Strangers in Their Own Land

Over coffee in Baton Rouge, Hochschild meets Dr. Paul Templet, a chemical physicist from the area who used to teach at Louisiana State University and run the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. Hochschild wants to understand Louisianan conservatives’ faith in the logic of “the more oil, the more jobs.” Presumably, these jobs would boost people’s income and make government aid unnecessary, but Hochschild has visited Dr. Templet to ask if the logic really works. When he tells her that “less than 10 percent” of Louisiana jobs are in the oil industry, she is shocked. Oil jobs, it turns out, are increasingly automated; the ones that remain are mostly temporary construction jobs filled by out-of-state workers.

Hochschild wonders whether lawmakers might prioritize oil because it brings in so much tax revenue. While “it was the largest single source of revenue,” oil money only made up 14% of the state’s budget, and Governor Bobby Jindal—who received half a million dollars in campaign contributions from oil executives—slashed taxes on oil companies between 2008 and 2012 and paid for these tax breaks by cutting 30,000 public sector jobs. Furthermore, the agency responsible for making sure that oil companies pay their taxes “has close ties with the industry” and “performed no audits at all” between 2010 and 2013.

Hochschild and Dr. Templet start on “a second round of coffee and a second layer of revelations.” Templet explains that oil also displaces jobs in other industries, like fishing and tourism, which were “severely hurt” after the Deepwater Horizon spill. Contrary to popular belief, Hochschild explains that “oil wages don’t trickle down; they leak out.” Dr. Templet explains that most of the profits go to executives who live nowhere near Louisiana, and most of the temporary construction workers that build the oil infrastructure send their incomes back home, out of the state. In fact, he says, oil has done nothing to benefit Louisiana’s economy in the short or long term.

Hochschild calls Louisiana’s strategy for economic growth the “low road” approach: by creating conditions that make it cheaper to do business, Louisiana hopes “to get industry that exists somewhere else” to move. In contrast, a “high road” strategy would try “to stimulate new jobs by creating an attractive public sector.” Hochschild argues that the Tea Party chooses the “low road” but progressive states like California choose the “high road.”

Hochschild and Templet order yet another round of coffee, and she asks him about the idea that “you must choose between jobs or a clean environment.” He tells her about a 1992 MIT study showing that stricter environmental regulations actually correlate with faster economic growth in the United States and a 2016 study that proved the same thing across the globe. She wonders why her conservative friends have not heard about this new “growing consensus” among economists.

Hochschild hypothesizes that conservatives might not know about this consensus due to the “growing dominance of oil and its show of generous company largesse.” This creates a cycle in which “companies squeeze favors out of the state,” which pays for those favors by redirecting money from public services. As public services crumble, opportunities dwindle for poor Louisianans and sectors of the economy besides oil start to fall behind, which “further concentrates power in the hands of oil.” Oil companies often donate a small portion of their tax incentive money to environmental groups as a gesture of goodwill, which makes Louisianans think they are helping preserve the environment.

Wondering if Louisiana is an “oddball oil state” rather than the true “heart of the right,” Hochschild reads a “startling” study demonstrating that red states are more polluted than blue states; her own follow-up shows the same effect on a county level. People who live in more polluted counties “are more likely to believe that Americans ‘worry too much’ about the environment” and identify as “strong Republican.”

Hochschild wonders why companies like PPG would specifically choose to build plants in Louisiana. She discovers the answer in a consultant’s report for the California Waste Management Board. Powell, the consultant, tries to figure out how to get neighbors to deal with the downsides of “locally undesirable” industrial projects like waste-to-energy plants. He suggests that, instead of trying to convince residents who resist “locally undesirable” construction, companies should simply go to the kinds of communities that would be unlikely to resist in the first place.

Some of Powell’s key “least resistant personality” traits are being conservative, pro-free market, and Republican; having low educational attainment and lacking a “culture of activism;” and working in “nature exploitative occupations.” Hochschild realizes that these all the Louisiana residents she has been studying fit the description. She wonders whether people with the “least resistant personality” are more easily influenced by the “psychological program” Honoré described, but then considers that this may be “too easy an idea,” one that does not give Louisianans enough credit for what they do believe. Hochschild suggests that “the empathy wall was higher than I’d imagined” and resolves to explore the cultural institutions that her subjects rely on in order to better understand their way of life.