The plant that the Waste Management Board wanted to set up would be hard to live near. The facility being considered would smell and sometimes be noisy. "Waste-to-Energy facilities also pose a potential health risk in terms of air pollution," Powell wrote. "Emissions from a plant may include varying amounts of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrocarbons, and particulate matter and other matter for which health standards have not yet been established." Company trucks could cause traffic congestion. The plant would reduce property values and provide relatively few jobs, he also pointed out.
So how can such a company get a community to accept it? The plant manager's best course of action, Powell concluded, would not be to try to change the minds of residents predisposed to resist. It would be to find a citizenry unlikely to resist.
Based on interviews and questionnaires, Powell drew up a list of characteristics of the "least resistant personality profile":
• Longtime residents of small towns in the South or Midwest
• High school educated only
• Catholic
• Uninvolved in social issues, and without a culture of activism
• Involved in mining, farming, ranching (what Cerrell called "nature exploitative occupations")
• Conservative
• Republican
• Advocates of the free market
When the big oil companies first came to Louisiana in the 1940s, 40 percent of adults in Louisiana had no more than a fifth-grade education, and its citizens were the least likely in the nation to move out of state. From the seventies on, most people had become Republican advocates of the free market and minimal government. Most of the people I met fit some or all of the criteria—they were long-time residents, high school educated (half were), conservative, and Republican. That description fit the Arenos and largely fit Lee Sherman. Those who resisted the oil industry fit a very different profile—young, college educated, urban, liberal, strongly interested in social issues, and believers in good government. Was the "least resistant personality" one susceptible to what General Honoré had called the "psychological program"—the talk of "jobs, jobs, jobs" that had "just enough to it?" Or was that too easy an idea, an idea from my side of the empathy wall?
I'd taken measure of the talk and silences of public life in the heartland of the right. I'd seen what my Tea Party friends were putting up with. But the empathy wall was higher than I'd imagined. I could see what they couldn't see, but not—as Yogi Berra might say—what I couldn't see. I still felt blind to what they saw and Honored. I needed to do something else, to enter the social terrain that surrounded and influenced them. Included in that were industry, state government, the church, and the press. How did these basic institutions influence their feelings about life? I thought I would start with industry, which is what brought me across the I-10 bridge from Lake Charles to an open door at the office of Mayor Bob Hardey in Westlake City Hall.
PART TWO
The Social Terrain
6
Industry: "The Buckle in
Americas Energy Belt"
Seated in the Westlake mayor's office with Bob Hardey, I am watching a video of a groundbreaking ceremony honoring the expansion of Sasol, the South Africa-based petrochemical giant six miles northeast of the Arenos' home in Bayou d'Inde. At sixty, Hardey is a vital, athletic, balding man, boyish in manner, eyes fixed on the video with irrepressible delight. On screen, two hundred dignitaries in suits and ties sit facing the microphone. On a 3,034-acre site, Sasol is investing $21 billion in an energy complex that will be the single largest foreign direct-investment manufacturing project in U.S. history. It is part of an even larger planned multi-company investment totaling $84 billion spread over sixty-six industrial projects in southwest Louisiana over the next five years. A "Qatar on the Bayou," the Wall Street Journal called it. It will call for "losing 26 public roads, buying out 883 public property lots." And in their place will rise "new cities of fertilizer plants, boron manufacturers, methanol terminals, polymer plants, ammonia factories and paper-finishing facilities."
Mayor Hardey is the seventh speaker. "I didn't have a thing written down," he recalls, "but I thought I should look like I did." An instrumentation foreman at Phillips 66 before running for mayor of Westlake, Hardey hasn't given many public speeches, he says. "So I just got up there with my iPad. It had a picture of my wife, so I looked at her." He passes me his iPad to show me the image of his seated, dark-haired, smiling wife.
