The 2013 hurricane season kicked off this weekend, and CCAN’s director Mike Tidwell has a must-read op-ed in today’s Virginian-Pilot: Will Norfolk be the next New Orleans?

As climate change brings higher seas and bigger storms, nobody in Virginia has higher stakes in facing the climate crisis than Hampton Roads residents. Mike wrote the piece to connect the dots between dirty fossil fuels, climate change, and the water lapping at coastal Virginians’ doorsteps.

Read a preview of the op-ed below. Then, click here to read the full piece, and click on the graphic below to share it on Facebook. We’re declaring “game on” for saving the wildlife, people and culture of this great Virginia coast, but we can’t do it without you.

“A hurricane is coming, and it’s going to wipe us out.”
Papoose Ledet, a Cajun shrimper, told me this as we rode on his wooden trawler just south of New Orleans. I was a visiting journalist, and it was the spring of 2001, more than four years before Katrina. How did Ledet – and millions of other Louisianans – know the Big One was coming prior to Katrina’s actual arrival in 2005?

Simple. They saw the ocean creeping steadily into their lives, for years, with their own eyes. They saw the tides grow higher and higher. They saw unusual and increasingly intense flooding of streets and homes. And they saw scientists issue study after study showing that the ocean was literally rising, an obvious threat to Louisiana’s flat, watery coastal region, where some areas were below sea level.

If you live in coastal Hampton Roads, take a deep breath and re-read that last paragraph. You live, right now, in a world eerily parallel to south Louisiana prior to 2005. Every time you take a different route to work – or miss work completely – due to newly flooded streets, you become more like a citizen of New Orleans.

Read on: http://hamptonroads.com/2013/05/will-norfolk-be-next-new-orleans

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