Bad ruling doesn't slow LA LNG export growth

Even an activist rogue elected state judge won’t be able to slow the momentum liquified natural gas transport and export has established in Louisiana, reaping a windfall to Louisiana’s economy.

Last month, independent 38^th District Judge Penelope Richard ruled in favor of two of three claims made by three leftist environmentalist special interest groups. Richard previously had served as a public defender before election to the court as a Democrat, but more recently ran as an independent as Cameron Parish voter registrants signing up as Republicans began to become the district’s plurality.

In buying claims that the state (and by implication the federal government, which approved of the environmental impact statement earlier this year) ignored catastrophic anthropogenic global warming as a factor in issuing a permit, she wholly created new law using an absurdly expansionist view of the state Constitution that obligates the state to consider CAGW in permitting, and echoed that approach in alleging the state didn’t consider “environmental justice” as a factor – even though months earlier the Environmental Protection Agency repudiated the entire concept in its enforcement actions.

LA ratepayers must not pay for Meta CAGW fantasy

What can go wrong? It turns out that even as Meta boosts its data center investment in northeast Louisiana, for residents there may be higher electricity rates and fewer police officers around.

Almost a year ago, Meta announced land deals aimed at plunking down a center in Richland Parish. Since then, it has bought almost as much land again and raised its cost estimate for the project, known as Hyperion (in the original Greek, “he who watches over”), from $10 billion to $27 billion.

As part of the arrangement, Meta pledged to draw a significant portion of its power from renewable sources, perhaps eventually as much as five gigawatts from all sources after starting out needing about one GW. Five GW would power over a million homes.

CCS future, not past, relevant to LA Senate race

Republican Senate candidates trying to differentiate themselves in a field where daylight barely shines among them on issue preferences should stop playing “he said/she said” and instead concentrate on telling voters what they will do on the issue of carbon capture and sequestration.

In a battle largely played out in gatherings and on social media, Treas. John Fleming and state Sen. Blake Miguez supporters have taken to trading accusations about whether each is against CCS and when. Fleming indirectly started it when some months ago he began proclaiming that he was the only candidate not to have voted for expanding CCS at some point in his legislative career.

That hit both Miguez and, although perhaps not intended since she didn’t enter the race until recently, state Rep. Julie Emerson where they live. Since 2020, with both being members of the Legislature throughout, several matters have come through that regulate CCS in some fashion, sometimes expansionary, sometimes restrictive, that scarcely any legislator ever voted against. As late as 2024 both were voting in favor of bills expanding the scope of CCS.

While neither publicly have addressed the controversy, supporters of Miguez’s have been by trying to shoot the messenger. They claim, using a trail of web material, that not only did Fleming have a pro-expansion CCS vote while a member of the U.S. House of Representatives but also his opposition to CCS only became public when he began touting his line about CCS votes cast. They also assert that back when these votes were taken too little was known about CCS and its safety concerns and need to dislodge private property rights to hold legislators accountable for these in the present.

That’s a weak argument, akin to ignorance of the law being an excuse to break it, and could be applied as well to Fleming’s supposed 2015 vote on an omnibus energy bill where the section in question only in the absolutely vaguest sense could be read as an endorsement of CCS – it instructed the federal government that it could shovel more funds to CCS research if an evaluated project seemed promising. Keep in mind that there’s nothing wrong in conducting CCS research, or even in having CCS as long as it has adequate safety measures attached, buy in from local governments, and that government isn’t subsidizing it.

A recent executive order by GOP Gov. Jeff Landry touched many of these bases but could not address the single biggest failing attendant to CCS: federal government tax policy favoring, to taxpayer detriment, the highly uneconomical practice. Outside of enhanced oil recovery, there’s no use for captured and stored carbon at present that pays for itself.

It’s done in most cases only because of a lucrative tax credit known as Section 45Q. So, the relevant issue for the campaign is preference regarding the retention of that credit, regardless of when opposition really began or whether everybody was asleep at the wheel.

