Itâs a dark day for Louisiana conservatives when the stateâs top law enforcement officer takes up the mantle for the Leftâs climate lawfare agenda. Attorney General Liz Murrill, elected with the promise of advancing President Trumpâs agenda, now sides with Democrat-aligned trial lawyers in an absurd campaign to pin the blame for Gulf Coast erosion on oil and gas producers operating in the state.
In May, a local jury returned a $745 million dollar verdict against Chevron that the attorney generalâs office intervened in as a third-party plaintiff. And there are dozens of other similar cases pending.
The Louisiana land loss casesânow heading to the Supreme Courtâare cut from the same cloth as the climate cases being litigated in deep blue states and municipalities across the country. Like those cases, the primary objective is extracting money, not fixing coastal erosion. Nothing says this louder than the stateâs decision this month to scrap its largest coastal restoration project to date.
This isnât âjustice,â itâs a shakedown. Left-wing trial lawyersâpocketing huge contingency feesâtarget companies like Chevron in order to destroy the oil and gas industry in the United States. To do this, they are rewriting history by blaming industry for century-old, government-made problems. And Attorney General Murrill is playing right along.
The true story of Louisianaâs coast isnât one of corporate villainy; itâs the saga of the 1927 Mississippi River floods and the governmentâs response. After catastrophic floods, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built extensive levees and dikes to protect communities and farmland. This flood control infrastructure, necessary as it was, hampered the Mississippiâs natural delivery of silt to the deltaâsediment crucial for replenishing barrier islands and wetlands lost to natural erosion.
How much sediment are we talking? In the late 1800s, as much as 750 million cubic feet of Mississippi silt reached the Gulf yearlyâenough to bury a square mile under 27 feet of earth. These vital deposits were systematically reduced by federal levying. The scientific and historical reality is that without that silt, the coast subsides and erodes, independent of oil industry activity.
Multiple university studies and even prior lawsuits by Louisiana politicians blamed not Chevron, but the very federal government whose flood control policies turned the Mississippi from a land-building powerhouse into a silt-starved trickle.
In 1942, President Roosevelt issued a wartime executive order establishing the Petroleum Administration for War to help win World War II. Oil production dramatically increased in Louisiana in order to comply with the federal mandate maximizing petroleum production. The Louisiana State and Local Coastal Resources Management Act of 1980, further legitimized the wartime projectsâ necessity and legitimacy, explicitly grandfathering them into the permitting process.
Yet, Murrillâs deception doesnât end there. Recently, she went as far to claim that Chevron had illegally dumped four billion gallons of âtoxicâ waste in Louisianaâs marsh â a talking point that appears to be taken straight from leftwing trial lawyersâ playbooks. In truth, the so-called toxic waste was in fact produced water, which comes with every oil and gas production. Itâs primarily salty water that is separated from oil.
It was legal to discharge produced water into saline water in LouisianaâChevron even got a permit from Louisiana for the discharge. Every state and federal agency overseeing its operations approved of its discharge. It was not until the state conspired with contingency fee lawyers pushing the Leftâs climate cultism did any agency allege that the discharge was unlawful.
This bayou shakedown isnât just legally suspectâitâs economically destructive. The oil and gas industry contributes $77.7 billion to the stateâs economy annually, representing 25% of the total gross domestic product (GDP), and the industry supports 306,750 jobs, accounting for 15% of the stateâs total employment. Tax revenue from the energy sector made up more than 20% â or $3.48 billion â of the stateâs 2024 fiscal year budget, helping to fund public education, Medicaid, public safety and yes, environmental and natural resources.
The irony is biting. Less than a year after Chevron abandoned Californiaâs punitive climate regime, the company faces echo-chamber litigation in the supposedly âredâ state of Louisiana. Republican Governor Jeff Landry and Murrillâs joint prosecution agreements with Democrat trial lawyers, some of whom have donated hundreds of thousands collectively to their super PACs, risk billions in new Louisiana energy investments. Energy producers are not going to invest in projects that invite junk science lawsuits.
If these baseless lawsuits succeed, the only winners will be the left-wing trial lawyers and liberal moneyed interests who want to destroy American energy productionânot the people of Louisiana, and certainly not the coastal communities in true need of real, science-based solutions. If the shakedown wasnât already obvious, the stateâs recent cancellation of its largest coastal restoration projectâthe $3 billion Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversionâmakes clear this lawsuit isnât about fixing erosion; itâs about extracting money.
If Louisianaâs Republicans want to avoid becoming indistinguishable from their blue-state counterparts, they must reject this leftist climate crusade. The real path forward requires confronting nature, history, and engineeringânot scapegoating the industries that built and sustained modern America. Enough with the political theater. Restore common sense, defend real science, and put an end to this Louisiana blues act.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer, publishes JunkScience.com and is on X @JunkScience.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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