The Port of Cameron was once the nation’s largest producer of seafood, bringing in 679 million pounds in 1984. Today, the oil and gas industry is destroying our fishing and shrimping grounds as well as the docks we used to fish and launch our boats from to build gas export terminals. Massive tankers decimate the Calcasieu River, all so these companies can sell gas on the other side of the world. We don’t want to become an industrial wasteland – we want to support our local seafood industry, the one that sustained us for generations and put Cameron on the map.
Once gas is piped across our state and loaded onto tankers in Southwest Louisiana, it sells to the highest bidder—whether that’s a friend in Europe, or a foe, like China. The oil and gas industry is interested in profit, not patriotism. They won’t keep the gas here in the U.S. to bring our prices down, and they won’t reroute their exports to Europe to alleviate the ongoing humanitarian crisis. Instead, they’ll continue selling to the highest bidders on the open market—even when that highest bidder is one of America’s global adversaries.
New gas export terminals serve one purpose: to take gas out of Louisiana and export it to other countries. They won’t power homes and businesses here, but they will create electricity and power manufacturing in China, Brazil, and elsewhere. By exporting gas to competing businesses and foreign governments that can be hostile to the United States, the oil and gas industry is profiting by putting the American people at a disadvantage. Meanwhile, exports are fueling our adversaries, costing us tens of thousands of American manufacturing jobs, increasing domestic energy costs, and wreaking coastal devastation that will make SWLA families more vulnerable to floods and hurricanes.
Fossil fuels aren’t renewable, and our country only has 13 years of gas remaining in our proven reserves. “Proven reserves” are the amount of readily available gas that the industry and government regulators know is there. If the U.S. were to keep exporting gas at the rates we are today—or at even faster rates as they propose—we would run out of gas in little more than a decade.
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Lake Charles, LA 70606
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press@DefendSWLA.org
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