Storms, Insurance, and Fossil Fuels: What Katrina Taught Us – Center for International Environmental Law

Louisiana advocate displays on twenty years of local weather devastation and the alternatives which are shaping her house and our local weather future

Revealed August 28, 2025

By Jane Patton, US Fossil Financial system Marketing campaign Supervisor on the Heart for Worldwide Environmental Legislation 

I used to be 5 the primary time I noticed a tree ripped from the bottom by hurricane winds. 

Andrew. Ivan. Katrina. Rita. Gustav. Isaac. The 2016 floods. Laura. Zeta. Ida.

My reminiscence is pockmarked by named and unnamed storms ravaging my house state. Once we misplaced energy for days after Andrew, my siblings and I ate so many chilly Pop-Tarts in that sweaty, interminable week that I now search them out as hurricane consolation meals. 

The primary time I hunkered down in my very own place, not but 18, was throughout my first semester of faculty (Ivan). It was 4 years later once I evacuated to my grandmother’s home, after selecting up her greatest buddy of 65 years from a nursing house with out energy (Gustav). We drank Irish whiskey nightcaps and did crossword puzzles collectively till the facility got here again on at house.

The primary time I helped somebody ‘muck and intestine’ their home wasn’t even a named storm – simply onerous rain, dangerous zoning, and even worse luck (2016 floods). I made a buddy for all times once I welcomed into my house somebody I knew solely from Twitter together with her 5 kids and two cats, working from a storm that shared her identify and wrecked her city (Laura). Two months later, my household rode out a direct hit, the primary hurricane to cross over our 100-year-old New Orleans shotgun house (Zeta). 

A yr later, my husband and nephew celebrated their birthdays – a day aside – with grocery retailer cupcakes in an Alabama resort (Ida). We spent the following 10 scorching, humid, complicated days at my dad’s home on generator energy till we might go house. 

This recounting skips Katrina and Rita. They usually don’t really feel like my tales to inform. Sure, my house metropolis of Baton Rouge was without end modified by the storm. I volunteered for graveyard shifts at a triage middle within the LSU Fieldhouse, chatting with Kansas Nationwide Guardsman on the door to remain awake. My dad and mom gave up their home to host and transport a rotating crew of radio newsmen, station DJs, and broadcast engineers — essential however often-forgotten first responders in a disaster.

However I didn’t experience out the storm itself. I used to be by the way out of city, and my return house two days later was harrowing—revealing a panorama without end modified in the one place I’ve ever referred to as house. Katrina and Rita marked the primary time I witnessed information corporations filming stranded individuals as an alternative of serving to them to security. It was the primary time I noticed hungry and terrified individuals labeled as ‘looters’ and shot at whereas their wealthier, whiter neighbors had been helped as ‘foragers’ or ‘refugees’. It was an omen. 

Since then, each storm, each hotter– and longer-than-the-last summer time, and each allow granted regardless of vocal neighborhood opposition has strengthened a key lesson of Katrina: This isn’t ‘pure’. That is the disastrous and lethal mixture of fossil gas growth, monetary complicity, and authorities abandonment. 

Regardless of unimaginable acts of neighborhood safety and collective resurgence, the coverage decisions that might defend us from future devastation are usually not being made. The US authorities is actively retreating from warning or repairing us by decimating climate information assortment, weakening chemical security guidelines, and canceling FEMA catastrophe help. Simply final yr, communities gained hard-fought protections from chemical plant emissions, however the Trump administration simply exempted dozens of chemical amenities from these guidelines. Louisiana leaders proceed to actively court docket new fossil gas initiatives, even bypassing commonplace approval processes. They’re ignoring our inevitable destiny if we don’t roll again our reliance on fossil fuels.

And the prices of dwelling in hurt’s method are skyrocketing. My annual home-owner premiums have greater than doubled since I purchased my house in 2017. On common, New Orleans metro owners spend practically 1/5 of their median annual earnings on insurance coverage protection. These commonplace home-owner insurance coverage insurance policies, like mine, don’t cowl flood injury — a necessity, not a luxurious. The price of my separate flood insurance coverage coverage has additionally doubled for me since 2017. So now, my month-to-month insurance coverage tab quantities to a second mortgage fee — regardless of having by no means made a declare on both coverage.

