Seated on the porch of his home in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Solomon Williams Jr. began to unwind time. While his daughter chattered in his lap, Williams conjured up memories of Cameron, the Gulf Coast town 50 miles to the south where he was raised, where his father and uncles once oystered and fished for pogy. He didn’t talk about Cameron as it is now. He talked of Cameron as it used to be.

He started with food. “They had the best sausage and boudin and tassos there, man,” he recalled. Boudin is rice-stuffed sausage, a staple of Cajun cuisine; tasso, a smoky, spicy cut of pork that flavors dishes like gumbo. “Man, you stop in Cameron and eat that tasso one time—you come all the way from Houston to get that tasso, it’s so good.”

Williams, a longtime opponent of oil and gas development, still pops down to Cameron. The hour-long drive takes him through coastal prairie, through freshwater marsh and old rice fields that run wild. The ridge of land between the marsh and the Gulf of Mexico remains a refuge for thousands of migratory birds: mallards and long-legged egrets, roseate spoonbills, and black-crowned night herons. Once he’s in town, all he sees are ghosts. Here, the juke joint where he danced as a young man. There, Schoolboy’s bar, where he and his friends used to play pool. The grocery store. The gas station. The library. Almost all of it is gone now. “It was beautiful down there,” Williams said, sighing. “Really beautiful. But LNG done closed all that off. . . . There’s nothing there anymore.”

In less than a decade, Cameron has become the epicenter of the largest methane gas boom in history. As recently as the Obama era, the United States didn’t export any LNG—that is, liquefied natural gas, methane that has been supercooled and compressed so that it can be shipped overseas in massive tankers. But then the fracking boom and a glut of domestically produced methane changed everything. Today, the US is the world’s biggest exporter of LNG. A single company—Venture Global—is poised to ship more LNG annually than does the entire nation of Qatar. Five massive LNG terminals are already in operation across the Gulf Coast. Five others are under construction, and another 12 are in some stage of permitting or pending approval. All of them are, to some degree, contested by local residents.

Williams remembers when Cameron’s first terminal, Sabine Pass, started exporting LNG in 2016. He knew from the start that it would be trouble. The largest LNG facility in the nation sprawls across more than 1,000 acres of former marshland: It contains six liquefaction units, three berths for giant ships, and 17 billion cubic feet of storage capacity. Other effects are harder to see. Air pollution and particulate matter from ozone are estimated to contribute to 19 premature deaths in the area each year.

The LNG expansion harms not just Cameron but the planet as a whole. If all the planned LNG projects were to be built, their combined annual emissions would be equivalent to those of 695 coal-fired plants—or some 646 million gasoline-powered cars. A study published in the fall by a professor at Cornell University found that, due to high rates of methane leakage from pipelines and flare stacks, exported LNG produces 33 percent more emissions than coal. In an LNG-soaked world, we could blow past the 2°C threshold by the time Williams’s five-year-old daughter is old enough to order a beer.

Last January, President Joe Biden made one of the most consequential environmental moves of his presidency when the Department of Energy announced a pause on pending and new applications to export LNG to countries that don’t have a free trade agreement with the United States. Since then—even as the federal courts and the administration have gone back and forth about the scope of the pause—environmental advocates across the Gulf Coast have known that the ultimate fate of the pause would be determined by the 2024 election. On November 5, LNG opponents’ fears came to pass when Donald Trump was elected as president for a second time.

During the campaign, Trump pledged to unleash US oil and gas production on his “very first day back.” Near the top of Trump’s to-do list will be a reversal of the pause on LNG exports—a major priority for his corporate backers, including the Natural Gas Supply Association and the American Petroleum Institute. The revolving door that shuttles personnel from industry to government will likely usher LNG proponents back into power. Shaylyn Hynes, for example, was the Department of Energy press secretary during Trump’s first administration, then became Venture Global’s senior VP of public affairs, and may very well return to government service again to advance Trump’s vision of fossil fuel dominance.

While an intensified oil and gas boom would be welcomed by corporate executives, it would almost certainly accelerate the hollowing out of communities located near LNG facilities. Since Sabine Pass LNG began operating, Cameron Parish has lost about 30 percent of its population. Many people left after Hurricane Laura pounded the area in 2020, but one major reason they didn’t come back was that the parish had little money to rebuild, since the state and the parish had showered Venture Global with tax benefits. “Even if the people wanted to go back to Cameron, they couldn’t,” Williams said, pointing to the difficulty of basic tasks like buying groceries and filling a prescription.

