Louisiana has lost over 2,000 square miles of coastal land since the 1930s, an area the size of Delaware. Wetlands continue to disappear at an alarming rate, threatening communities, infrastructure, and one of America’s most productive fisheries. Since 2013, coastal parishes have filed 42 lawsuits seeking billions in damages, alleging that oil and gas activities conducted decades ago, before Louisiana’s coastal management law took effect, contributed to that loss. Last April, a jury ordered Chevron to pay $745 million in the first case to reach trial. The Supreme Court is now weighing whether the companies can invoke their World War II-era federal contracts to move the litigation out of Louisiana’s state courts.

The coastal crisis is real, and stopping land loss requires urgent action. But retroactive litigation is the wrong tool. These lawsuits assign responsibility with more certainty than the science can support, expose Louisiana’s energy economy to major legal risk, and cannot replace the sustained public investment coastal restoration actually requires.

The Cases Oversimplify a Complex Problem

The parishes are suing under Louisiana’s 1978 coastal management law, targeting oil and gas activity that occurred mostly from the 1940s through the 1970s, before the law took effect in 1980. Some of the earliest operations took place during World War II, when companies expanded production under federal wartime directives. They dredged thousands of miles of canals through wetlands, discharged byproducts of oil extraction, and left behind aging infrastructure.

Chevron and other defendants argue that the law’s grandfather clause shields pre-1980 activity from liability. The parishes respond that those operations were not “lawfully commenced” because companies failed to follow prudent industry practices, including restoring canals and managing waste properly. The lawsuits seek proportional damages by assigning each company a share of the loss in specific areas, even though the science cannot pinpoint blame with that level of precision.

Ask coastal scientists what is driving Louisiana’s land loss, and the answer is not singular. Researchers point to a range of causes, including reduced sediment from the Mississippi River, natural subsidence, sea-level rise, hurricanes, and destructive navigation projects, including the levee system that cut the river off from its delta. The result is a crisis driven not by a single force, but by decades of overlapping human and natural pressures.

Oil and gas canals likely contributed to erosion. Some studies have found a connection between drilling activity and wetland loss, and one scientific review concluded that oil and gas development had a significant impact. But the same review acknowledged that it is probably impossible to assign precise weight to each contributing factor. If scientists cannot confidently isolate the role of one driver, it becomes even harder to attribute a precise share of damage to a single company in a specific place.

Likewise, legal scholar Richard Epstein argues not only that Louisiana’s coastal loss has many causes, but also that pollution is not itself a demonstrated cause of the large-scale erosion at issue in these cases. He notes that “independent experts had documented the complex and multifaceted causes of the Delta’s decline…. Yet in this case, the Louisiana jury concluded that 25 percent of the losses were attributable to a narrow set of oil and gas activities whose alleged scale was far too limited to explain the devastation.”

A Better Path Already Exists

Even if the lawsuits’ causation theory were correct, retroactive litigation would still be poor environmental policy. These cases apply modern expectations to conduct from 50 to 80 years ago, including activity that was lawful at the time or occurred before coastal regulation existed. Louisiana had no coastal permitting system before 1980. For decades, state and local governments not only allowed coastal oil and gas development, but were happy to collect the tax revenue it generated.

Now, Louisiana’s Attorney General has entered joint prosecution agreements with the parishes against the companies whose activities it allowed and benefited from. That kind of retroactive liability has predictable consequences. Punishing activity that was once publicly sanctioned signals that Louisiana’s regulatory framework cannot be relied on and discourages future energy investment. Pelican Institute research suggests those effects may already be visible, with Louisiana’s GDP share declining since the lawsuits began, drilling in state waters falling, and energy employment dropping even as production in federal waters increased.

Meanwhile, Louisiana already has a better model: its science-based coastal master plan, updated every six years by law and built through nearly two decades of bipartisan work by scientists, engineers, community members, and public officials. The 2023 plan uses computer modeling to evaluate potential projects and prioritizes those with the greatest potential to build land cost-effectively, including large sediment diversions that reconnect the Mississippi River to its delta.

That approach involves real tradeoffs, and critics have raised valid concerns about costs, politics, and impacts on fishing and oyster grounds. But those debates are inevitable in any large-scale restoration effort. The master plan offers a more credible example of science-driven, publicly accountable coastal management than retroactive litigation, which risks punishing companies that support jobs and tax revenue in Louisiana.

The Stakes Ahead

Louisiana’s coastal crisis is real, urgent, and solvable, but it will not be solved in court. The legal fight is far from over. A Supreme Court ruling in the coming months could reshape the landscape. A decision for the companies could unravel the $745 million Plaquemines verdict, while a decision for the parishes could accelerate trials in more than 40 pending cases. Either way, Louisiana likely faces years of uncertainty and litigation.

Whatever the verdict, the coast will still need long-term public investment and the political will to carry out the restoration strategy Louisiana has already built. Before the consequences of retroactive litigation become harder to undo, the state should reconsider whether the tool it is using matches the problem it needs to solve.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of C3.