His iPad facing him, part shield, part support, Bob tells the dignitaries that Westlake has been home to four generations of Hardeys. A road there bears his family name. He, his father, his son have worked in local plants, as he hopes his grandson will. But things here will have to change, he adds. "My son and his wife have dreamed a long time about building their own home. At last in 2015 they were in the middle of building it here in West-lake, near my wife and me. I was helping my son put in his plumbing. Then he told me Sasol needed his land. It wanted him to sell and move. I got up from my plumbing and said, 'Son, I'll help you put in plumbing in your next house.'"
The audience was rapt.
Westlake is a sprawling gray expanse of smokestacks rising from immense steel-girded fortresses, with a row of enormous, round, white, flat-topped storage tanks, which, illuminated at night, looks like a strangely beautiful great emerald city. But there is often a chemical odor. "They say, Ah, West-lake, y'all got that smell,"' Hardey continues in his speech. "I say, 'Man, that smells like rice and gravy."' The audience laughs knowingly, and applauds more loudly than for other speakers.
I was meeting with Mayor Hardey to try to see the Great Paradox from his point of view. The people I was getting to know would have strongly resisted Dr. Templet's analysis that the oil industry suppressed other lines of work, drew a third of revenue out, left pollution, and did nothing to resolve the many problems saddling the state. I was trying to enter the state of mind in which criticisms of the overreliance on oil or the harmful side effects of fracking would seem misdirected, in which other things loomed more important. Among my Tea Party friends, the mention of Sasol was often accompanied by the word "billion," as in a $7 billion investment for the ethane cracker, a $14 billion investment for the gas-to-liquids plant. It conveyed the idea of power, importance, and prosperity.
Did this enormous investment overturn Templet's dim picture of jobs in fossil fuels, I wondered, or illustrate it? Maybe the new fracking-spurred gold rush helped explain why people were dying to relieve themselves of the federal government. Who needed it with such opportunity at hand? My visit to Hardey would be a first step in exploring the institutional context conducive to the worldview of Mike Schaff, Lee Sherman, and others of the right.
Westlake and Lake Charles had recently become ground zero in a surprising new gold rush for natural gas. The gas could be sucked from the ground, piped to plants, processed into various chemical feed stocks, and piped out to still other plants, which manufactured such things as Frisbees, plastic hair brushes, garden hoses, steering wheels, computer cases, Bubble Yum, bed liners, medical gowns, jet fuel, wasp spray, grocery bags, and Hershey bars.
After we talk, Mayor Hardey drives me around Westlake to give me a sense of what the Sasol expansion will mean. It's a two-mile-square town surrounded by land zoned "heavy industrial" and indeed inhabited by industry. It has a weekly newspaper, one high school, one middle school, two elementary schools, four banks, and eighteen churches. We pass a Family Dollar Store, auto repair shops, a rib-eye-and-burger bar, and the Isle of Capri Casino Hotel. Such signs of a town's life hardly seem "heavy industrial," but that doesn't mean they won't be soon. Hardey can already envision which buildings will come down, and which others will go up.
"See that Assembly of God church? Sasol bought it for $2,500,000, will tear it down, and build over it. They paid $4,000,000 for First Baptist. It's as if money is no matter. They need to enlarge the road to haul in heavy equipment."
"See that?" Hardey is
pointing out the window. "That's a Methodist church. The deacon overbid, wanted a million three hundred. Sasol backed away from the table. Now the state may declare eminent domain and give it to Sasol, which will tear it down. The congregation may not get a penny. A member of the Board of Trustees is waiting in my office now," Hardey said. "He wants me to push Sasol to pay them to move. We'll see."
We pass a cemetery. On one side of a bisecting roadway, the lawn is freshly cut. Hardey has just mowed it himself. (On the other side, payment came from a different source. The dead were black and the lawn less recently cut.) After he retired from Phillips 66, Bob kept a part-time job cutting public lawns. It had stuck with him when his sister said, "You're mayor now, Bob, but stay who you are." Cutting lawns has kept him a regular guy, connected to the place he deeply loves. His two daughters and son all lived within blocks of him in Westlake in large, shrub-lined suburban homes. His brother had lived nearby but had recently taken Sasol money and moved. Hardey had helped to build his parents' nearby home too. In their eighties now, they were planning to remain as Sasol moved in, zoning land heavy industrial around them.
