All eyes are on the US Supreme Court to review a monumental case involving Louisiana officials and energy producers, with a hearing this week. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill has insisted that her coastal lawsuits against the oil and gas industry are firmly aligned with conservative principles and Trump’s energy agenda. But as the cases advance, the political reality tells a different story. Far from challenging the left-wing litigation campaign that has targeted American energy for years, Murrill now finds herself echoing its tactics, embracing its legal theories, and relying on the very organizations that have spent decades working to undermine domestic production. Even before the next phase of litigation unfolds, her chosen allies make her motives unmistakable - these lawsuits are less about protecting Louisiana than about chasing political paydays at the expense of America’s energy security.
As the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments this week on whether Plaquemines Parish’s lawsuit against Chevron belongs in state or federal court, a flurry of amicus briefs has flooded in. Those supporting Chevron include Trump’s Department of Justice, former Attorney General Bill Barr, the America First Policy Institute, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And on Murrill’s side? Louisiana’s former Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards authored a report by Earthjustice and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).
These are precisely the types of organizations she herself describes as “radicals determined to extort the fossil fuel industry,” and that is exactly what these cases attempt to do. The playbook mirrors the climate lawfare suits that have become common in progressive states and localities. As the American Tort Reform Association puts it, groups like Earthjustice and EDF “set about the country like traveling salesmen trying to convince local and state governments to file public-nuisance lawsuits,” seeking to retroactively punish fossil-fuel companies for allegedly contributing to natural disasters such as wildfires.
In this case, instead of environmental activists, it was politically connected plaintiff’s attorney John Carmouche who sold these communities on the promise of big paydays from wealthy oil and gas companies. That does not make the situation any better – it simply reflects Louisiana’s notoriously corrupt legal environment, where collaboration between plaintiffs’ attorneys, politicians, and sympathetic courts undermines the integrity of these cases. And since Earthjustice and EDF are formally supporting the Attorney General, Murrill’s divergence from Trump’s energy dominance agenda is even harder to deny.
So why are these environmental NGOs now jumping in? Because after years of pursuing climate litigation across the country, they are experts at keeping these cases out of federal court. Just as Carmouche and Murrill rely on biased state courts to uphold their unproven claims linking coastal erosion to oil production, environmental NGOs strategically target politically compromised state venues where judges are more inclined to blindly attribute fault to oil and gas companies.
The stakes are high for Earthjustice, EDF, and similar groups. They’ve built an entire national strategy around ensuring that climate cases are heard in state courts because federal judges are less willing to accept their creative liability theories and rewrite national energy policy from the bench.
By embracing their assistance, Murrill is now entangling Louisiana in the very strategy these groups have used to undermine American energy for years. If Earthjustice and EDF can help secure a ruling keeping Louisiana’s coastal suits in state court, they will use it to fortify the broader climate litigation movement nationwide. And they will do so under the banner of Louisiana’s Republican Attorney General.
Even more troubling is the precedent these cases aim to establish: that energy companies can be punished retroactively for activities that were legal, regulated, and even mandated at the time they occurred back in the 1940s. If courts allow this theory to stand, no industry will be able to rely on the stability of the law. Compliance today could be criminalized tomorrow if a future political faction decides it dislikes the outcome.
This is exactly the tactic behind the coastal erosion suits. Louisiana’s decades of environmental mismanagement are being reframed as the fault of private companies that operated under state-issued permits.
It is a move straight from the California playbook. For years, California mismanaged its forests – discounting controlled burns, allowing fuel to accumulate, and ignoring the warnings of forestry experts. When predictable, devastating wildfires erupted, state leaders sued “Big Oil” instead of addressing their own environmental mismanagement.
Louisiana is now doing the same. Unable or unwilling to confront decades of governmental failure that contributed to coastal erosion, politicians have chosen an easier narrative: blame the industry that built the state’s economy.
But when Murrill partners with Earthjustice and EDF, she is legitimizing the very movement working to dismantle America’s energy security. She is helping establish legal doctrines that benefit climate activists and our geopolitical adversaries at the expense of Americans.
If Trump’s agenda is to unleash American energy, strengthen domestic production, and protect industry from weaponized litigation, then Murrill’s alignment with the lawfare machine is not a complement. It is a betrayal.
Louisiana’s energy workers, its economy, and the broader American energy dominance cannot afford for Republican officials to hand victories to the environmental left. The Supreme Court now has the opportunity to course correct. The question is whether Louisiana’s own Attorney General will learn from the company she has chosen or continue empowering those determined to bring America’s energy future to a halt.
George Landrith is the President of the Frontiers of Freedom Institute and the author of “Let Freedom Ring… Again: Can Self-Evident Truths Save America from Further Decline?”