"Tropical Storm Cindy was a tiny storm that had an outsized impact on south Louisiana. Coastal flooding cut off LA 1 and extended westward to Cameron Parish. Again, this was only a tropical storm. Not a hurricane. 

Cindy revealed our extreme vulnerability. Flooding in south Iberia Parish has revived calls for a levee to keep some storm surge out of some communities in that parish. A similar proposal was defeated four years ago. 

There is more of this to come in our future — all across south Louisiana. It's because of climate change. The atmosphere is continuing to warm up, driven primarily by the the burning of fossil fuels which create the greenhouse gases that drive the process. The floods of August 2016 had all the earmarks of being powered by climate change. 

The Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) has just implemented its third Coastal Master Plan. Like its 2012 predecessor, the 2017 plan is an amalgam of projects and approaches to restore wetlands, protect people and property. Like the 2012 plan, it carries a $50 Billion price tag. We know that this is a low-ball estimate. And, oh, by the way, we don't have the money to cover even half of the low-ball estimate. 

One path to getting some of that money leads to the federal government. Good luck with that. The Trump administration (like the Obama administration before it) has proposed cutting off Louisiana's access to GOMESA money which is a new stream of offshore oil and gas royalty money that CPRA leaders include in the $19 Billion in revenue they thought they could count on as part of the minimum $50 Billion needed to implement some significant portion of the Master Plan. 

That leaves the oil and gas industry. The industry is responsible for some significant portion of the wetlands loss Louisiana has experienced over the past 70 years. Studies in which the industry participated have found that industry activities — particularly the dredging of access canals for drilling locations and trenching through wetlands for pipelines — contributed between 30 and 70 percent of wetlands loss in particular areas, depending on the amount of oil and gas activity and the topography of the area. 

Six parishes have filed Coastal Zone law suits against oil and gas companies under the powers given them by the Coastal Zone Management Act. There are 20 parishes included in Louisiana's Coastal Zone. Governor John Bel Edwards wants all of them to join the state in suits against the industry as part of a strategy of bringing them to the negotiating table. 

The industry has a legal, ethical and moral responsibility to help pay for the damage their activities have caused to our wetlands. The profits they have extracted from Louisiana have made them rich but their activities are setting us up for disaster. 

Climate change — rising seas, sinking land, higher humidity, stronger storms — threatens the future of everyone living in south Louisiana. The core business of the oil and gas industry is fueling climate change. Climate science indicates that relative sea level rise in Louisiana (the combination of rising seas and sinking land) could be as much as six feet within the next half century.

Sea level rise of that magnitude will force many of us to abandon our homes, businesses, and communities. For people like us —  people who are deeply attached and connected to place — this will be a traumatic event. We might be able to avoid it, but only if we are willing to confront climate change — the existential threat to south Louisiana."

"Calling Louisiana’s finances over the past decade a train wreck is an insult to trains and the calamities that sometimes engulf them. 

Bobby Jindal inherited a $1 billion surplus from Kathleen Blanco when he took office, plus a flood of federal and private sector disaster relief and recovery money, and — with the help of a pliant/intimidated/indifferent legislature, burned through all that and an additional $2 billion dollars before he shuffled off the podium at the Capitol in January 2016 to the great relief of just about everyone. 

John Bel Edwards succeeded Jindal and has spent the first two years of his term trying to dig the state out of the hole Jindal left in his wake — despite the best efforts of the House Republican majority to keep us there by refusing to vote for the taxes needed to enable the state to deliver essential services needed by our citizens. 

Jan Moller has been observing this entire process for the past decade from front row seats. First, he was a Capitol beat reporter for the Times-Picayune back in the days when they were a daily newspaper. For the past five years, he’s been the leader of the Louisiana Budget Project, an organization whose focus is to provide analysis of state budget and spending policies for the good people of our state who would like to be informed. 

With the state’s long-standing ‘good guv’munt’ organizations reliant on conservative funders for their existence, the Louisiana Budget Project (which is part of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities) has brought a unique perspective (as in not dominated by corporate interests) to Louisiana’s budget discussions. 

In the podcast, Moller and I discuss the budget that just emerged from the regular and special sessions of the Louisiana Legislature, the role of Medicaid expansion in helping economic development in Louisiana, the prospective impact of the first Trump budget on Louisiana as well as what may or may not be the impact of the American Health Care Act which has had more false starts than are allowed in track meets. 

It’s a wide-ranging conversation that I think you’ll find worth you while. Jan knows his number!"

"Accountants took down the gangster Al Capone. If the corporate education reform movement in this country is brought down it will likely be by a statistician like Mercedes Schneider. 

The Slidell English teacher got engaged in the public education debate after one of the early leaders of the reform movement Diane Ravitch broke with the reformers. The former assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Education renounced her earlier support for high-stakes testing. Schneider started blogging her own opinions on public education not much later and has been steadily at it ever since. She also writes at Huffington Post. 

Schneider's authored three books on aspects of the education reform movement, in addition to the blogging and her teaching, which she has not stopped. 

As a practitioner and a statistician, Schneider brings unique tools to the table when she's discussing what works or doesn't work in education. And, she's been particularly adept at busting the manipulation of student performance data in Louisiana by Superintendent John White. 

Schneider pulls no punches. She's plainspoken, authoritative, patient and relentless. 

In this podcast, Schneider talks about the reformers in Louisiana and across the country, John White's record of data manipulation, and the impact that high stakes testing has in the classroom and how testing came to be a central element in the reform movement."