Governor Jeff Landry has enacted the Louisiana Energy Protection Act, a decisive measure aimed at safeguarding the state’s oil and gas industry against financial threats from environmental activists. These activists have attempted to hold the industry accountable for perceived downstream consequences of climate change.
This legislation is designed to shield companies from being targeted by frivolous lawsuits that hinge on climate concerns. A notable example occurred last year when a legal case was initiated in Washington state against six oil companies after a tragic incident where a woman succumbed to heat stroke. Such cases, under this new law, would struggle to find footing in Louisiana.
Importantly, the law does not offer blanket immunity to oil companies. It remains clear that lawsuits concerning direct and discernible impacts, such as oil spills, erosion, or coastal damage as a result of oilfield operations, are still permissible. The Act carefully balances protection with accountability.
This legislation represents a rational approach to energy policy, science, and indeed, maintain a sense of sanity in ongoing climate debates.
Attempting to link an oil producer directly to specific weather events, like a heatwave, is a questionable endeavor. It vastly differs from cases where a chemical plant can be pinpointed as the source of local poisoning. The intricacies of climate science mean it’s impossible to trace a single carbon dioxide molecule from a company’s oil production to the subsequent effect it might have had on weather patterns. This notion fundamentally misinterprets how the Earth’s climate system operates.
Louisiana is a great example. Louisiana residents use the most energy per household of any state. A huge amount of electricity is necessary to beat the heat and humidity necessary to live there comfortably. Fortunately, Louisiana residents are blessed with low energy costs; nearly 70 percent of the state’s electricity is generated with cheap and abundant natural gas. The rest is made up by nuclear, then coal.
No one living in Louisiana, which is also one of the poorest states, is going to give up affordable air conditioning to stop carbon dioxide emissions. Nor are they going to give up cars, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, or their cellphones, which all rely on the byproducts of petroleum refining, a major industry for Louisiana.
Louisianans shouldn’t have to go without any modern conveniences. None of us should, and the companies that run the industry shouldn’t be bullied out of business by lawfare over a few degrees of warming spread out over more than 150 years, which is no disaster.
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These lawsuits ask courts to accept a long chain of weakening speculation and assumption. First, they need to take for granted that emissions contribute significantly to warming. They then leap to the claim that slight global warming is causing disasters.
To do the latter, lawfare pushers increasingly rely on a very popular and politically driven area of computer-model-driven science called “single event attribution.” It assumes a given weather event was caused by, or made worse by, climate change, then calculates how much worse. Next, it assumes that a portion of that influence can be traced to a particular company.
And then, of course, we are asked to believe that damages won can be apportioned fairly.
Every link in this chain is more dubious than the last, and too often, defendants are afraid to challenge the so-called science.
A single oil company in Louisiana is going to contribute an immeasurably tiny portion of global emissions, and there is no honest way to tell how any emissions impact any specific weather event.
Different weather and climate conditions have many contributing factors. Take sea level rise, for example; effects like soil sinking from tectonics, natural erosion, ground compaction, and aquifer withdrawals often have a huge impact on local relative sea level and have nothing at all to do with global warming.
Louisiana residents know this. Much of the state south of I-10 is barely above sea level, and in places like New Orleans, below it. Residents of the Pelican State have been battling issues with flooding long before modern fossil fuel use and global warming.
There are hundreds of these ridiculous attribution-driven lawsuits filed in courts across the country, particularly in blue states. Louisiana, along with states that have passed similar laws, is doing the right thing for its residents as well as local industry by stopping this ludicrous lawfare.
Affordable and reliable electricity, as well as petroleum byproducts, make modern life possible and make us more resilient to bouts of dangerous weather, regardless of climate change. These environmental groups and their proxies are trying to bankrupt the companies that make modern amenities, technologies, and long, healthy lifespans possible by providing energy and thousands of products we all demand and use every day.
Linnea Lueken ([email protected]) is a senior research fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute. X: @LinneaLueken
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