Entergy is proud to support programing on LPB and Greener practices that preserve Louisiana.

The goal of our environmental and sustainability initiatives really is to ensure that our kids and future generations can be left with a cleaner planet.

Additional support provided by the Fred B. and Ruth B. Zigler Foundation and the Zigler Art Museum located in Jennings City Hall.

The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is an historical and cultural center for Southwest Louisiana and the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

With support from viewers like you and how lawmakers will navigate a huge budget surplus.

A big question is going to be where are they going to put the money?

What are they going to use it for?

How the war overseas affects our pockets here.

This is a step that we're taking to inflict further pain on Putin, but there will be cost as well here in the United States.

Fallout from the energy bailout.

What I want the commission to do is take control of the resiliency conversation.

Effects of climate change are here to stay, probably the most important thing that you as a Louisianan can do is talk about climate change with your community, with your community.

Hi, everyone.

I'm Kara St. Cyr and I'm André Moreau.

Governor John Bel Edwards late Wednesday vetoed the new congressional map passed by the legislature in last month's special session.

And now it sets up a showdown between the Deep South, only Democratic governor and a GOP dominated House and Senate.

Edwards says the map didn't add a second majority black district.

That's despite an increase in the state's black population over the past decade.

Yeah.

Governor Edwards also said in a statement that continuing to draft a new congressional map into this year session would only keep lawmakers attention from other matters of the state.

Lawmakers now have a couple options.

They can let Governor Edwards veto stand or hold a veto override session.

To approve the map.

And L.A. check on some of the other stories making headlines around the state.

A Louisiana man caught on video killing his estranged wife may be set free to live with his sister in Las Vegas.

This after Anthony Knox served only 24 years of a 40 year sentence.

The unanimous approval of the release by the parole board has raised all kinds of questions and concerns.

Knox has always denied the killing, though police say security camera shows him knocking Sergeant Angela Knox to the ground standing over her and shooting her at point blank range.

This 386 passenger ship floated out of a homeless shipyard and into being one step closer to giving tourists a cruise.

The length of the Mississippi River Viking River Cruises hosted the unveiling of the ship, which would take people from Saint Paul, Minnesota, to New Orleans.

The Viking Mississippi is billed as the largest and most modern ship in the region.

The first voyage is scheduled for this June.

A plan to build a new model helicopter in Lafayette is no more.

The Italian owner of a Swiss company has backed out.

It seems the problem here rests with the people hired to build the facility, which is Bell Helicopters.

State leaders say Bell didn't meet hiring goals and obligations and ended the agreement.

A new artificial reef off Holly Beach in Cameron is finished.

The reef is ten miles offshore, built in an area where an oil plantation was removed.

A group of coastal advocate partners built the reef.

It's in 25 feet of water and is expected to rebuild a rich fish habitat.

The regular session of the Louisiana legislature kicks off on Monday at 12 noon We will have live coverage beginning at one p. M on Monday of the governor's address to the legislature.

So what will he say and what will evolve during the session?

Julie O'Donohue is a senior reporter for the Louisiana Illuminator.

You've also written for the Times Picayune Advocate all over the place.

You also handle their podcast producing and of course, Greg Hilburn, USA Today Network.

You guys, as reporters or photographers, you tweet, you do a lot more than just cover the statehouse.

But in the statehouse.

What are the big things that we expect to get done or need to be addressed this session?

Well, I think there's always the issue of the budget, getting the finances set for the next year, what gets funded and what doesn't.

After that, there's a lot of money this year.

There is more money than there has been certainly in several years, at least since Katrina, and possibly more money than there was following Katrina.

So a big question is going to be where are they going to put the money?

What are they going to use it for?

How are they going to spend it?

The governor has proposed putting a big chunk of it into like a reserve fund for when we build the new Mississippi River Bridge in Baton Rouge.

How's that being received?

Well, it's being received well in Baton Rouge, I think, but not necessarily outside of that.

Okay.

Well, that's a good thing.

What about what about that?

There's a there's a lot of skepticism.

I think some people are also concerned that that project is pretty far out from actually getting under construction.

And so will the money then be rated at some point?

I know that's been the concern.