When Williams talks of Cameron’s past, he also conjures the possible futures of other Gulf Coast communities. A tour of towns hosting LNG facilities—places like Port Sulphur, Louisiana, and Brownsville, Texas—reveals similar signs of decline, patterns so identical that they begin to appear less like isolated impacts and more like something endemic to LNG development, like the advancing stages of an aggressive disease.

In stage I, the building begins. The massive construction projects bring in trucks by the hundreds and send clouds of concrete dust billowing into nearby marshes. Acres of biodiverse wetlands are drained, leveled, and paved over.

In stage II, the intense demands of the plant begin to strain infrastructure: Water runs short, traffic gets worse, and medical services become stretched thin and harder to access. Dredging to make berths and sea channels for the massive tankers contributes to the fragile land’s erosion. Shrimpers and fishers get pushed out. Residents begin to murmur about leaving.

Stage III—that looks like Cameron.

On a sticky August day, Williams and about 50 others—mostly fishers and shrimpers—stood around the Cameron harbor and pumped each other up for a Louisiana Department of Environment Quality public hearing. Near the water’s edge, a table was loaded with boudin, but the attendees—Black and white, old and young—were too focused or too nervous to eat. “Be mad,” boomed Alyssa Portaro, an organizer with Fishermen Involved in Sustaining Our Heritage. “They have allowed this to happen.”

The “they” she referred to was Venture Global.

Venture Global has racked up thousands of permit deviations during the past three years, and the hearing was being held as part of the company’s request for new permits that would allow it to pollute the air even more. The company was seeking permission to emit 30 percent more carbon monoxide, over 40 percent more benzene, and 500 percent more lead. As one local put it, that’s like getting caught for speeding and then asking the state to raise the speed limit.

The hearing began in the Cameron Parish Police Jury building, and speakers approached the podium one by one.

“I own the last remaining shrimp house in Hackberry,” Melissa Richard said. “Shrimpers are suffering.”

“Inland fishing has gone to nothing,” another fisher echoed. “[The LNG industry] has put us out of business. I’ve lived here my whole life, and I don’t want to anymore.”

“My whole family died of cancer, diabetes, respiratory problems,” Deborah Ramirez said. Ramirez is a kind of Louisiana sibyl: Her hometown of Mossville was also depopulated by petrochemical development, shrinking from hundreds of residents to just a handful. Last summer, she was arrested in her wheelchair in front of the Citi headquarters in New York City while protesting the bank’s funding of Gulf LNG projects. “We can have jobs,” Ramirez added. “We don’t have to die about it.”

Many residents of Cameron have found the gas giant to be a lousy neighbor. John Allaire lives across the shipping channel from Calcasieu Pass, and from his place he documents gas flaring nearly every day. A retired engineer, Allaire gathers data in part because there are no air monitors in Cameron. “There’s no infrastructure over here in Cameron,” he said. “There’s the Shell station and a bar or two, a taco truck.” As Venture Global’s construction pushed fishers off the docks, the company agreed to install a new boat ramp, but it was poorly constructed, Allaire said. “Venture Global wasn’t gonna spend a nickel more on this parish than they could get away with.”

Some of Cameron’s decline can be attributed to a string of major hurricanes that battered the area and made it increasingly unlivable. Dustin Granger, who grew up in neighboring Calcasieu Parish and once ran for state treasurer, argues that rebuilding could have happened—were the LNG industry not receiving massive tax breaks through the state’s Industrial Tax Exemption Program. “We still haven’t rebuilt our infrastructure,” Granger said. “There’s just so much stuff that [tax money] could fix.”

Last year, the state approved over $184 million in tax breaks for Venture Global’s operations in Cameron alone. And that’s just one year of tax breaks; they will likely extend over five years. “We basically pay these industries to come here and extract value from our area,” Granger argued, and as a result, “it’s practically been wiped out and turned into an industrial wasteland.”

Even as local services crumble under the pressures of severe storms and a shrinking tax base, the multibillion-dollar facilities generally enjoy the support of local and state politicians in Louisiana, who often have ties to industry. Governor Jeff Landry’s chief of staff is a former Venture Global lobbyist. A Landry-owned firm was involved in the construction of Cameron LNG. The president of the Cameron Parish Police Jury, Ronald Nunez, is an employee at the facility.

