What Are Streets Paved With

[Claude]

Istarted working for the refinery when I was 24 years old, and I worked there for 12 years. First I was a ship agent taking care of cargo and customs paperwork, then I worked as an operator, then in the lab.

Even back then, I was trying to do my part. I drove a hybrid to work, and I was hyper-conscious of my consumerism. But I justified working at the refinery because I had bills. This is what everybody does: try to make the most money for the least amount of time.

I also justified it by the fact that we were fueling America, and we were. At the time, we were importing this heavy, sour crude that came from Venezuela, which you make diesel and jet fuel out of. I had this mindset that there was no alternative, and that the system was too big to fail. This is not the mindset I have today.

At first I was convinced, the LNG must be cleaner. But then I came to learn that fracking, which is how they get most of the gas, is God-awful. Sure, the gas itself might be clean-burning, but the process to get the fuel out of the ground and to that point is just as bad as every other extractive way we've been taking carbon out.

The industry keeps saying LNG is good for jobs: jobs, jobs, jobs! But there are no jobs. There's construction jobs that last for 2 or 3 years, but the governor has to get visas for pipefitters and welders from Mexico to come and build them. Because we don't have enough workers locally.

So I applied to that job, which was for the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, and I got it. Then eventually, I started my own non-profit, For a Better Bayou, which is focused on raising awareness about protecting Louisiana's natural resources. Actually, tomorrow will be our one-year birthday.

So a lot of these conversations I have are just listening, hearing where people are coming from. Like that friend I was talking about earlier, we grew up in the same neighborhood. His older brother was one of my best friends, and he has asthma. He moved to Hawaii maybe 10 or 12 years ago. And in Hawaii, he doesn't have asthma. He doesn't have to worry about his asthma pump.

Was that because of this environment? Was it because of the humidity? Or was it because we have massive amounts of pollution being emitted into the atmosphere? I don't know, but I know that he lives in a humid place in Hawaii and doesn't have asthma. And when he comes home, he has to have his asthma pump with him.

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Wow - we need more of these stories to enact action. This help influence the idea that it's not about maintaining a harmful cocktail of being comfortable and hopeless - it's about action, and that enacting change leads us to a better future, and those need to all be driven by optimism and autonomy in working again the grain of the masses.

I\u2019ve been reporting a lot on that decision this week\u2014specifically, trying to untangle some of the most prominent misinformation being spread about it from both Democrats and Republicans, to help you better understand what it really means for the climate, the economy, and energy security.

I\u2019ll have a newsletter laying all that out for you on Thursday. But in the meantime, I wanted to share with you an interview I did with James Hiatt, a third-generation former oil worker from Louisiana who has been campaigning against the LNG build-out for the last two years, most recently at his non-profit, Better Bayou.

His personal story serves as a powerful debunking of fossil fuel industry narratives about the benefits of LNG in Louisiana. Here it is, told in his own words.

I didn\u2019t retire. I stepped in it. I got fired for sticking up for someone they were being unjust with, and they didn\u2019t like it. I\u2019m not supposed to talk about it because there was a settlement involved. But they were wrong for firing me. They had to settle with the union.

I usually never name the actual refinery I worked for, because then it becomes a site-specific thing and I\u2019d rather focus on the systemic problems. These companies use the same tactics all over the place. They\u2019ll say \u201CSafety First,\u201D and tell you that if you don't feel safe, you have every right to stop work. But then every time you actually use your stop work authority, it\u2019s a problem, because they don't want to stop work.

So I settled with the union, but I wasn\u2019t looking to become an environmentalist. After I got fired, my wife told me, \u201CYou\u2019ve always wanted to be a social worker. Why don\u2019t you go do it?\u201D I came to realize that we all have one life, and I wasn't being fulfilled trading time for a lot of money. So I did; I went back to school in January 2020, and then I graduated in December 2021. I was going to become a social worker and help heal people where they\u2019re at.

I also saw that the LNG boom in the area wasn\u2019t really benefiting communities. Like, we already have three LNG terminals in Cameron Parish\u2013one that started operating in 2018 and one that started in 2020\u2013and it looks like the hurricane we had in 2020 hit yesterday. There's not even a church. The only people who live in the town are the fishermen who have seen the worst catch they've ever had. Come look at Cameron, and tell me if this looks like some prosperous economic development, and not extractive profits for somebody from elsewhere. These streets should be paved with gold. But they're not.

It is difficult doing this work here in Louisiana. I have friends that work at every one of these LNG facilities and most of these plants. Last night, I was at my friend's house for a campfire, and he\u2019s an engineer at one of these petrochemical places. And he told me would love to go work at an LNG facility, because they pay better than the union jobs. But he also understands the work that I'm doing. He agrees, and many people do. Because they have taken and taken and taken from us.

It\u2019s hard to talk about climate change here, too, because people have bought into this idea that it's not it's not human-caused. And that\u2019s because accepting climate change requires you to become uncomfortable with the way you're living. The system has made it so we can be comfortable, and any challenge to that system makes you uncomfortable. So now you just side with the system.

So I try to have these conversations about what might be better, because the system at large here does not allow us to have them. Even our local media is captured by industry, both the newspaper and the TV. Like the other night, all these flares were going off at one of the plastic refineries, and the whole sky was orange. So the local TV station aired a segment, and the end message was essentially: \u201CThis is our noisy neighbor that we just have to put up with.\u201D They said it\u2019s better that they flare than they explode. And it\u2019s like, really? These are our only options? We flare and pollute, or we explode?

This narrative has really taken hold here, the one that says we must accept the oil and gas industry, because without them we\u2019ll have nothing. And it\u2019s indicative of folks who have no hope. It\u2019s tied back to our poverty of imagination of what could be.

The reality is that, when the oil industry is done extracting and using and making profits off us, they will leave. And we will still have no jobs. So to have these conversations with my friends and family and people who still work with industry, it\u2019s important to me. Because when people hear stories, it breaks through some of that.

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