“Just south of Oil City, where Louisiana representative Danny McCormick is from, is the predominantly Black city of Shreveport. Residents there breathe some of the most toxic air in the country. Oil refineries owned by UOP and Calumet contribute to the town’s toxic emissions, according to the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory,” reports The Guardian. “McCormick, a Republican, introduced a bill at the Louisiana capitol last week that would protect oil companies and not residents in his district who have to breathe in that air. The bill would establish Louisiana as a “fossil fuel sanctuary state” and ban local and state employees from enforcing federal laws and regulations that negatively impact petrochemical companies.”

“The idea for the bill, McCormick said, came about after President Joe Biden began putting new restrictions on oil and gas companies, including a pause on new oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters. “Look at what they did to the coal industry,” he said at a Louisiana house committee hearing. “We already know what the game plan is. They already picked off coal. Now they’re going after oil and gas.”

“The bill – which is unlikely to move forward in its current state because of legality concerns – is among several bills introduced at the Louisiana legislature this session that would likely reduce regulation of oil and gas companies in the state. Lawmakers say that deregulation is necessary to preserve tax revenues generated by oil and gas companies and to stop further job losses. A separate bill introduced by McCormick would redefine gas pipelines from modes of transportation to facilities, in order to prevent Louisiana state police from fining pipeline companies for failing to immediately report gas leaks.”

The situation in Louisiana highlights how in the United States, reliance on fossil fuel development is often linked to a wholesale failure to educate workers or develop new technologies.  Although conservative politicians love to make bold promises that new fossil fuel projects will deliver economic prosperity, the areas of the country that have traditionally relied most heavily on coal and petroleum extraction to grow their economies are also last in the country in terms education and key quality of life metrics. If the promises of conservative politicians were true, then over a century of financial growth from coal extraction should have turned the Appalachian Mountain regions of Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia into areas of incredible prosperity.  Instead, those areas are some of the most impoverished in the country. Although Louisiana has had decades of tax revenues that could have been put towards educating their work-force and diversifying their economy, the state typically ranks in the bottom ten percent of states for quality of public education. If Louisiana lawmakers were smart, they’d be focusing on the fact that they’re in the American sun-belt and retraining petroleum workers to become solar panel and wind turbine installers.  Instead they are plotting strategies to defy Federal regulations to try to pay fealty to a dying technology.