A recent article in the Times-Picayune and Nola.com, “Louisiana just made it illegal to sue oil companies over climate change. So have other states,” describes a recent bill passed in the Louisiana Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Jeff Landry (R) that bars groups from suing oil and gas companies over alleged downstream impacts of climate change. This is a very positive development, as it is not reasonable to connect storms or things like heat-related illness to any particular oil producer.
The law, called the Louisiana Energy Protection Act, protects Louisiana oil and gas companies, and all other potential defendants, from frivolous lawsuits over climate change. The Times-Picayune article describes the potential lawsuits as intending to “hold oil and gas companies accountable for the impacts of sea level rise, extreme weather events, wildfires and flooding, arguing that the companies should pay for measures needed to adapt, such as seawalls and building elevations.”
Rep. Brett Geymann (R – Lake Charles), who wrote and sponsored the bill, expressed skepticism about human activity like burning oil and gas causing climate change, which the Times-Picayune article chastises, reciting the idea that there is “overwhelming consensus among scientists that greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels heat the planet.”
The “overwhelming consensus” line is overplayed and worthless when it comes to the facts, because that claim is extremely suspect, as breakdowns of the “97 percent consensus” study show that scientists have a range of belief about how much humans contribute to global warming, and besides, scientific truth does not lean on consensus.
Geymann is quoted as saying “[t]o say my aunt died from a heat stroke and I’m going to sue every oil company and every pipeline company in Louisiana because of it — that is not a legitimate claim.” He is right to be skeptical that these lawsuits are anything but frivolous.
For one, oil and gas are necessary for the lifestyle that Louisiana residents live. The heat and humidity of the state is handled with copious energy demanding air conditioning almost year-round. Stable, abundant, affordable electricity to handle that load comes mostly from natural gas in Louisiana, nearly 70 percent, with most of the rest made up by nuclear, then coal. Louisiana residents are not going to give up air conditioning, or roads, or driving cars, or concrete, or medical technologies, pharmaceuticals, and electronics that rely on the byproducts of petroleum refining. Nor should they be forced to. Attempting to run companies out of business with lawfare for making these essential products is much worse than the alleged impact of a degree or two of warming over more than 100 years.
Another problem with these lawsuits is that they are attempting to attribute a particular negative outcome, like sea level rise, to a single company or industry, and assign damages based on that company’s contributions. But a single oil company in Louisiana is going to be contributing an immeasurably small amount of emissions—upstream and downstream—to the global count. And it is not the oil company itself that is producing the emissions, it is the public. The users of its products including city and state governments, businesses, and households that use oil and gas and produce emissions.
Also, something like sea level rise has many contributing factors, including the effects of local thermal expansion of water that may have nothing at all to do with global warming, and land subsidence, which is often completely disconnected from climate change or weather at all.
Major civil engineering projects to keep New Orleans from slipping under the waves have been ongoing since the city was first established, long before modern warming trends.
Oil companies, particularly pipeline companies, can be responsible for contributing to erosion and making channels in coastal tidelands, which can make land erosion worse; this law does not ban groups from suing over those very direct and real impacts.
Thus far, most climate lawfare has been more about harassing oil and gas producers and costing them money than actually solving any problems, and certainly cannot stop sea level rise or hurricanes, both of which have occurred throughout history. As numerous papers at Climate at a Glance demonstrate, trends for those and other weather-related events have not gotten worse and fewer people are dying now from temperatures or extreme weather events than at any time in history.
It is the state’s job to handle major civil engineering projects like building levees, so long as they want to maintain below-sea level cities. Louisiana’s legislature and Gov. Landry did a good thing by blocking unscientific and frivolous potential lawfare from climate-obsessed environmental groups.
