Louisiana’s disappearing coast - The state loses a football field’s worth of land every hour and a half. Now engineers are in a race to prevent it from sinking into oblivion.

as i recall, the general consensus in the scientific community nowadays is that this is a battle where there's only shades of losing and there is no victory condition (unless the US government steps in, i guess). there's simply no realistic path by which louisiana can completely reverse this because the expenditures necessary at this point would likely be more than the entire state budget, so the best they can settle for is slowing the process down and hope that sediment from the mississippi makes up most of the remaining difference elsewhere. in a similar vein, the sinking of new orleans is all but inevitable because the very process that allows it to exist habitably exacerbates the sinking that makes it increasingly untenable going forward to make a living in. realistically, the sinking of coastline (and new orleans) seems to be an inevitability--it'll just be a matter of how quickly it happens, how many people get fucked by it, and whether or not people choose to double down on levees or cut their losses.