About this Toolkit

This toolkit is part of an academic excerise for which we imagine advising Green New Deal policy makers as they work to focus funding and advocacy efforts on the regions of the country most impacted by fossil fuel production and climate change. On February 7th, 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) and Senator Ed Markey (MA) introduced H.R. 109, a non-binding resolution “recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal.” In it, they provide a framework for a 10-year national effort to bolster actions on climate change mitigation and resilience.

While the GND is not supported equally across the country, there are a number of locations that would greatly benefit from the realization of GND policies. This toolkit will focus on Louisiana in particular due to the prevalence of oil and gas (O&G) production in the state, coupled with high unemployment and poor health outcomes. O&G production not only contributes to local pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, but it erodes wetlands along the Mississippi river making inland areas more susceptible to damaging flood events and coastal areas less resilient against sea level rise.

We begin by analyzing how air quality in Louisiana has changed over time—specifically, between 2001 and 2014. The indicators we observed show an increase in pollution levels over time.

We then analyze the relationship between levels fossil fuel production and air quality in Louisiana. This analysis indicates that the concentration of O&G production has a negative relationship to air quality in Louisiana.

Finally, we look to Twitter to understand how those who live in Louisiana feel about the Green New Deal. We choose to analyze Twitter data for the two weeks following the first presidential debate on September 29th, 2020 between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Climate change and the Green New Deal were discussed extensively during the debate, which had a large and diverse audience. While we would have liked to perform a sentiment analysis for the Green New Deal on only Louisiana for this time period, due to the small number of tweets that contain location data, we expanded our analysis into two parts. One was a sentiment analysis of tweets in the two weeks following the debate across the United States. The other was an analysis of where the geo-located tweets in our data were located—we find that there is a concentration of tweets about the Green New Deal in Los Angeles and Brooklyn.

By looking at the count of words and the sentiment of tweets from this time period, we unsurprisingly find large amounts of polarity in the feelings of those Tweeting about the Green New Deal.

We hope that the visualizations and information presented in this toolkit are helpful to GND advocates, policy makers, and local community activists in communicating the urgency of the climate crisis in Louisiana and for understanding the nuances within opinions about the GND.

The toolkit includes 3 pages.

Fossil Fuel Production Dashboard

Air Pollution(2001-2014) Visualization

Senitment Analysis: #GreenNewDeal