Louisiana Deep in the Grips of Dirty Industry

Time and again I’m struck by the extent to which political attitudes toward environmental issues are determined by local producer interests. You’d think that the people of Louisiana, who’ve already seen their state’s largest city devastated by a hurricane and now have a gigantic pool of oil headed for their shores, might be among the biggest skeptics of the fossil fuel industry. Instead, Louisiana is a big oil state and the spill has mostly just been causing Louisiana elected officials to double-down on their love of the industry. I saw Mary Landrieu on television yesterday talking about drilling, and Sharon Begley offers this tale of the state legislature working to kneecap environmental legislation (that’s via Mike Tomasky):

Just as Louisiana politicians are about to get an up-close-and-personal look at the BP oil spill (it is approaching the shores an hour’s drive from Baton Rouge, the state capital), they are considering a bill to “kneecap” all university environmental-law clinics in the state, which have led the way in challenging the historically cozy relationship between state politicians and the petrochemical industry. [...]

Although the bill would apply to clinics doing work in civil litigation, domestic violence, and juvenile law, says CLEA president Robert Kuehn of Washington University School of Law, “the target is clearly environmental-law clinics, especially Tulane’s.” Indeed, the Louisiana Chemical Association, the trade group of chemical (including petrochemical) companies which got a favored senator to introduce the bill, was quoted in The New York Times last month saying that if law clinics “want to play hardball by trying to kneecap industry,” then “we should play hardball and kneecap them with their state appropriations.”

This specific idea is a travesty that can and will be fought in the state legislature. But the overall mentality—that what’s good for oil companies is what’s good for Louisiana, and what’s good for coal companies is what’s good for West Virginia—is quite deeply entrenched and it’s a huge obstacle to change. Meanwhile, oil-led development has left Louisiana as one of the poorest states in the union.