Hardey has embraced the changes, and shares with me his vision of a new Westlake, one 25 to 30 percent larger in population. "See that park? I'd like to double it. And that golf course? We could put in tasteful housing for executives and professionals coming in."
But some of his grand vision glosses over possible problems now troubling local residents. He slows down his SUV to point out the window to an acre of grass. "See that? We could plant a screen of trees right there, and put up a 'man camp' behind it."
"A man camp?" I ask.
"We're expecting 5,000 temporary construction workers and 500 permanent technical workers. The construction workers will stay in man camps," he explains matter-of-factly. According to the local American Press, industry would have openings for new welders, scaffolding workers, pipefitters, operators, iron workers, insulators, instrumentation techs, and electricians. R.B. Smith, vice president of workforce development at the Southwest Louisiana Economic Development Alliance, urged potential local workers to "invest in yourselves" and train in a trade. But others said that local applicants weren't coming forward because they'd learned that companies wouldn't hire them without "experience"—apprenticeships, which the companies themselves weren't offering. Instead, the American Press said, "Construction and workforce developers are targeting international locals in Ireland, which has an unemployment rate of 14.6 percent, and the Philippines to fill service industry and construction jobs." So behind a strip of trees is where the man camps housing foreign workers would stand.
Residents don't want the man camps near them, Hardey says. What if the imported workers included rapists or burglars? they'd asked the mayor. "I don't want to tell them, but they're already living near a few registered sex offenders in nearby trailer parks; they just don't know it."
Hardey describes another dilemma more on his mind. "The previous mayor handed me a deficit budget. So Westlake is broke. Meanwhile Sasol hasn't given me a dime. We're right in the middle of their expansion, but mostly, they don't actually need our land, except for some heavy-haul throughways. But we could use some money, like to build the man camp here in Westlake, or executive housing on the golf course. I've been petting Sasol's dog. I'm waiting to see if they'll come through. If they don't, 1 have a trick in my bag."
Hardey stops his SUV, chuckling, and points to a nondescript strip of weeds. "See that 300-foot strip? That piece of land belongs to me. Sasol can't build over it or under it, and they need it. So that's the trick in my bag. I don't want to have to call my lawyer and pull it out. But I can. I'd like to use it to improve this town."
There is a history of discovery and invention behind the fracking boom. Rich alluvial soil has opened the way for the growth of cotton, rice, and sugarcane—like that Mike Schaff had shown me on the former Armelise Plantation. But in a sodden rice field in 1901, a farmer discovered oil. In the 1920s and 1930s, technology was adapted to drilling along the marshy Louisiana coast, then in the 1940s, along the outer continental shelf. Along the way an enormous warren of pipelines was laid belowground, aboveground, and underwater. Then, from 2003 on, new technology enabled the horizontal fracturing of shale rock. Drill bits can now bore down 1,000 to 5,000 feet into the earth and turn sideways. Water, salt, and chemicals—the exact composition remains proprietary information—can be pressure-pumped through the pipes to crack open shale rock, and other pumps suck out the natural gas that is released.
Seen as an environmental curse to many, the fracking boom brought money and pride to Mayor Hardey and most others I talked to. Stuck in the South, the poorest region in the nation, Louisiana now seemed perched to become the proud center of an industrial renaissance, a shiny new buckle in the nation's energy belt. Louisiana wouldn't come last; it would come first. And that would bring a welcome end to the Great Paradox.
On the Brink of the Boom
The fracking boom was big. People I talked to followed it proudly. Leading economists were forecasting for Louisiana one of the highest growth rates in the country—a five-year growth rate for 2014-2018 of 4.7 percent. New jobs would be highly paid. Salaries for permanent workers would hover around $80,000 plus benefits. As a carpenter in Louisiana you can earn about $33,000; as a truck driver, $46,000; and as an elementary school teacher, $34,000. Maybe you needed training to get a job as a plant operator, but you didn't need a college degree.
