Can't win for Loozing

Here's an interesting study in contrasting perspective. In this week's Gambit, Clancy Dubos wraps up the legislative session listing an unexpected entity among "Da Loozas"

2. Big Oil and the Chemical Association — For decades, these guys have had their way with lawmakers, but this year they failed to recognize that BP changed everything. They seriously over-reached on a bill to gut the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, and they got their butts kicked on Sen. Danny Martiny's bill to ban chemical companies and big business from forcing onerous "hold harmless" agreements on their subcontractors and truckers. Over Big Oil & Chemical's objections, Jindal signed Martiny's bill last week.

Meanwhile (via Timshel) we find this alternate description from Mother Jones of the sway Oil and Gas still holds over State Legislature.

So far, the BP spill has not provided environmentalists with new leverage in Baton Rouge. During their most recent session, Louisiana legislators also considered bills that would have allowed plaintiffs to seek punitive damages for injuries related to "the drilling, equipping, operating, or producing of an oil or gas well" and would have taxed oil processing to fund coastal restoration; both failed. As the legislature adjourned, Darrell Hunt, a lobbyist for the Louisiana Sierra Club, lamented that it had not passed a single bill to tighten controls on oil and gas companies since the spill. "If this situation in the Gulf didn't change the minds of people and get them to vote for those bills," Hunt laments, "I don't know what would."

Yet Hunt did not lobby for the punitive damages bill, or the tax on oil companies, or the contingency bill. "It would have been counterproductive," he says. "The Sierra Club is so goddamn weak in Louisiana that any statement of support on those bills would have been just meaningless." Instead, he spent much of the most recent legislative session fending off a bill, promoted by chemical companies, that would have dismantled Tulane University Law School's Environmental Law Clinic, which has a long record of suing the state's anemic environmental regulators to enforce the law.

So was Big Oil really Da Looza in this session? Or did it very nearly get everything it wanted DESPITE the concurrent fact of the most horrific environmental disaster in the history of the industry? Depends on whether your glass is half-full of petroleum or half-full of Corexit, I guess.