Fleming has publicly spoken about it, saying it should be repealed. We also reasonably can infer that the remaining major candidate, Republican Public Service Commissioner Eric Skrmetta, even if he has yet specifically to address publicly the issue, would be against it since he is on the record in a public forum, a year prior to launching his Senate bid, calling CCS part of  a “scam.”

So, let’s hear from Miguez and Emerson about 45Q credits. And if they pledge to try to dump them, then voters can take note that only GOP incumbent Bill Cassidy, to the chagrin of state voters, among quality candidates shows any genuine backing of CCS, giving them another reason to toss him out of office in favor of any of the Republican front runners.

LA case may moot recent Democrat election gains

Recent election results that cheered Democrats may prove short-lived, if not possibly reversed, when the U.S. Supreme Court rules on a Louisiana case that will affect its electoral maps on multiple levels.

The Bayou State now waits upon the Court’s decision in Callais v. Louisiana to determine whether race will be allowed to be used as a proxy for partisan goals. A decision to rein that in and to provide new, likely more restrictive, parameters for when racial categories can become relevant and legal in drawing district boundaries would give the state a chance to revert back from a map gerrymandered to produce two majority-minority districts almost guaranteeing two of six seats won by Democrats to one where only one such seat exists and Republicans likely would win five of six seats in a state where a third of voters are black.

The whole country watches for this, especially the handful of states where such a decision could lead to new reapportionment options. One such is California, which like Louisiana over the past few decades has had an electorate become increasingly skewed towards one party, but in the opposite direction.

LSU Board chooses wisely new governance, leaders

The Louisiana State University Board of Supervisors delivered a welcome surprise this week with the hiring of a new system president paired with a reorganization that stands to make the delivery of education by the system’s institutions more relevant and vital to improving the state’s quality of life.

The Board hired McNeese State University’s current president Wade Rousse to lead the system. But instead of also making him chancellor of the Baton Rouge campus additionally, it hired a late applicant, University of Alabama Provost James Dalton, to serve as LSUA&M’s leader, returning the governance structure to what it had been a dozen years ago.

Perhaps there was a plan beyond what appears to be a last-minute decision to spit the jobs had they once had been. It isn’t unusual for a search firm to solicit candidates, but apparently after the deadline had closed when Dalton wasn’t even initially a semi-finalist for the combined post is an atypical process. Regardless of the provenance, it’s a wise move.

BC to weigh new fee to stem white elephant red ink

If at first you don’t succeed, knock seven dollars off the price and call it something different to stem the red ink from the white elephant known now as the Brookshire Grocery Arena.

Just over three years ago, ASM Global, the management company decided it would institute a $12 parking fee at Bossier City’s arena, where $2 would go to the company handling the parking through a cashless system and the other $10 would be split evenly between ASM for operations and the city for capital expenditures. As if to highlight the city’s acceptance of the deal, at the next City Council meeting discussion about taking $350,000 out of the 2017 LCDA Bond Fund to buy a new generator for the facility focused on how the new bounty would offset such costs, particularly as the arena has lost money since its inception 25 years ago, over $10 million cumulatively.

That idea went over like a lead balloon. Almost as suddenly as it had appeared it quickly disappeared. But the problem remained. Despite barely making money for only the third time in its history in 2024, not only does the facility continue to hemorrhage funds generally, but also this is on top of capital improvements being made. The 2022 dip into the 2017 LCDA bond fund actually came as part of a one-time effort to perform capital improvements. Over the past several years, over $15 million has gone to that purpose, with a typical budget of $250,000 each year reserved out of the Hotel/Motel Taxes Fund from occupancy and related sales taxes for this purpose.

Suit, recall latest challenges to Monroe's Ellis

It was take-your-shot at Monroe independent Mayor Friday Ellis last week, in the courts now and maybe later at the polls, early.

