Louisiana’s political orthodoxy is being turned upside-down as prominent leaders of both political parties join lawsuits against Big Oil companies to get billions of dollars for environmental improvement projects, The Associated Press reports.
Louisiana remains the nation’s second-largest crude oil producer and oil refiner after Texas, but the industry has been on the defensive since Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, ended eight years of Republican leadership last November.
Publicly, Edwards joined a campaign of lawsuits filed by local governments to hold the industry, which injects $73 billion into the state economy, at least partly responsible for Louisiana’s loss of 1,900 square miles of coast since the 1930s.
Privately, he pushed for a pretrial settlement to resolve all their claims.
“Our coast is in crisis,” Edwards wrote in a letter to oil executives in May, calling for an “amicable solution” to avoid years of litigation.
Edwards was soon seconded by New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who accused former state leaders of allowing the industry to cripple “in a generation or two what Mother Nature built in 7,000 years.”
In July, Vermilion Parish became the fourth local government to file claims against Exxon, Shell, Chevron and dozens of other corporations. The agency overseeing flood protection for New Orleans also is suing. Republicans have joined in, from GOP-led parishes to Attorney General Jeff Landry.
“It’s absolutely new,” pollster Bernie Pinsonat says. “The oil companies are taking it seriously because you’re talking about billions and billions of dollars.”
This political shift can be traced to Hurricane Katrina, which exposed the dire state of ecology in the Mississippi River’s delta. Katrina alone tore up about 60 square miles of marsh around New Orleans in 2005.
At issue are oilfields like the one in Alliance, in Plaquemines Parish, where oil companies are accused of routinely abandoning open waste pits, carelessly dumping toxic brine and oilfield waste onto the marsh and interrupting the delta’s ebbs and flows by dredging thousands of miles of canals that weren’t filled back in.
The oil industry blames the Army Corps of Engineers, whose levees deny the delta its natural deposits of silt and sand while channeling the Mississippi River out to sea. It also blames the clear-cutting of coastal forests more than a century ago, shipping channels that have sliced up the delta and even the invasive nutria, an oversized marsh grass-eating rodent.
“It’s just such a vague attempt by the plaintiffs to throw a blanket over an entire industry and hold it singularly responsible for a problem that’s got multiple causes,” says Robert Meadows, a Chevron lawyer.
