Louisiana has joined a handful of Republican states that have recently passed legislation aimed at banning lawsuits against oil and gas companies over the harms of climate change.

The Louisiana Energy Protection Act, written by state Rep. Brett Geymann, R-Lake Charles, is aimed at preventing lawsuits filed by states and local jurisdictions in other parts of the U.S. from playing out in Louisiana. Across the country, about 30 lawsuits seeking to hold industry to account for the impacts of climate change have been weaving their way through the legal system, but none have been brought in Louisiana.

The lawsuits seek to hold oil and gas companies accountable for the impacts of sea level rise, extreme weather events, wildfires and flooding, arguing that the companies should pay for measures needed to adapt, such as seawalls and building elevations. Louisiana has now banned those types of claims from being brought in state court against oil and gas producers or any other defendant. 

Geymann, who chairs the House Natural Resources and Environment Committee, said he was skeptical that human activity is causing climate change, and didn’t think the lawsuits were “legitimate.” There is overwhelming consensus among scientists that greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels heat the planet.

“To say my aunt died from a heat stroke and I’m going to sue every oil company and every pipeline company in Louisiana because of it — that is not a legitimate claim,” Geymann said, referring to a lawsuit filed in Washington state against oil companies after a woman died of heat exposure. “A legitimate claim would be: I live down the road from a refinery and I have damages from the emission of (hydrogen sulfide) at a level that exceeded the EPA or the Clean Air Act.”

Gov. Jeff Landry signed the bill into law on Thursday. It was passed by a vote of 31-3 in the Senate and 92-5 in the House. Oklahoma, Utah, Iowa and Tennessee all passed bills this year that aim to ban lawsuits over the impacts of climate change. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, also introduced the “Stop Climate Shakedowns Act” at the federal level, which would ban climate lawsuits nationwide. 

Michael Gerrard, an environmental law expert at Columbia University in New York, was skeptical that the Louisiana law would have much impact.

“They don’t amount to much because these bills are all being enacted in red states that haven’t brought such lawsuits. They can’t stop a California court or a Colorado court,” he said, calling the bill “mostly performative.”

Geymann responded that 20 years ago, it would have been hard to imagine the dozens of lawsuits, led by Baton Rouge attorney John Carmouche, that have been filed by coastal parishes seeking damages from oil and gas companies for damaging wetlands.

Tommy Faucheux, president of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil & Gas Association, which supported the legislation, said “the history of litigation against business in Louisiana creates uncertainty for business.”

“So yes, we have not had a claim yet. We didn’t want to get to one,” he said. “Anything that we can do to stop frivolous litigation in Louisiana is good for the oil and gas industry.”

Still, Jackson Voss, government affairs coordinator for the Alliance for Affordable Energy, which advocates for electricity customers, worries that the bill could be interpreted broadly by the courts.

“My concern is that you could now make an argument to a judge that a lawsuit is climate litigation in disguise — what they’re really arguing is that this is about the climate impacts,” he said. “That’s a slippery slope.”

Geymann said the bill was worded specifically so as to limit its applicability only to lawsuits related to broad climate change damages.

“The governor is obviously trying to attract industry,” Geymann said. “They’re already a little nervous to come here. That’s the reason this bill has a big impact — it takes it off the table.”

The bill is part of a pattern in Louisiana of attracting industries to the state by limiting the types of lawsuits that can be brought against them. The Legislature also passed a bill this session that limits the ability to sue aerospace companies, amid widespread speculation that SpaceX, the company founded by newly minted trillionaire Elon Musk, is eyeing a remote tract of land in Vermilion Parish. 

Part of a national push

The nationwide push to stop such lawsuits was on display at a December conference organized by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a conservative nonprofit lobbying group. 

Nonpartisan watchdog group Documented provided a recording of a panel discussion there to The Times-Picayune | The Advocate. O.H. Skinner, the former solicitor general for Arizona, accused the “political left” of seeking to shape national policy through climate-related and other litigation, and another speaker, Will Hild, presented model legislation, the Energy Freedom Act, that would ban climate lawsuits.

At the end of the meeting, invitees were shown a QR code that linked to a draft bill.

A copy of Geymann’s legislative calendar obtained through a public records request indicates that he was not at the ALEC conference. He has said that he wrote his bill himself.

“I never talked to ALEC, I did not read anything by ALEC, I don’t think I’m a member of ALEC, and no one sent me an ALEC bill,” Geymann said.

In the course of researching his bill, he said he found similar legislation in Utah and Oklahoma.

“We drafted the first bill in its original form here in Baton Rouge. And then people started coming to the table,” he added. “The more attorneys you get involved, then they start going out and looking at other legislation. So at some point an amendment may have had language from an Oklahoma bill, because they may have thought this language works better.”

But he stressed that his bill “is specifically drafted in a way that we think is good for us here in Louisiana.”

‘Somebody’s going to be left holding the bag’

There is indeed one major distinction between the Louisiana law and those passed in other Republican states: language that makes clear the coastal lawsuits will not be affected.

But a side-by-side comparison shows that Geymann’s bill reproduced specific language from Oklahoma’s law, word-for-word. The two measures use the same wording to define what they cover: “any cause of action for fraud, misrepresentation, deception, or failure to warn.” The bill’s wording also closely mirrors laws passed in Iowa and Utah. 

ProPublica reported in April that the push behind these bills is tied to a constellation of conservative groups that are linked to Leonard Leo, a conservative legal activist.

Keith Hall, a law professor at Louisiana State University, said the law’s conservative advocates view the climate lawsuits as “a fundamentally improper use of the courts” — that the plaintiffs are trying to shift national policy on climate change through their lawsuits. Conservatives say that should be left to Congress.

“Every single one of us uses products of the oil and gas industry every day of our lives, and we’ll continue to do so for quite some time,” he said. “If that has secondary impacts that we want to address, the best way to do that may be through legislation and regulation.”

Mark Davis, a Tulane professor of environmental law, pushed back on industry’s argument that the law is not intended to detract from “legitimate cases for real damages.”

“I think that’s exactly the intention,” he said. “Somebody’s going to be left holding the bag, and the real question is: Should it be the people who cause the problem, or should it be the people who’ve been injured? This bill presumes that it should be the people who are injured.”