At a courthouse in lower Plaquemines Parish near Louisiana’s fading coastline, a landmark trial that could force oil and gas companies to pay billions for wetlands restoration is nearing its verdict. 

For the lawyers who championed the lawsuit, getting to that courthouse took over a decade. 

The trial in Pointe à la Hache is the culmination of a legal saga, part of the only effort still underway to get the oil and gas companies to pay for efforts to restore Louisiana’s coastal wetlands. Closing arguments are scheduled for Thursday. 

The lawsuit is the first to make it to trial among 42 similar cases that coastal parishes filed against oil companies starting in 2013, each of which alleges that they failed to comply with state permitting regulations. Law firm Talbot, Carmouche, and Marcello is representing the local governments in the litigation, which alleges that oil companies failed to abide by coastal regulations and contributed to wetlands loss.

Plaquemines Parish and its lead attorney, John Carmouche, are asking the jury to award nearly $3 billion in damages in the case. Taken together, the dozens of cases could force companies to pay tens of billions in damages, which would, by law, have to be used to restore coastal wetlands. 

The cases could also lead to hefty payouts for the lawyers involved. 

In the 12 years since the litigation was filed, the Plaquemines lawsuit has survived three attempts by oil and gas companies to send the litigation to federal court — a venue that the companies saw as favorable to them and where similar litigation has died. Legislators in Baton Rouge have introduced bills to try to kill the lawsuits.

But Carmouche and his team have bobbed and weaved their way to trial. And if Carmouche wins, a jury could for the first time award mammoth damages from industry to the state to address coastal land loss.

During his opening statement before the jury, Carmouche attempted to present the case in simple terms: “If somebody causes harm, fix it,” he said. “Clean up your mess.”

Chevron noted in a statement that it was being sued over oil and gas activity conducted by Texaco, which Chevron acquired in 2001, under a 1980 law. It argues that the law was never meant to apply to oil and gas activities that took place before the statute went into effect. The companies also say that the cases belong in federal court because some of the oil and gas activity at issue was conducted under federal guidance, part of the World War II effort. 

“The parish and the state should cease their state court efforts to destroy the oil and gas sector in Louisiana,” said Bill Turene, a spokesperson for Chevron. Industry advocates have argued that the lawsuits could have a “chilling” effect on oil and gas production in Louisiana. 

While the levees lining the Mississippi River set the state’s land loss crisis in motion, the thousands of miles of canals dug through marsh by oil and gas companies have been major contributors. The extraction of oil and gas has also exacerbated subsidence along the coast.

The scale of the problem is enormous, with Louisiana having lost land the size of Delaware over the last century. The state’s efforts to address it are costing many billions of dollars.  

While it took Carmouche and his team a decade to get to trial, he and his team drew on efforts that stretch back decades. 

‘Legacy lawsuits’

In May of 1991, Michael Veron, an attorney in Lake Charles, got a call from his cousin, Billy Corbello, who told Veron that Shell Oil’s lease on the property, originally signed in 1929, was due to expire. For years, Shell had drilled for oil on property owned by Veron and Corbello’s family. 

The agreement the company had struck with their grandfather stipulated that the company was responsible for returning the property to its initial condition when the lease was up.

Veron’s argument, like Carmouche’s, was simple: The oil company made a mess and didn’t clean it up. On Veron’s family property, he found buried oil drums, and a gas-dispensing pump emblazoned with the Shell logo on the property. The soil was laden with carcinogenic chemicals, his witnesses would testify at trial. And years after the problems were brought to the company’s attention, Shell had taken no steps to fix things, Veron argued.

But nor had the state forced them to. In Veron’s lawsuit, as in Carmouche’s, central pillars of the oil companies’ defense are that the alleged violations took place years ago, petroleum production was vital to the nation and the potential risks were not understood. Why make them pay up now, years later?

“Industry isn’t evil,” Veron said in an interview, “They’re human. And human nature is that I’m not going to do something that costs me extra money if nobody’s making me do it.”

