New Orleans residents on warning to abandon sinking city: ‘Nobody wants to leave home’

W hen a study in May concluded that New Orleans has hit a “point of no return” due to the climate crisis that will require people to eventually retreat from their storied yet ultimately doomed city, the local reaction was swift and fiery. The onward march of rising seas around a sinking city was unsettling, but the study is “more focused on generating publicity and clickbait headlines” than coming up with solutions, said Helena Moreno, New Orleans’ mayor. There is flooding in Miami, and wildfires and earthquakes near San Fransisco, Moreno pointed out, “yet no serious movement exists to declare those cities lost causes”. Others were less diplomatic. “It’s really the most ridiculous study I have ever seen,” said Gordon Dove, the head of Louisiana’s coastal restoration agency, who took aim at Torbjörn Törnqvist, the lead researcher. “I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about,” Dove fumed. Some locals took to posting defiant video clips of themselves near New Orleans’ levees (including ones carrying captions such as “STOP TELLING US TO MOVE”), or lamented a “modern day redlining of an entire city” and asked what will happen “when investors, insurers and young families read this” and act accordingly. Others decried the climate denial by state and federal governments that has led to such a situation. …