A recent study makes dramatic claims about our city and state, but the science does not back them up. The paper published last month in Nature Sustainability made headlines with a dire verdict about our city and state: “In paleo-climate terms, New Orleans is gone.”
The study claims coastal Louisiana has already crossed a “point of no return,” and that some of our state’s largest cities — Baton Rouge, Lafayette and New Orleans — will eventually become waterfront property as the Gulf encircles us.
As a New Orleanian and an economist who studies these kinds of claims for a living, I want to offer some pushback and reasons for optimism. This is not to deny that coastal Louisiana faces serious challenges, but bad science leads to bad policy, and our city deserves better than both…