My inbox is suffocating under the weight of your unearned moral outrage. All morning, I have been bombarded by frantic petitions and weeping mass emails from grassroots environmental groups, begging me to use my platform to stop the $18 billion expansion of the Plaquemines LNG facility. You want me to decry the tragedy of the disappearing coast. You want me to write a fiery, viral takedown of the fossil fuel industry. You want me to validate your fragile, coastal-elite belief that if we just post hard enough, the wetlands will magically regenerate. I will do no such thing.
Let us look at the facts you are so desperate to avoid. Fast-tracked by President Donald Trump's administration, the Plaquemines project is poised to more than double in size, cementing its status as the largest natural gas export terminal in the United States. Venture Global LNG is preparing to pour billions of dollars of concrete onto a rapidly sinking stretch of mud south of New Orleans, transforming a dying estuary into a state-of-the-art monument to human consumption. And instead of looking in the mirror, you are pointing your fingers at the developers.
If you did not want an $18 billion natural gas terminal swallowing the Louisiana coastline, you should have tried harder in 2014. You bought cheap home goods shipped across the ocean. You left your air conditioning running all summer. And you quietly rejoiced when Amazon introduced same-day delivery, entirely ignoring the baseline energy load required to bring a silicone spatula to your doorstep in six hours. Now, the bill has come due, and you have the audacity to act shocked that a heavily capitalized energy conglomerate is arriving to collect it.
If you look at the coastal wetlands objectively, rather than through the lens of emotional attachment, they were already a stranded asset. We are simply putting the real estate to work before it sinks.
He is entirely correct, though I know his honesty makes you deeply uncomfortable. The Louisiana coastline has been vanishing at the rate of a football field every hundred minutes. It is a geological loser. It is actively giving up. Why on earth should we artificially prolong the life of a marsh that clearly lacks the resilience to survive the modern era? By replacing the soft, decaying organic matter with a multi-billion-dollar matrix of reinforced steel piping and liquefaction trains, Venture Global is arguably providing the only structural stability that parish has seen in a century.
The sheer scale of the denial among the climate movement is exhausting. During a recent closed-door panel I moderated at COP28—which none of you were invited to, because you prefer shouting outside with cardboard signs over doing the actual, tedious work of stakeholder engagement—several mid-tier energy executives laid out the inescapable math of the transition. You cannot achieve a green future without transition fuels, and you cannot export transition fuels without a terminal the size of a medium European city. Plaquemines LNG is not an aberration; it is the physical manifestation of the net-zero pledges you all spent the last decade clapping for.
When the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved the original footprint, the usual suspects threw a tantrum. Now that the Trump administration is aggressively fast-tracking the expansion to double the facility's capacity, the wailing has reached a fever pitch. You complain that the regulatory review process is being bypassed. You complain that environmental impact statements are being treated as light suggestions. But what exactly is there left to study? The environmental impact is that we are going to boil the ocean to keep your Wi-Fi routers powered. We already know this. Studying it again is just bureaucratic theater.
Consider the financial logistics. Securing the $18 billion for phase two required an unprecedented consortium of global banks, private equity firms, and institutional lenders. These are organizations staffed by people with degrees from Wharton and the London School of Economics, individuals whose entire professional existence is dedicated to calculating long-term risk. Do you honestly believe that JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs would underwrite a facility on a sinking mudflat if they weren't absolutely certain that the sheer velocity of American fossil fuel extraction could outpace the rising tide? They have run the models. The terminal will pay for itself long before the water reaches the control room. It is a triumph of late-stage actuarial science.
By accelerating the erosion of the physical state of Louisiana, we are actually streamlining the federal map. Fewer coastal parishes means less government waste on flood insurance.
Say what you will about the cruelty of the approach, but it is a refreshingly clear-eyed policy stance. For decades, we have poured billions of federal tax dollars into futile dredging operations, trying to rebuild barrier islands that the Gulf of Mexico has explicitly decided it wants back. The ocean has made its ruling. President Trump's administration is simply settling the lawsuit out of court. If capping the whole doomed enterprise in concrete and chilling methane to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit accelerates the inevitable, then so be it.
My favorite flavor of hypocrisy in this entire saga is the outrage over the project’s storm wall. Venture Global is reportedly spending millions to construct a massive, 26-foot-high steel perimeter wall to protect the $18 billion terminal from the very sea-level rise and supercharged hurricanes that its own exported product will inevitably help cause. Activists call this a dystopian irony. I call it proactive adaptation. If the environmental movement had half the foresight of Venture Global’s risk-management division, we wouldn't be in this mess. They are preparing for the future; you are crying about the past.
And please, spare me the performative grief over the local ecosystem. I have no sympathy for the brown pelicans, who have had millions of years of evolutionary runway to develop a tolerance for industrial runoff and simply chose not to. I am equally unmoved by the plight of the commercial shrimpers who claim the terminal is destroying their fishing grounds. The global economy is pivoting to a high-density energy export model, and you are upset about a crustacean. It is a stunning display of main-character syndrome.
They are literally building a wall to keep the ocean out, while selling the gas that brings the ocean closer. It is a death machine.
Listen to the hysteria in that statement. A death machine. No, Sarah, it is a highly optimized liquefaction train operating at peak thermodynamic efficiency. It is only a death machine if you cling to the outdated paradigm that the coast was supposed to be a permanent fixture of the North American continent. Once you let go of that sentimental attachment, the Plaquemines facility reveals itself as a marvel of engineering, a shining beacon of human resilience in the face of the very catastrophe we engineered.
If you actually bothered to read Venture Global’s latest ESG report—which I know you didn't, because reading a 400-page corporate disclosure does not trigger the same dopamine hit as complaining on a podcast—you would see that they have robust protocols in place for minimizing scope-three emissions. They are utilizing state-of-the-art electric drive motors for the liquefaction process. They are making the destruction of the Gulf Coast as carbon-efficient as humanly possible. What more do you want from them? An apology?
We are out of time, but go off. Keep signing your little online petitions. Keep demanding that a notoriously transactional administration reverse course on the largest infrastructure project in the southern United States because you saw a sad documentary about a marsh. The concrete is already curing, the pipelines are already laid, and the LNG tankers are already queuing up in the Gulf.
The terminal is not a tragedy; it is a monument to exactly who we are.