Another blackout. Another island-wide outage. Another 1.4 million Puerto Ricans left in the dark. That’s what Puerto Rico experienced last week.
Every customer of LUMA Energy—the company responsible for running Puerto Rico’s power distribution—lost electricity. Over 328,000 residents lost running water. The chaos lasted for days, and it wasn’t a one-off event. Since 2022, the island has suffered more than 200 blackouts. And yet, with Puerto Rico’s energy grid crumbling in real time, Governor Jenniffer González-Colón is turning her attention to… suing American energy producers?
Yes, you read that right. While Puerto Rican families endure life-threatening power outages, the supposedly pro-Trump governor is standing by and allowing a massive climate lawsuit to move forward against household American companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips—the very producers of the fuels Puerto Rico relies on to survive. The lawsuit, originally filed in 2024 under the previous administration, is riddled with legal overreach, blaming oil and gas companies for hurricanes and a supposed decades-long campaign of “climate deception.”
But even though Governor González-Colón didn’t initiate the lawsuit, she has refused to stop it. By choosing to let it proceed, she is aligning herself—not with President Trump and his America First energy agenda—but with the extreme left, Democratic attorneys general in deep blue states such as California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Ironically, Puerto Rico imports 100% of its fuel and obtains over 90% of its electricity from fossil sources—mainly natural gas, diesel, and coal. These energy companies aren’t just suppliers; they’re lifelines. Suing them won’t fix the grid. It won’t power a hospital during the next blackout. It won’t lower energy costs or stabilize the supply chain. What it will do is scare off future investment and disrupt the already fragile system.
It’s hard to reconcile that reality with the Trump agenda Governor González-Colón claims to support. So far in his presidency, Donald Trump made U.S. energy dominance a top priority and admirably stated “we will develop the liquid gold that is right under our feet, including American oil and natural gas.” He signed executive orders to unleash domestic energy and end the Democrats’ “state overreach” against American fossil fuels. President Trump rightly understands that energy security is national security—and that demonizing the industry only helps our enemies outcompete with American energy companies.
Now, contrast that vision with what’s happening in Puerto Rico. A Republican governor is supporting a lawsuit that reads like it was written in a Greenpeace boardroom. It seeks to blame oil producers for Hurricane Maria, pay for future storm damage, and even calls for “compensating” Puerto Rico through a billion-dollar climate fund. Meanwhile, the same administration has the audacity to want Puerto Rico to become the fifty-first American state and is absolutely doing nothing to hold LUMA or PREPA accountable for the island’s catastrophic blackouts.
Where is the logic in that?
If Governor González-Colón wants to show real leadership, she should focus on the local utility failures that have left her people in darkness—not chase courtroom shakedowns at the expense of energy security. LUMA Energy and PREPA have a well-documented history of mismanagement, corruption, and failure. Yet despite those failures, the government awarded a massive 10-year contract to Genera PR—a recently created subsidiary of New York-based hedge fund, New Fortress Energy. This company has no prior experience running power generation of this scale. The company has already been tied to serious performance issues and contract violations, including fuel delivery failures that cost the island millions of dollars. Even worse, New Fortress Energy is facing major bankruptcy risks yet this is the company Governor González-Colón is entrusting to run Puerto Rico’s power grid.
Worse still, Governor González-Colón is doing all of this while the island has accepted billions in federal energy aid paid for by American taxpayers. In just the past year, over $1 billion in Department of Energy funds have been sent to help rebuild Puerto Rico’s grid. But what good is that money if the administration’s priority is to wage a legal war against the energy sources that actually help power the island?
This isn’t just bad policy—it’s a betrayal of the voters who believed Jenniffer González-Colón would govern like a conservative and stand with President Trump’s vision of American energy dominance. By advancing this baseless lawsuit, she is embracing the left’s climate litigation crusade and turning Puerto Rico into the next political laboratory for anti-fossil-fuel zealots.
Puerto Rico deserves better. Its people deserve lights that stay on. They deserve leadership that takes on the true causes of their suffering, not phantom villains. And Americans across the nation deserve to know the truth: a so-called Trump ally is throwing America’s energy producers under the bus—right when we need them most.
It’s time for Governor González-Colón to pick a side. Will she stand with the people of Puerto Rico and the America First energy agenda? Or will she keep carrying water for the environmentalist left’s climate lawsuit industry while her island sinks deeper into darkness?
The choice is hers—but time is running out.
The Honorable Tim Huelskamp represented Kansas’s 1st District in Congress from 2011 to 2017, chaired the House Tea Party Caucus, and was a member of the 2024 RNC Platform Committee
Join the conversation as a VIP Member