Jennifer Jones is the only member of her high school graduating class who still lives in Cameron. Her family has long roots in the area; when her ancestors arrived in 1840, they became the first permanent white settlers among the Atakapa people. Jones, in her seventies, recently retired from practicing law after the family office was taken out by a storm. Everyone is moving inland, she said. “My sister has not come for Christmas since [Hurricane] Laura, because she’s afraid to come where there’s no medical care.”

It’s the disappearance of the churches that really gets to her. “This is what finally killed this community,” she said, her voice strained. Like so much else in Cameron, the three churches there were damaged by Hurricane Laura. Pointing to the area’s shrinking population, the Catholic archdiocese chose not to rebuild. “They took our school, took the stores, took everything. And when they took our church, this community finally died,” Jones said. After years of watching the town decline, she offered a piece of advice to other communities facing LNG development: “Don’t give them 100 percent tax exemption. Don’t let them not pay school tax, at least.”

When asked what she sees when she pictures Cameron’s future, Jones looked down. She carefully smoothed the napkin on the table in front of her. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I don’t really want to think about it.”

At the mouth of the Mississippi River sprawls Plaquemines Parish. Much like Cameron, this is water and sky country: fragile land built up by millennia of alluvial flooding, lacy with salt marsh and also slashed through with the oil industry’s network of channels and canals. Along the single road that leads downriver, citrus orchards bloom, and crabbers and shrimpers work the water. But here, too, a darker future knocks.

“It’s the same exact story,” said Shaq Cossé, who grew up in Pointe à la Hache, a small, historically Black fishing town on the Mississippi’s east bank. Cossé expected to go into the oyster and fishing business, like his father and his grandfather. But as land loss accelerated and local fishing declined, especially after 2010’s BP oil spill, he turned to activism and eventually wound up working with Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an environmental-justice nonprofit. “This is a place that was once this thriving sportsman’s paradise. And now it’s being carved up and sold out to industry.”

Amid this slow-motion déjà vu, LNG opponents from across the state often collaborate. In April, a Cameron fisherman called into a meeting in Plaquemines to warn them of the fight they were facing. He counseled them about the threat of time: Wait too long, he cautioned, and you’ll all be scattered to the winds, displaced into RVs or homes inland, making it harder to organize a united front.

The danger of history repeating itself is already apparent. In both Cameron and Plaquemines, the supply of permanent housing has shrunk, while units of temporary RVs have multiplied. The RVs are mostly for construction workers, who flock into town and then leave after an LNG plant is completed. Meanwhile, homeowners abandon their properties to move inland (since there are few willing buyers) or struggle with upkeep in the face of worsening storms. Louisiana in general is seeing high rates of population loss, but near LNG terminals, that decline is accelerated. In 2022, Plaquemines experienced the fourth-highest county population decline in the nation.

One factor pushing people to leave is the reduction in local services. During its first year of operation, expected to be 2025, Venture Global’s Plaquemines LNG plant will receive $83.5 million in property tax breaks, considerably more than the parish’s entire 2023 budget of $50 million. Even as the company avoids paying its share of the local government’s costs, the terminal puts increasing pressure on public services. During a water crisis last year, up to a quarter of one local district’s water was being used by Venture Global for construction. The company pulled water from municipal fire hydrants as residents downriver found themselves without enough water to bathe.

Emergency medical services have also been impacted. Current and former EMS workers in Plaquemines Parish report that medical services have been increasingly strained since the arrival of LNG. The plant has brought an influx of thousands of workers and, along with them, an enormous surge in traffic. This has increased the number of emergency calls while reducing ambulances’ ability to reach patients. At the same time, Venture Global doesn’t contribute to the funding of EMS, thanks to its tax breaks.

Public records obtained by Sierra show that the average time for Plaquemines EMS to get from the scene of an emergency to a medical center increased from 28 minutes to 52 minutes between May 2021, around the time construction began, and May 2024. The LNG build-out is, in this sense, a thief of time.

“You have a golden hour,” said Kristine Whatley, a retired Plaquemines EMS worker, referring to the window of time to effectively treat a traumatic injury. “You need to get that person in a trauma bed in a hospital within the golden hour.” Instead, “you have people that are throwing their family members in the car because they can get there quicker than the ambulance can.”