Also, you know, the governor has been, especially after what's happened in the past couple of months is here and it seems the legislature's really here, not close together.

Is that going to remain?

Well, what's happening in the world in Ukraine and Russia?

Well, that impact anything Well, I think what you'll see happen in this upcoming session will mirror other state legislatures across the south and across the country.

And what's known as the culture wars.

We'll see a lot of legislation from Republicans about transgender children, transgender girls, whether they'll be allowed to play sports in public schools, a lot of vaccine debates.

There'll be what's known as a lot of education debates.

Much of what divided the legislature last year will carry over to this year.

And we'll see whether the governor can still has a veto threat, can hold I don't think that redistricting helped.

We just went through a politically redistricting session that can be not just Democrat and Republican, but black legislators and white legislators.

Were in pretty different pages about what they what they wanted to see.

And I think some of the issues that Greg is talking about will continue to be a little bit of an open wound a lot of this discussion about critical race theory is about what we teach in schools, and particularly I know race is uncomfortable to talk about, but particularly the black legislators in the white legislatures sometimes have different ideas, not exclusively.

But, you know, I think that's going to probably agitate certain dynamics in the legislature.

What happened with redistricting did not set the table well for this to be a really harmonious legislature.

Right.

And when we when we say divided, the Republicans do control almost two thirds of majority in both House.

So it's a big majority.

We'll be together, but it's still divided because you got a Democratic governor, the only one in the Deep South.

And and the issues are more divisive, even though there might be a big majority that wants some of this legislation to pass it.

You know, there's been a lot of hurt feelings.

Great thing out there that people aren't thinking about that could become important.

Well, I think you mentioned insurance.

I mean, I think we are seeing after being hit by two of the worst hurricanes in the last 150 years.

We're seeing a lot of people who are very frustrated with their homeowner's insurance in particular.

It may be auto insurance, too, but we hear a lot about homeowners insurance, their ability to get what they think they're due in a timely manner.

And there are a lot of bills to address some of the frustrations that people have with that process.

One I'm thinking of that's kind of low hanging fruit is a bill that would limit the number of adjusters your insurance company could have on your particular case.

So I think it would limit it to three.

It's kind of remarkable to think that maybe you would have more than three, but there is going to be some bills to address that.

There are some members of the leadership who currently, particularly from Homa, Homa has a couple of members of leadership who, if not personally, affected.

Certainly everyone around them.

Sure did.

And so I think that's going to be an issue that's actually not very divisive.

I think we may see a scrambling of how people approach that.

You know, I don't think that's Democrat or Republican.

I think that might have more to do with what impact you felt personally and still Southwest Louisiana hurting because they've not received, at least to this moment, the money that they really have needed since.

Laura.

Thanks, guys.

For being here.

I appreciate it.

Come back.

Okay.

Thank you.

All right.

Thanks.

Great to be here.

Thank you.

Summer 2022 is expected to be one of the most expensive travel years on record.

That's because gas prices have reached an unprecedented high $4.17 per gallon, surpassing 2008 average of $4.11.

White House oil and gas sanctions against Russia are slowly isolating the country's economy, but it comes with the cost.

David Dismukes, a professor of energy studies at LSU, says Americans will continue to experience elevated gas prices as long as Ukraine is under siege by Russia.

The ongoing invasion of Ukraine has both the U.S. and other European countries scrambling to discourage the war with sanctions against Russia.

We are enforcing the most significant package of economic sanctions in history, and it's causing significant damage to Russia's economy.

It has caused Russian economy to fight, frankly, crater.

The Russian ruble is now down to 50% by 50% since Putin's announced his war one rule is now worth less than one American penny, one rubles less than one American penny, and preventing Russia's central bank from propping up the ruble and to keep its value up.

They're not going to be able to do that.

In a press conference this week, President Joe Biden recapped sanctions already in place The U.S. cut Russia's largest bank off from the international financial system and limited their ability to do business within this country.

But the latest blow is a ban on Russian energy imports, including crude oil.

The United Kingdom has already agreed to reduce their intake of Russian oil as well.

We remain united and our purpose to keep pressure mounting on Putin and his war machine.

This is a step that we're taking to inflict further pain on Putin.

But there will be cost as well here in the United States.

