Believers in the faith-based, evidence-free theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming continue to try to make life worse especially for the poor and threatens national security through sitzkrieg tactics, picking up a judicial ally for an agenda that generally harms Louisianans even more.
It all began several years ago when political, technological, and economic conditions made the time right for America to export liquified natural gas. This started a process that led to construction and operation of LNG terminals that helped to send a lower-cost energy source to places around the world to help particularly people in poorer parts of the world, to assist allies in accessing energy instead of buying from more hostile states, and to provide economic expansion for Americans.
Louisiana ended up a big beneficiary of this, with construction of facilities on the state’s southwestern coast that provided jobs there and upstream where the gas is collected and piped south. In just a few short years now with America becoming the world’s largest LNG exporter, markets continue to favor expansion of this.
Naturally, ideologues and special interests wedded to CAGW saw this as problematic. Until recently, their primary strategy focused on instigating political pressure to curb LNG exportation, which paid off earlier this year when the Democrat Pres. Joe Biden Administration declared a moratorium on approvals of new exporting capacity. This meant that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would not grant approval, and if exporting would happen to countries not part of a free trade agreement with the U.S. nor could an exporter net the needed approval from the Department of Energy.
Just as naturally, this was a blatantly illegal assertion of presidential power, as a Louisiana Western District Court ruled this summer, so FERC resumed hearings and ruled favorably on two Louisiana LNG projects, loaded with stipulations to protect the environment. This led to a shift in tactics where the opposition escalated efforts to throw whatever they could at the wall and hope it stuck.
Something did. This summer, in two separate decisions dealing with a case in Louisiana and one in Texas, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has remanded in part these decisions back to FERC (appeals for many agency administrative decisions go to this, the twelfth circuit court in America’s judicial system). The Court has a majority of Democrat appointees and in each case the three-judge panels selected were all such appointees.
Which explains the raw judicial activism evident behind the decisions. In both, the panel read into the law its own dominant ideology by declaring FERC hadn’t taken an alarmist approach to calculating environmental costs and by not including the chimerical concept of “environmental justice” in its analysis.
Now groups are trying to score a trifecta with another such move after another FERC approval, to expand Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass operations with an additional facility. This full-court press on these cases is because most of the groups argue these facilities would increase considerably the amount of carbon and methane emitted due to extraction, pipeline transport, liquification, and transport by ship, and to these Chicken Littles this creates an existential problem, although there’s no scientifically credible evidence that such emissions increases would have a significant impact on climate.
However, there is somewhat of an existential threat to one set of interests complaining – coastal fishers. The activity brought on by the facilities would alter their abilities to extract from the sea, possibly significantly reducing that and with a chance of environmental despoilment if something goes wrong.
Any time government action takes away a potential benefit from a private sector grouping to favor another that does necessitate some form of compensation. But it is madness to halt something that will lead to economic development at home and a better quality of life worldwide plus increase security for the U.S. and its allies just so fishing can continue entirely unmolested; a balancing of interests to achieve the optimal aggregate solution is the hallmark of superior policy-making.
If the DC Court on this case again goes beyond statute in its ruling, and resistance occurs after FERC reissues approvals in all of these cases, it will be time to take these to the Supreme Court to make the correct decision. Meanwhile, Louisiana suffers as all this lawfare at every conceivable juncture only delays the net positive benefits that increased LNG exports bring.
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