial.)

Leaks and malfunctions like these can also trigger explosions. In June 2022, a thunderous blast shook Freeport LNG’s facility in Freeport, Texas, the second-largest export terminal on the Gulf Coast, rattling the town of 10,000. A malfunction in one of the plant’s pressure valves caused gas to back up in a pipeline and leak out into the air, where it formed a dense “vapor cloud” and then ignited. It took eight months for Freeport LNG to repair the damage from the blast and secure permission from the federal government to export gas again.

It hasn’t happened on the Gulf Coast yet, but experts worry that the liquefaction process could lead to much bigger blasts. The Freeport explosion involved a leak of methane, but export terminals also employ a cocktail of chemicals known as refrigerants to condense gas into a liquid, including ethylene, propane, and hexane. They are all even more explosive than gas itself, which means they would cause larger vapor cloud explosions, perhaps large enough to level entire city blocks.

“We have searched high and low to find this answer of how far people would be affected and no one has been able to tell us,” said Naomi Yoder, a staff scientist at the Gulf Coast-based environmental organization Healthy Gulf who studies LNG terminals. “If they don’t have those answers, then what in the world are we doing building these things?”

Venture Global and other gas exporters have promised jobs in cash-strapped parishes that sometimes fail to provide residents with basic services. Officials in Cameron, for instance, are still working to resume medical treatment at the parish’s only hospital, which was damaged by Hurricane Laura in 2020. And in July, Louisiana’s Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, declared a state of emergency in Plaquemines after saltwater from the Mississippi River began seeping into the drinking water supply. In response, the parish and a state agency handed out 200,000 bottles of water. 

Some locals are worried that the new terminals won’t improve these conditions even if they deliver on the promise of more jobs. Supporters of the Plaquemines project say the parish badly needs the 250 jobs and 728 indirect jobs that Venture Global promised to create, since almost the same number of positions were eliminated when the Phillips 66 Alliance Refinery up the road shuttered in 2021. In an effort to lure the company to the parish in 2016, the Louisiana Board of Commerce and Industry awarded Venture Global a 10-year property tax break to build the LNG terminal. That break was worth $83.5 million in the first year of the contract, a sum larger than the parish’s 2022 budget of $75 million. The board recently approved another $29.8 million in payroll tax rebates to the company over 10 years. 

McAnespy appreciates the economic benefit of the terminals, but says companies like Venture Global often ignore the residents who live closest to the facilities.

“The plant is a wonderful economic boost, not just to Plaquemines or the state of Louisiana, but worldwide,” McAnespy said. “My concern is that it’s such a big project that they’re imposing their will on us. Have a little respect for us.”

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Given the chance, McAnespy said, he’d move 10 miles up the road and away from the plant where he would be more confident that his family could easily evacuate if there was an explosion. McAnespy’s house is likely within the blast radius of the plant’s high-powered liquefaction machines, as well as its massive gas storage tanks.

McAnespy said that Venture Global offered to buy the houses of some people living on the east side of Lake Hermitage Road in Plaquemines Parish, which the company considers to be the outer boundary of its blast radius. But people like him just across the street haven’t heard anything from the company.

“I feel like they should come back here and give me an option to buy me out,” he said. “Do your project, just give me fair market value for my property. I’ll pick up my pieces and go live somewhere else.”

On a bright day in April, Travis Dardar stood with his boot heels in the shallows of Calcasieu Lake, a few miles away from John Allaire’s house, surveying the area where he took his boat out to catch shrimp each spring. The 38-year-old Dardar has been fishing all his life, beginning in his hometown of Isle de Jean Charles, an island community in southeast Louisiana.

“Back then, fishing wasn’t really a choice for me, you know?” Dardar said, eyes shaded under his camo Louisiana State University baseball cap. “It was the kind of lifestyle we grew up in. We had to eat.”

Like other residents of Isle de Jean Charles, Dardar is a member of the United Houma Nation, a state-recognized tribe, and his family had a strong connection to the island. He rebuilt his family home there twice after successive hurricanes ripped through. But after many of his neighbors moved away and his grandfather died, the place didn’t feel like home anymore. Other residents of Isle de Jean Charles were taking part in one of one of the first climate resettlement programs in U.S. history, and Dardar decided it was time for him to leave, too. In 2015, he and his wife and kids moved west to Cameron, where he could still make a living by shrimping, the only way he’d ever known. 

Dardar quickly got used to life in Cameron, a fishing community just like Isle de Jean Charles. But then came the LNG terminals, one after the other, tearing out patches of wetlands larger than football stadiums and changing the chemistry of the air and water. The export facilities now ring Calcasieu Lake, a gourd-shaped body of water separated from the Gulf of Mexico by a narrow channel that cuts through a stretch of wetlands. Until recently, most of Louisiana’s largest fossil fuel facilities sat well inland from the Gulf. Sitting back from the water gave oil refineries and chemical plants protection from storm surges and easy access to highways and pipelines. LNG export terminals are different: Because they load gas right onto massive tanker ships, these facilities must sit right at the water’s edge, on land that is both undeveloped and especially vulnerable to flooding.

That soon became a problem for people, like Dardar, who caught shrimp on Calcasieu Lake for a living. The massive waves created by gas tankers damaged his boat and forced Dardar and his fellow shrimpers to cluster in a corner of the lake where they all vied for a small share of the catch. Another gas company, Tellurian, had announced plans to open a 1,200-acre terminal on the Calcasieu River, which empties into the lake, and they began to worry that the shipping traffic to that terminal would one day push them out for good.