But this step will likely affect American wallets.

President Biden mentioned during this conference that the gas prices will spike again.

The market has already seen a 75 cent increase following the start of the war, pushing gas prices to an average of $4.17.

David Dismukes, a professor of energy studies at LSU, says the hike is inevitable.

Essentially, it's just an issue of supply and demand.

When you take that supply off, it's going to have to raise prices in order to allocate out the demand that's in the market.

We continue to have relatively strong energy demand throughout the globe and in the United States and in developed countries right now as we continue this ongoing recovery from COVID.

And so it's just going to put in these inflationary trends that we're already seeing generally throughout the economy that just kind of aggravates that situation.

The U.S. only imports about 3% of its crude oil from Russia.

But Dismukes says the oil market is interconnected.

It's one country.

Sanctions and others will follow suit, making oil barrels more difficult to come by and more expensive for countries that do depend on Russian oil more heavily like Germany.

People are self sanctioning right now in various parts of the world.

Just to get away from all Russian goods and products, oil being one of many.

So even if these countries in Germany or in France or in other places in Western Europe don't have a total country wide ban, you're going to see individual players in those countries where they can start backing out of those positions and moving into other positions.

So that it creates this artificial constraint that is driving up prices everywhere around the globe.

And we're feeling it here domestically, too.

America will need to replace the 3% of Russian oil that it's banned.

The field was used primarily as an alternative to transporting oil across the country.

Also, U.S. refineries can't refine all crude oils produced domestically.

This could contribute to rising prices.

Dismukes says there's no way to predict how high gas prices could spike.

I suspect you're going to start seeing a pretty significant consumer reaction.

And if prices go even higher, you're going to see even more reaction to that.

So they'll be self-correcting.

There'll be a ceiling at some point that they'll hit and then people will start, you know, dramatically changing their consumption patterns.

Though political leaders are in agreement that prices will rise.

They're at odds over a solution.

Republicans have called for more drilling of domestic oil.

While Democrats are looking to replace the oil with fuel from other countries, the White House is in talks with Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia about possibly entering an oil deal to mitigate the loss of Russian crude oil.

So far, nothing is certain If you're an energy customer, you know that you will foot the bill for the billions in losses the power giant took on after the hurricanes of the past two years.

The Public Service Commission voted four to one, giving Entergy that green light.

But after talking with two of the representatives, Foster Campbell of Shreveport and Dr. Craig Greene from Baton Rouge, it's easy to see why they aren't happy about what's going to happen either.

Craig, I'll ask you first.

You voted yes.

Explain that for me.

Yeah.

So ideally, in the absence of any storm, we would have never had to approve this this reimbursement them.

They're then what the utility does is we it's our job as a regulator.

To make sure that if a utility invests prudently in in Louisiana and we have to approve that if it's our priority meaning moving forward, this is a retrospective review.

But if it's prudent, then we just need to make sure that they're reimbursed in the least expensive way possible.

And that's what this vote was.

I mean, I to answer that question further, I would say I think them putting us back on line was very prudent.

And so what this decision was is what's the most economic way to do that?

One of the things Commissioner Campbell brought up, and I think I'm interested in as well, is I think that I think that the utility should have some skin in the game.

That's that's the utilities as well as the investors.

Right now.

They don't have any skin in the game.

They have no risk with the storms that we take on.

And so I think that's something we need to talk about as well.

Well, Foster, you've you've mentioned that.

So I want to hear your take on this, because you were the one no vote.

You didn't believe that customers should have to take on this expense.

I know I'm the only one representing north Louisiana, basically from Alexandria to Arkansas, from Texas to Mississippi, about a million people out across north Louisiana.

We haven't had the storms and yet we're having to pay more than I think our fair share.

But anyway, that's that's that's something that maybe we can work out.

I know I'm in the insurance business and I told Craig, I quoted my home homeowner's.

So my home is $2,000 a year.

And the homeowner's policy of someone who lives in Jackson, Louisiana, north of Baton Rouge, is about $4,000 a year.

Same thing with car insurance.

Car insurance costs more in New Orleans than it does in Shreveport because they have more accidents.

So using that theory, we don't have all these storms in North Roseanna, but we are in Louisiana and we want to pay our fair share.