Veron won his case at trial. Shell paid $76 million in damages in 2003.

The case was one of the first of the “legacy lawsuits,” so called because they had to do with pollution left on private landowners’ property during oil’s heyday in Louisiana, years prior to the filing of any lawsuit.

“Everybody got word” of the win against an oil company, Veron said, a rare feat in Louisiana. Among the lawyers who took notice were partners at Talbot, Carmouche, and Marcello. 

Veron would go on to work with a team of attorneys on the landmark South Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East’s oil and gas damages lawsuit, which sought to hold companies accountable for damaging wetlands in South Louisiana. Talbot, Carmouche, and Marcello, meanwhile, came up with their own legal theory about how to hold oil and gas companies to account: They would represent coastal parishes.  

Not incidentally, the firm also stood to make a lot of money if the lawsuits went their way. 

Lawsuits filed

Beginning in 2013, six coastal parishes filed 42 lawsuits, backed by Carmouche’s law firm, each lawsuit focused on state-issued permits.

In the case that’s now at trial, Plaquemines Parish is accusing Texaco, which Chevron bought in 2001, of having used “unlined waste pits” to dispose of toxic oil and gas byproducts in an area near Bayou Gentilly. When regulations came into play in 1980 that put tighter restrictions on oil and gas activity in the state’s coastal areas, the lawsuits allege that oil and gas companies did not comply. 

The lawsuit alleges that “defendants have failed to clear, revegetate, detoxify … areas affected by their operations and activities,” as required by law. 

Working in the parish courts may give Carmouche a home turf advantage given the jury pool is from the area. 

While the lawsuits wound their way through the courts, one company, Freeport McMoRan, settled for $100 million. Days before what would have been the first trial in Cameron Parish, the companies and local government settled in that case, too.

But the lawsuit that Veron had been working on separately, on behalf of the New Orleans Flood Protection Authority-East, was quashed. A federal judge dismissed it, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take it up on appeal. 

Legislative squabbles

Oil and gas companies didn’t just try to kill the lawsuits in the courts. 

During a 2016 Louisiana House Committee on Natural Resources hearing, there was near unanimous outcry from Republican legislators against the lawsuits. Rep. Blake Miguez, R-Erath, said that the state, by intervening in the case on behalf of the plaintiffs, was “discriminating against the oil industry.”

In 2020, the state introduced a bill that would have barred parishes from suing companies for violating the conditions of coastal zone drilling permits — the central claim in Carmouche’s lawsuits. The bill ultimately died.

John Barry, a historian and former board member of the South Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East who spearheaded that agency’s lawsuit, described legislative efforts to kill the efforts as a “recurring theme” in the 2010s.

“It was a continuation of the efforts to kill the legacy lawsuits,” he said. “And ours for that matter.” 

Through three successive governors, Carmouche and his team managed to win support for their cause. Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, did not outright oppose the parish lawsuits, though he was outspoken against the levee authority’s lawsuit out of New Orleans. Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, openly supported them.

Gov. Jeff Landry, in his previous role as attorney general, threatened to take over the litigation from Carmouche. But as governor, Landry has had Carmouche’s back.

Edwards and Landry have cited the need to address coastal land loss. Carmouche’s firm has also long been politically active, contributing $2 million to help Edwards get elected as well as at least $310,000 to Landry’s campaign and a PAC that supported it. 

The oil companies have made their own political donations. Since 2013, when the lawsuits were first filed, Chevron has donated at least $2 million to Louisiana politicians, according to state data. 

Without damages from these lawsuits, Barry argues, the cost of restoring the state’s eroding coastline will fall on taxpayers’ shoulders. The price tag on the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority’s plan to restore parts of the coast: $50 billion over 50 years — widely acknowledged as an underestimate since it doesn’t take inflation into account.

“This is clearly the best shot in years that we’ve had to have oil companies meet their responsibility, which they should be doing voluntarily,” Barry said. “It’s in their own interests. It protects their own infrastructure.”