And it wasn't just jobs. Fracking could strengthen American foreign policy. Instead of importing oil from unstable or authoritarian countries like Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan, the United States could extract natural gas from its own soil. It could even export natural gas through a widened Panama Canal to energy-hungry Japan, or to a Russia-dependent Ukraine. Indeed, the two biggest oil refineries in southwest Louisiana (Citgo and Phillips 66), which usually imported oil from Mexico and Venezuela, were reconfigured to export it.
But in all the euphoria, missing was any public mention of the new sources of pollution that were to be added to the old. In my hour and a half with Mayor Hardey, that topic didn't arise. Hadn't Lake Charles been through an investment rush before, and hadn't it resulted in the pollution of Bayou d'Inde? Similar hosannas had gone up in 1966, when Pittsburgh Plate Glass first moved upstream from Bayou d'Inde. In 1966, the American Press had written of how investments "stagger the imagination." An editorial described how chemicals PPG produced would help rubber resist abrasion, add color to rubber, and make ink pigment that wouldn't show through the back side of a newspaper. The wonders of new investments, products, and jobs had all felt to the citizenry of the 1960s—including Harold and Annette Areno—as exciting as they did to Mayor Hardey now.
"The Sasol plant alone is expected to emit 85 times the state's 'threshold' rate of benzene each year," Dennis Berman wrote in the Wall Street Journal. "It will also produce massive streams of carbon dioxide and treated water."
"I don't want to wear a gas mask to go to bed at night," one pipefitter declared at one four-and-a-half-hour public hearing regarding the Sasol expansion.
Sasol also sought and received permission to use public water—thirteen million gallons a day of relatively clean water from the Sabine River. This it would use, pollute, and dump back in the Calcasieu River. In addition, the state granted Sasol permission to emit an estimated 10,000,000 tons of new greenhouse gases every year. No effort at carbon capture was proposed, and now that the door was open, more companies were submitting similar proposals, anticipating similar approval. "How about the issue of water use? " I ask Hardey. "The companies are in compliance," he answers, and indeed they were. The state had okayed it.
Meanwhile, the city government of Lake Charles launched its own Ozone Advance Program, which focused exclusively on what private citizens could do. They could drive shorter routes in their cars or walk. They could quit idling their car engines. They could mow their lawns less often. The plan called for a "school flag program"—green fo
r good, yellow for moderate, red for high-ozone—to let "the community know that... if you have somebody that has difficulty breathing, today's not a good day to be outside."
As I was trying to climb this slippery empathy wall, a subversive thought occurred to me: do we need all the new plastic the American Chemical Association is promising us? Weren't we entering into a strange cycle? Many people I was talking to carried around plastic water bottles, partly for convenience, partly out of distrust of local waters. And with cheap natural gas at hand, the American Chemical Association said it could triple the amount of feedstock needed to make plastic. But if we triple our plastics, more petrochemical companies will pollute more public waters, which will lead more people to pay for more plastic bottles filled with ever more scarce clean water. We'll throw away more plastic bottles, buy more, and further expand the market for plastic, the production of which pollutes water. But I was straying from my goal, getting into the spirit of things.
Two Roads to Prosperity: Huey Long Versus Bobby Jindal
The heady excitement of the fracking boom hides some deeply important— and little discussed—political choices, of course. In the last Louisiana oil boom, from 1928 to 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, Louisiana governor Huey Long, the progressive demagogue—the Kingfish, as he was called—taxed oil companies, using that money to put a "chicken in every pot," give out free textbooks to schoolchildren, create evening literacy courses for adults, and build roads, bridges, hospitals, and schools. Long curbed homelessness and poverty. Before succumbing to the lure of oil money himself, Long embraced the ideal of an activist government that lifted the poor and added to the common good.
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right Page 10