Despite science against jetties, Gov. Bobby Jindal rocks on: Bob Marshall
Filed under Science in 2010 |30 Jul
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At a press conference supporting his wish to narrow Gulf passes with rock jetties in an attempt to keep oil out of interior marshes, Gov. Bobby Jindal said this: “No one can convince us that rocks in the water are more dangerous than oil. That is absolutely ridiculous. The only people who believe that are the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., who can’t see the oil, smell the oil or touch the oil.”
That’s not even close to the truth, as Gov. Jindal surely knew. But I’m not surprised.
That misinformation is in keeping with the governor’s response to this disaster, which has often been a mixture of diversion, fur coat attitude and panic — all of which is doing terrible long-term damage to our chances of survival on this starving delta.
Let’s start with that claim about the rocks.
The governor knows full well that since the day the rock idea was broached by Jefferson Parish politicians, the foremost authorities on Louisiana’s coastal ecosystem have come out against it. These are not Washington bureaucrats. They are men and women who have long lived and worked in coastal Louisiana; many of them are natives. They have spent their lives becoming expert on how the system functions, why it has been crumbling and what must be done to save what is left.
The first to raise the alarm was Kerry St. Pe, a coastal scientist who heads the Barataria Terrebonne National Estuary Program. He grew up fishing and hunting in Port Sulphur. That’s a long way from D.C.
That was followed by a letter to the governor signed by no fewer than 16 renowned coastal scientists, including leading lights from LSU, UNO, Loyola, Tulane, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Southeastern Louisiana University, McNeese State University, the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation and others. None of those places is within 1,000 miles of Washington.
Among their concerns:
Narrowing the passes will increase the velocity of tides and probably result in more oil being sucked into the interior marshes; modeling shows the project would result in increased salinities in interior marshes leading to greater rates of erosion; the barriers could change currents along coastal shorelines causing them to erode more quickly, leaving interior marshes more vulnerable and future rebuilding more costly; squeezing the passes would restrict the vital exchange of estuarine species between offshore and interior estuaries.
Further, our most prominent scientists have already said the coastal grasses being impacted are very resilient and respond fairly quickly to oil spills. They know because we have had many oil spills in the interior marshes.
In short, the rocks could intensify the ongoing destruction of our coast — a disaster far greater and more devastating to our future than the oil coming in, and one that will still be here long after the oil is gone.
Millions of your tax dollars have been invested helping these men and women become the world’s acknowledged experts on coastal Louisiana. Yet Gov. Jindal and Jefferson Parish officials want to ignore them. Why?
This brings me to the digression, fur coating and affright parts of his advance.
Since the oil began spewing, Jindal has been stressful to convert mass the understanding our wetlands are beingness poisoned and mass are out of exercise is those anathemize feds. It’s a deflection. If he screams brassy plenty, mayhap masses bequeath bury that he was a big help of bad deepwater boring.
He is fashioning villains of those responding to the tragedy, not those creditworthy for it.
The fur pelage comes from an old proverb that applies to many multitude elective to world post: “Give a gorilla a fur pelage, and he thinks he’s King Kong.” Jindal thinks “regulator” is not an spot but a entitle, one that comes with a diadem that bestows ecclesiastic nirvana: He moldiness experience more than the scientists because he was elective. That’s why he can disregard the experts.
Finally, we occur to scare — which is the long-suffering ikon the state may be acquiring from the almost seeable Louisiana politicians during this crisis. They see men hilarious at cameras, tempestuous at the federal governance around this oil catastrophe. The like men are shriek that we pauperization to proceed boring more wells and ignoring their own scientists’ advice on how to hatful with the problems.
If we suffer a futurity on this glide, we bequeath motive the country’s helper in the mannequin of tens of billions of dollars for coastal projects. Politicians spewing distortions, ignoring experts and cachexia tens of millions of dollars doesn’t barrack investor self-assurance.
Louisiana has the humans’s first experts on its coastal ecosystem. The regulator and early elective populace servants should listen their advice.
Bob Marshall is open editor. E-mail him at bmarshall@timespicayune.com.
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