An underappreciated reform agenda sought by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry continues to bear fruit reorganizing the way that Louisiana makes policy regarding it energy and natural resources.

Last week, a panel established by Landry– intended to review the state’s natural resource management– issued its preliminary report. It drew the conclusion that this function suffered both from compartmentalization and incoordination, and recommended establishment of a steering commission that would provide overall policy leadership over at present disparate agencies such as the Departments of Energy and Natural Resources and Transportation and Development and the Coastal Protection and Restoration Agency. This Commission would have as members the secretary of DENR; his deputy that heads the new Office of Land and Water that is to manage all of the state’s energy and state-owned resources, ostensibly another DENR employee representing both its new Natural Resources Trust Authority – designed to provide a modernized financial security system for energy, and natural resources-related projects – and planning; ostensibly someone sitting on the CPRA Board or Authority to represent coastal interests; and a commissioner dedicated to a broad portfolio of planning for energy, overseeing infrastructure as it relates to resource management, and coordinating outside grant and other funding opportunities.

The document doesn’t delve into the details of Commission membership selection and service – apparently directly or indirectly by the governor, probably concurrently with his term and needing Senate confirmation – but it does make clear that it will acquire policy-making functions previously wielded by the affected agencies. So, for example, while the CPRA would continue to oversee a master plan and crank out revisions every six years with annual plans describing implementation, the Commission would have final say over how to pursue future implementation and the projects undertaken which for coastal projects at present CPRA has.

Additionally, the report calls for creating a CPRA clone, the Upland Resource Management Authority, to perform tasks like the CPRA in the remainder of the state. This promises at worst a method to coordinate the many disparate agencies involved in resource management such as levee boards and perhaps even cause a consolidation of authority as was pursued in southeastern Louisiana after the hurricane disasters of 2005.

Finally, a salutary direction the report takes concerns financial aspects. The state has launched into considerable activity through the CPRA because of an unfortunate fluke: the Macondo oil well blowout in 2010, the settlement for which has to date plowed $8 billion towards restoration activities and with billions of more to come. That revenue stream will dry up within a few years, leaving the state well short of its $50 billion goal (it does kick in typically hundreds of millions of dollars a year on its own), so this emphasis on funding is needed.

However, the biggest payoff from these changes comes in the potential to depoliticize choices made in spending. Regrettably, CPRA master planning too often has relied on politically-popular but scientifically-questionable assumptions, based upon faith in the evidence-free worldview of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. This risks misallocation of money – perhaps billions of dollars – towards projects that when subjected to rigorous scientific criteria don’t deliver as much value as do others judged, when all were evaluated by CAGW standards, lower in priority or not at all pursued.

This proposed structuring provides another layer of vetting that, if properly undertaken, offers the chance to reorder project pursuit when necessary to ensure the most bang for the buck using a data-driven approach eschewing political fashion. Too much land loss and too much money are involved to let a CAGW-led agenda substitute for reality.

With a final meeting scheduled to discuss the draft Sep. 20 and the final report due next month, let’s hope something very much like what has emerged from this process goes into that and signals to policy-makers the statutory and other changes that need doing and implementation by this time next year.