As previously threatened, the three Democrats on the City Council, plus local publisher Roosevelt Wright, filed suit against Ellis, as well as Republicans Gov. Jeff Landry and Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill, plus new Monroe fire chief Timothy Williams. This involves the selection of Williams by Landry for his post that a new state law allowed. Ellis had mentioned that the City Council, led by the Democrats, twice turned down (for conflicting reasons) Ellis nominees for it, including Williams, to GOP state Sen. Stewart Cathey, who then authored and had passed into law a bill giving the governor the power to appoint the official from qualifiers for cities about Monroe’s size (only Alexandria also could qualify) when conflict between a mayor and council dragged on for too long.

The suit goes all over the legal map, alleging both race-based claims prejudicial against blacks and violation of home rule provisions. To say the least it is a long shot in arguing just because a majority-black populated city didn’t have a black fire chief appointed that racial discrimination occurred, and in its claiming the state usurped home rule powers when in fact state law supersedes conflicting charter provisions.

Democrat session overreactions serve their agenda

The special session on pushing 2026 election dates back a month was done and dusted this past week after just a few days. But it seemed to last forever because of caterwauling by Democrats seeking to distort and obfuscate the issue, using false alarmism to shore up their deteriorating political position.

For the supermajority Republicans in the Legislature and GOP Gov. Jeff Landry, it was all pro forma: as the U.S. Supreme Court looks extraordinarily likely to declare invalid the current congressional map – one that Landry prodded the Legislature to accept in a way that favored Democrats because of a court declaration (then still in dispute and not close to being resolved) that the previous version was unconstitutional – the majority wanted to buy more time to draw a new and constitutional map. That’s all it did.

But legislative Democrats disingenuously tried to equate new election dates with something beyond the state merely giving itself the best chance to be in constitutional compliance, in asserting changing dates meant that the Republican majority was trying to bring representational matters back to the point they had been prior to the current map – having gone from one of six districts being majority-minority to two, that this would be junked in reversion to a map with just one M/M district or even zero. This cynically conflated the issue of constitutional compliance with reapportionment politics: the former stands independently of the latter, even if the latter depends upon the presence of the former.

Like herpes, BC water scare stories reappear

Like herpes, celebrity scare artist Erin Brockovich is back to plague Bossier City with her money-generating brand of alarmism for alarmism’s sake.

Seven years ago, Brockovich – who launched a career in environmentalist quackery when she helped to con a huge lawsuit settlement payout from a California utility using faulty scientific conclusions and reasoning that brought her a hit movie deal – drummed up negativity about Bossier City’s water system in the wake of the discovery that naegleria fowleri, popularly known as the brain-eating amoeba, had infiltrated a line outside the city system but connected to it. The city commenced with a lengthy chlorine flush to negate that, but in the interim Brockovich and a colleague moaned about the allegedly dangerousness and ineffectiveness of it all, even though scientific evidence said otherwise.

Now she’s back, griping again about chlorine flushes after somehow spotting word that city water customers were complaining about the smell. That odor is a byproduct of when pure chlorine, rather than its related chloramine, comes into contact with organic compounds and produced byproducts of trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids.

N.O. takes pass on chance to adopt sane policy

At the start of this week, Republican Treasurer John Fleming had no idea that his schedule would fill up so suddenly – only to watch it empty out quickly because New Orleans elected officials can’t face disempowerment caused by their past policy sins.

Fleming as treasurer sits on the somewhat-known State Bond Commission, as chairman. It meets regularly to approve of requests by state and local governments to authorize and sell bonds and to schedule ballot propositions. But it received an unusual request earlier this week.

New Orleans came to it asking to sell $125 million in short-term revenue bonds, in response to a “surprise” $160 million deficit. The SBC agreed to meet on the matter, but it became clear that its members weren’t at all jacked about the idea, pointing to lax fiscal administration by the city.