As it turns out with the now-halted and controversial Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project, the climate alarmism injected into its design by the Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards Administration may have hoisted it onto its own petard—into suspension, and possibly toward downsizing or even outright termination.

Upon taking office, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry expressed skepticism about the $3 billion project, which had already entered initial stages. Its stated goal was to divert sediment from the Mississippi River roughly 60 to 70 miles above its outlet into the Barataria Basin, rebuilding about 21 square miles of land over 50 years. However, the spillover effects would be stark: destruction of marine habitats, potential collapse of the oyster and shrimping industries, threat to at least one certain species, and disruption to Plaquemines Parish’s flood insurance program—Plaquemines being the parish that opposed the project from the start. Even the final analysis found the benefits only slightly outweighed the costs.

Then came the halt. In March, Landry announced he was suspending work on the project. Last week, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers revoked its environmental permit, citing the state’s suspension—but that wasn’t all. The Corps also listed other factors into the decision, including that the state “deliberately withheld information … that the state knew it should provide … [for] consideration whether to include that information” for the purposes of issuing the permit. In other words, the Edwards Administration deceptively kept information from the Corps that might have altered the Corps’ final decision.

According to Landry, the key suppressed document was a report indicating the state would be on the hook for roughly $50 million a year in dredging costs. Edwards, now conveniently cloaked in the robes of an “environmental lawyer” of all things, who for eight years acted as the most relentlessly partisan governor in the state’s history, used his tiresome it-bounces-off-of-me-and-twice-onto-you usual schtick in accusing Landry of scapegoating and warning that “partisan politics has no place in Louisiana’s coastal restoration work.”

That assertion deserves both a cringe and a cackle.

Cringeworthy, because Edwards never denied that the Corps didn’t get the report. Worth of a good belly laugh, because no governor in recent memory politicized coastal restoration more than he did, anchoring his plans in the faith in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) welded onto the two coastal master plans that appeared during his years in office–plans from which spawned the project that served as the linchpin of their recommendations.

Those plans, baked under Edwards’ direction, embraced sea level rise projections that bear no relationship to historical trends or current reality. The sequestered report based its modeling on relative sea level rise, the difference being that includes not only sea level rise emanating from the oceans, but also rise caused by land subsidence.

While a dispassionate analysis suggests a realistic eustatic sea level rise (ESLR) of no more than 200 cm by 2100 – which itself is over twice the historical average the rend of which hasn’t changed including the most recent annual data – the state’s master plans operated on a 770 cm projection. The suppressed report, released a year before the latest plan, used relative sea level rise (RSLR)—factoring in both rising water and sinking land—and doubled that number to 1500 cm as its central model.

The significance? This wild overestimation reduces the benefits and increases the cost of the project and its maintenance–specifically the dredging about which Landry spoke. The higher the assumed RSLR, the more the diversion system must compensate to maintain effectiveness. Dredging must begin a dozen years in to keep land-building viable. Edwards’ CAGW fantasy assumptions–incorporated into the plan that filtered into the report–reduced the benefits and ballooned both the costs and the maintenance burden.

Had the Corps seen the report, it might have denied the permit altogether. The motive for burying the report couldn’t be clearer. The Edwards Administration invested in the project had every motive to suppress it, and special interests wedded to climate alarmism and its former apparatchiks continue to try to deflect from this.

Further, had the report used a realistic assessment of RSLR, it would have argued for a scaled-down version that was less costly both in resources needed and damage done. That’s the very path Landry’s administration has now floated.

The irony is rich: the very evidence-free CAGW belief held by Edwards and his mandarins likely would have sabotaged the permit for the project they wanted. As the Corps reevaluates the permit, perhaps now the process will be driven by actual data—and maybe a more realistic, appropriately scaled project can proceed, one that protects both land and livelihoods without bleeding taxpayers or gutting marine ecosystems.