by Steve Milloy, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow and Junkscience.com Founder
As appearing in the Daily Caller
It’s a dark day for Louisiana conservatives when the state’s top law enforcement officer takes up the mantle for the Left’s climate lawfare agenda. Attorney General Liz Murrill, elected with the promise of advancing President Trump’s 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 general’s office intervened in as a third-party plaintiff. And there are dozens of other similar cases pending.
The Louisiana land loss cases—now heading to the Supreme Court—are 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 state’s decision this month to scrap its largest coastal restoration project to date.
This isn’t “justice,” it’s a shakedown. Left-wing trial lawyers—pocketing huge contingency fees—target 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.
