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Tag: oil Louisiana nutria US Supreme Court
The case, Chevron USA Inc. v. Plaquemines Parish, La., focused on a narrow question: whether the oil companies could remove cases over environmental damage from state to federal court. But the case has been closely watched by litigants in other climate lawsuits because state courts are generally thought to be more receptive to people who sue over damages caused by climate change, including climate activists and state officials.
Justice Thomas explained that the oil company had cleared the bar required to move the case into federal court because the lawsuit dealt with oil production in Louisiana dating back to World War II, when Chevron refined crude oil into aviation gasoline for the U.S. military.
He wrote that Chevron had shown that its wartime production of crude oil related to its wartime aviation-gasoline refining for the military, a federal priority.
Louisiana has lost about 2,000 square miles of land to coastal erosion since the 1930s — a land mass about the size of Delaware.
Plaquemines Parish, the state’s southernmost parish, juts into the water where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico. The parish, which is crisscrossed with oil and gas canals, has already lost nearly half of its size in the last century as sea levels rise because of climate change. The parish has also become more vulnerable to storms, in part because levees built to shield New Orleans from flooding also deprive the delicate coastal ecosystem of fresh water and sediment. Canals that aid in oil and gas production have also weakened the ecosystem, experts have said.
One may want to explore the relationship between nutria and tabasco sauce, and between those and Louisiana coastal erosion. I posted the video of this story on the blog last night, before this story broke in The New York Times today.