To Dardar, it seemed like a sort of cosmic joke. He’d survived decades of deadly hurricanes only to leave Isle de Jean Charles, and when he finally achieved some measure of stability, a new industry rose up around him, an outside force challenging his livelihood once again. In fact, the plants came to Cameron for the same reason Dardar did: Calcasieu Lake is an ideal access point for LNG tankers coming in from the Gulf of Mexico. 

This summer, Dardar made a choice he’d fought hard to avoid. He took a buyout from Venture Global and used the money to move his family 20 minutes north to the town of Kaplan, where he could continue shrimping in nearby Intracoastal City. Dardar said that in the month since they moved, he sleeps better at night. The air, too, is easier to breathe. 

“Kind of feel like we’re at home,” Dardar said of the new property in Kaplan. He described the final months in Cameron as eerily similar to the end of his time on Isle de Jean Charles.

The rapid expansion of the LNG industry in Cameron Parish might have pushed Dardar away from the coastline, but Venture Global and its fellow LNG exporters are incurring their own risks by setting up along the Gulf Coast. The five active LNG terminals bordering the Gulf of Mexico sit at the end of “Hurricane Alley,” a band of warm water that begins off the northwest coast of Africa and stretches across the Atlantic, providing fuel in the form of heat for dangerous hurricanes to form. 

In August 2020, Hurricane Laura made landfall in Cameron Parish, driving a 17-foot wall of water onto southwest Louisiana’s coast and exacting damage on a third of the state’s industrial facilities, including multiple LNG terminals. A pressure system failure at Cheniere’s facility led to the release of more than 100 tons of pollutants, and a nearby plant owned by San Diego-based Sempra Energy reportedly flared for days after the storm. Two months later, Hurricane Delta swept through, causing more damage to petrochemical plants across the state. 

“These locations can barely handle storms now,” said Jessi Parfait, a native of south Louisiana who works on the Sierra Club’s Beyond Fossil Fuels campaign. “Just imagine 30 years into the future, which is supposed to be the lifetime of these facilities, potentially more. They’re not going to be as protected.”

LNG developers have tried to assure investors and regulators that they’re getting ahead of future hurricanes by weather-proofing their facilities. A representative from Commonwealth LNG, the firm planning to break ground next door to Allaire’s property in Cameron, told Grist that it will build a “storm-surge wall intended to minimize flood damage or disruption of operations.” A representative from Sempra Energy pointed out that its facility is located 18 miles inland and eight feet above sea level, which puts it out of reach of storm surge events. The representative noted that the terminal suffered minimal damage when Hurricane Laura hit in 2020.

But the risks are only increasing. The sea levels off the coast of Louisiana are likely to rise by as much as two feet over the next 30 years, and the waters of the Gulf of Mexico are only getting warmer, which will provide more fuel to hurricanes as they make landfall. By the end of the century, the Gulf Coast region might be as much as 12 degrees F hotter, which will allow rainstorms to hold more moisture.

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Last year, the Sierra Club asked Ivor van Heerden, a noted marine scientist and former Louisiana State University professor, to assess the hurricane risk of Venture Global’s Plaquemines LNG terminal. Van Heerden is perhaps best known for predicting the potential devastation of Hurricane Katrina more than a decade before the storm submerged New Orleans in 2005.

When completed, Plaquemines LNG will be surrounded by a 26-foot storm wall and flanked by two separate levee systems. In his report, however, van Heerden determined that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane like Laura or Ida could still flood the facility and cause widespread damage that would spill into surrounding wetlands and nearby communities.

“It is my opinion after years of studying hurricanes and flooding that this LNG site will be flooded, in the not-too-distant future and perhaps even the next hurricane season,” van Heerden wrote in the report. If a flood ever breached the plant’s levee system, he wrote, there would be a high probability of chemicals “being carried off the site and into homes, businesses, farmland, and fragile coastal wetlands.”

The risks are similar at the five other LNG facilities that now line the Gulf Coast, and future export terminals in Louisiana and Texas will be just as prone to devastation during storms. As van Heerden sees it, the gas industry is on a collision course with rising sea levels and ocean temperatures, building explosive infrastructure in an area that is only getting more vulnerable to climate change. 

Grist sent questions about air pollution and hurricane risk to all five companies that operate LNG export terminals in Texas and Louisiana, and only two responded. A representative from Sempra Energy, said that the company “put[s] the health, safety and security of our workforce, customers and communities at the center of everything we do.” A representative from Commonwealth LNG said that “the safety of our employees, the public, and the environment … have the highest priority in everything that we do.”

Officials in Louisiana ignored van Heerden’s warnings before Katrina, and the result was the most expensive natural disaster in the history of the United States, costing more than $170 billion. If he’s right about the risks of exporting LNG, coastal Louisiana could see a devastating LNG disaster in the coming years, as soon as the right hurricane strikes, and it will be people like Henry McAnespy who bear the immediate damage from chemical explosions and contamination. The effects would also be felt well beyond coastal Louisiana.

“The average American should recognize that when it all goes to hell in a bucket, they’re the ones who are going to be coughing up the money for the remediation,” van Heerden told Grist. “Katrina cost billions of dollars. The cost [of an LNG disaster] is going to be borne by the American public, and it’s going to be a substantial cost.”

Editor’s note: Earthjustice and the Sierra Club are advertisers with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Death stars on sinking land’: How liquefied natural gas took over the Gulf Coast on Aug 2, 2023.