I don't think that energy in this particular case is like Corexit said.

I don't think they're putting up any money at all.

We're talking about insurance.

They don't need the insurance because they got the people.

Louisiana going to pay for it all.

Energy didn't put up one quarter of this of the rate payers put it out.

And the way we financed it or the way it was proposed to be is the cheapest way possible.

It wasn't a bad vote to tell the right payers to pay for it at this particular way because it can save money.

My big problem is energy giving big dividends to their customers at this particular time.

And by the way.

Greg, I don't know if you've seen this where I was griping about the president making 60 million a year.

He's not making 16 now.

He just got 17 million in one year.

I don't think any guys were $17 million a year.

I just really don't.

And I think you stop when energy they are monopoly.

No one can go in business against them in Newark, Baton Rouge, if you want electricity in Baton Rouge, you get it from energy.

Same way in Monroe, you get it from energy.

No competition, a guaranteed nine and a half percent on their money at a time when interest rate has been extremely cheap, but have their return on investments at nine and a half percent.

They've got all these good things working for them, and then they have a storm and they do get the lights back on.

And I give them credit for that and had a lot of fine men and women that did that together.

But yeah, they don't even have to put up one quarter of the expense.

It's all going from people from Arkansas all the way to the Gulf of Mexico and I think there's maybe a better way that we need to tell these people, Look, we can't let you go free.

You're going to have to put up some money.

And we never have asked them to do it.

Before.

That's a lot of that's my fault.

I've been there 20 years and I never have really got to thinking about this like we should have thinking about.

I don't think energy as a whole.

I'm talking about the company and the leadership.

Somebody is missing the train here that with all the problems we have in Louisiana, a poor state you have all these big dividends and give this man a big raise is this amount of money that has been caused to put them back online.

But are they looking toward the future to build much better under.

There's a lot of issues here.

One thing near and dear to my heart is the word resiliency, and that gets thrown around a lot.

But it does tend to break that down.

It's really how can we do better when something bad happens the next time?

And I'm a big believer in if we always do what we've always done, we're always going to get we've always gotten so.

One way to look at this and keep in mind, we're a regulatory agency.

We're not an enforcement agency.

So one of the I have two different things open in a docket.

One, to look back and ask all the utilities, not just Entergy, but all of them, the money we allocated for you towards grid resilience.

How did you spend that?

Because we need to take a deep dove and see how you spent what we gave you to spend on resilience in the first place.

But the second is to move forward.

Let's get I have a docket to hire engineers to say, what do we need to do?

What's the best mixture of underground?

Or that pole needs to be replaced.

What I want the commission to do is take control of the resiliency conversation and not just react.

So far, I think we've been reactionary, and I want us to be proactive about how we can do this better.

And that surcharge is going to add up to about $15 a month for the next 15 years for those 1.1 million energy customers in Louisiana.

The United Nations released a sobering report on climate change, its impact on the world.

The report hypothesizes that flooding, excessive heat and heat related illnesses will increase if the climate doesn't drop by a couple of tenths of a degree.

Daniel Guilford, a climatologist with Climate Matters, told me most of the problems outlined in the report are already happening.

A couple tenths of a degree doesn't really sound like much.

Why is it such a small number?

If you get a if you get a fever of a degree or two, you're going to really start feeling the effects physiologically.

It's going to really start changing the way the systems in your bodies are in your body are acting.

And it's the same with our climate system.

Small changes can lead to big changes on large scales, especially when it comes at temperature, which so many things in our climate system respond to.

As you increase temperatures even marginally, you dry things out in certain parts of the world that make them more likely to be increased have increasing wildfire risks.

You would think that we would have to reduce the temperature by such a large amount, but, you know, a 10th of a degree, it seems so small and it seems also very doable.

Going forward, we sort of have some decisions to make.

We can have a large, concerted effort to really reduce emissions, carbon emissions around the globe.

And if that happens, we can start to reduce down to a warming of just a few tenths of a degree, maybe maybe one more degree at most.

But if there isn't concerted effort, if we sort of stay at business as usual, we are definitely going to overshoot those tenths of a degree values.

And then we could end up with a quite a different climate than we have today.

