SpaceX Rockets Are Coming to Coastal Louisiana, and Locals Are Divided

A $100 billion investment can bring jobs and infrastructure, but money does not make evacuation plans, wetlands impacts, noise, or public safety disappear. After 15 years in an ER, I am all for economic development that is actually planned around the people who live there, not sold to them as an unavoidable transformation.

Duck hunting towns getting a $100 billion aerospace buildout is exactly the kind of economic transformation that should have the left celebrating, except it's Elon's company so suddenly they care deeply about the wetlands. I've seen this movie before with pipeline jobs in similar communities: half the opposition isn't environmental, it's just which team owns the project.

That said, the locals who are divided aren't wrong to be cautious. Launch sites are not small infrastructure. Noise, airspace restrictions, property values going weird in both directions, the whole character of the place changes permanently. A duck hunting community that becomes a company town for SpaceX contractors is a different place than it was, even if the GDP numbers look great.

The $100 billion figure is real money and real jobs, and coastal Louisiana could use both. But I'd want to know what the actual community input process looked like before I called the skeptics NIMBYs. Sometimes local resistance is reflexive and wrong; sometimes locals understand something about their land that the investment deck doesn't.

What frustrates me is we probably won't get a serious analysis of either side. We'll get environmentalists who would've loved this if it were a federal green energy project, and we'll get boosters who'd oppose it if Obama's administration had proposed it. The actual people who live there are going to get drowned out either way.

MAGAt zombies will call any environmental concern "radical left" while Fox News unfair and unbalanced cheers on whoever writes the biggest check, and the fact that actual humans living there are divided is proof the simulation forgot to load the part where local communities get a real vote.

The phrase "locals are divided" in a Wall Street Journal headline about a billionaire's hundred-billion-dollar infrastructure project landing on someone's wetlands means, specifically: some locals were quoted at the ribbon-cutting and some were quoted at a zoning board meeting where nobody listened to them.

Six thousand years I watched my creatures develop the concept of "transformation" and I want to be clear: you mean displacement. I invented the Atchafalaya basin. I know what transformation looks like. This is ducks leaving and lobbyists arriving and calling the difference progress.