Throughout Louisiana, over 42,000 individuals — 9% of policyholders — have dropped flood protection since 2022. My very own mom had to decide on between ample insurance coverage and groceries on her fastened earnings. When the 2016 floods hit Baton Rouge, she scraped out of pocket to repair her water-logged home. It’s nonetheless not absolutely repaired. 

Worse, my house insurer – the one one who would provide me a coverage apart from Louisiana’s over-burdened last-resort public choice – is amongst a cadre of younger insurance coverage corporations accredited solely by a tiny rankings agency with a questionable observe document.

Each home-owner or renter  I do know in Louisiana is anxious about shedding their insurance coverage or the results of elevated insurance coverage premiums; I’ve already been dropped by two insurance coverage corporations in lower than a decade. Renters reside with dread that their landlords may cross insurance coverage will increase onto them. That is on prime of a housing market already enduring gentrification, a flood of short-term leases, and catastrophe capitalism throughout town.

Households in Louisiana are being priced out of the one houses they’ve ever recognized, whereas the crimson carpet is being laid out for oil, gasoline, and chemical corporations to develop proper subsequent door. Fossil gas infrastructure is magnifying storm dangers and poisoning communities. These amenities emit not solely climate-wrecking gases but in addition chemical substances that threaten well being, security, and life—even on a peaceful day.  

Louisiana leaders are actually proposing “clearing” residents from 17,000 acres of land in Ascension Parish for brand new fossil trade growth. The largely Black river neighborhood of Modeste could be compelled out, however residents haven’t even been consulted. As you may think about, individuals have questions: 

Who decides what our property is price and the way, or whether or not we actually have a clear title for it, if it was handed down by means of generations? 

How will we maintain our households collectively if everybody has to maneuver elsewhere?

Most significantly, the place can we even go, when that is the one place we’ve ever lived and nowhere appears really protected from local weather change?

These are usually not small issues – these are existential and heartbreaking decisions. 

Regardless of having labored and been educated across the globe, south Louisiana is the one place I’ve ever referred to as house. At the least 5 generations of my household are buried right here. How will I lay flowers on my grandmother’s grave – the very one who took me in and fed me whiskey after Gustav – if I can not reside right here?

Our air pollution and local weather change woes are being attributable to the fossil gas trade, backed by the complicity of banks, insurers, and politicians. Our leaders declare we ‘depend upon’ fossil fuels, however the trade makes up solely 4.5% of Louisiana’s annual income and doesn’t ship practically the roles it guarantees to the individuals it usually guarantees them. 

Local weather change will price Louisianians a minimum of $4 billion in property injury. The poisonous emissions from fossil gas amenities price lives and big healthcare payments yearly. Persevering with to permit the tax-exempt LNG buildout in Louisiana will price parishes greater than $21 billion in misplaced income within the subsequent 15 years. We’re shedding a soccer discipline of coastal land each 100 minutes. But our flesh pressers proceed to select the oil and gasoline trade over the survival of this state and its individuals. 

I do know I must depart. I’ve already begun to pre-process the grief of shedding this place that lives in my soul, simply as I reside in it. I discover myself tattooing symbols of Louisiana on my pores and skin, to maintain it with me all the time – a pelican, a cypress tree, a magnolia bloom, and figures for every of my members of the family.

We’ll have to depart, however we owe it to ourselves, our house, and our ancestors to struggle for day-after-day that we get to remain. 

Our leaders might select a simply transition— to photo voltaic, wind, and well-paying jobs enhancing power effectivity, electrifying buildings, and repairing deserted wells. They might select to guard our air, water, and us. Insurers and banks might choose to cease investing in and financing damaging fossil fuels. Leaders might lastly act within the individuals’s curiosity. These items are potential, precedented, and even worthwhile, however they’re selecting to not do it. 

Now we have to make and demand completely different decisions. We deserve so a lot better than the longer term deliberate for us by the fossil gas trade. Now we have to plan our personal future, to verify we even have one.