Another thing I found interesting about this article is that it said some of the impacts of climate change are potentially irreversible.

Can you explain what actually would be irreversible and why?

What we mean by irreversible is really that that as we change the chemistry of our atmosphere, the amount of carbon dioxide that we put into it right now today is going to be the same amount or more that we have going forward.

In the future.

Unless there are significant advancements in carbon dioxide removal technology, for instance, that can take that carbon dioxide away.

But right now, there are no natural or unnatural sources that can pull it out of the atmosphere faster than every thousand years or so.

That's extremely scary, especially for us here on the coasts.

Do you want to talk about how climate change specifically affects Louisiana?

Yeah.

So Louisiana is particularly at risk to sea level rise and flooding associated with Sea-Level rise, especially right now as we are sort of living here today.

We are seeing a greater increase in the frequency of flooding events, in particular from sunny day flooding.

That is, there isn't necessarily even a storm outside of water levels rise.

And the reasons for those can be many different and multifaceted.

But a big part of it is that as we increase the temperature of the ocean, that heat that we're trapping in there causes the ocean levels of bump up.

It's kind of like if you have water on a stove and you start to boil it, if you were to measure the water level, how high the water is getting, it would start to bump up a little bit before it started to evaporate.

That's the same thing that's happening with our oceans as we track heat in them and and Louisiana, being a coastal state with a lot of natural resources along the coast, is particularly vulnerable to that rising ocean effect.

Dumping that's also mentioned in this report is the health risks that are associated with climate change.

Now, Louisiana is on the coasts.

So one of our biggest challenges is making sure that we don't flood and see where sea levels don't rise too much.

But how does that affect us health wise?

I will say there are well known sort of links between climate and human health.

The most sort of prominent of one is heat related illnesses.

We know that as the temperature of the global climate and local climates increase.

That increases the amount of sort of heat stress that our bodies, especially as we're working outside our feeling.

And so we could be at greater risk for morbidity mortality associated with heat related illnesses.

Is there anything Louisianians can do specifically to help reduce the climate change in their area?

Probably the most important thing that you as a Louisianan can do is talk about climate change with your commute with your community, talk about it with your friends, talk about it with your families, with your faith communities, with the people that you are seeing in your everyday life, with your yoga instructor and your yoga class.

Talk about it with the people you see in your local coffee shop or bookstore.

What are the communities that are around you and how are they going to be affected by climate change?

And how can we be stirred to action by talking about the risks that we're facing, but also talking about the hope that we have that as we make progress sort of as a global and regional community towards climate, we are making the world a better place for us and our children and grandchildren to live in.

All right.

Well, thank you so much.

I've learned a bit by talking to you.

Oh, good.

Thank you so much for taking the time out.

I appreciate it.

Yes.

Thank you so much for having me here.

All right.

You can read the entire 36 page report on LPI Dawg.

LP will be airing Little Satchmo, a documentary taking an intimate exploration of the life and legacy of iconic jazz man Louis Armstrong through his relationship with a daughter that the public never knew existed.

The film seeks to correct a historical narrative relied on caricature for too long.

Louisiana Public Broadcasting in partnership with PBS, North Carolina, South Carolina, ETV and Real South is hosting a virtual screening and discussion of the documentary Little Satchmo.

It's Wednesday March 30th at 6 p.m..

This event is free, but registration via Eventbrite is required at RealSouth.

Eventbrite.com.

And everyone.

That's our show for this week.

Remember, you can watch anything Yelp by any time, wherever you are with our live PBS app, you can catch LPB News and Public Affairs shows, as well as other Louisiana programs you've come to enjoy over the years.

And please, like us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

For everyone here at Louisiana Public Broadcasting, I'm André Moreau and I'm Kara St. Cyr.

Until next time that's the State We're In.

Entergy is proud to support programing on LPB and Greener practices that preserve Louisiana.

The goal of our environmental and sustainability initiatives really is to ensure that our kids and future generations can be left with a cleaner planet.

Additional support provided by the Fred B and Ruth B. Zigler Foundation and the Zigler Art Museum located in Jennings City Hall.

The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is an historical and cultural center for Southwest Louisiana and the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

With support from viewers like you