Even in Louisiana, where fossil fuels have long been the dominant energy source, utilities and industrial power users continue to place more emphasis on tapping a renewable power supply — whether forced to do so by regulators or driven by environmental reasons. 

The Legislature has been asked to consider policy to pave the way for alternative energy, which has led to some resistance from lawmakers with deep ties to oil and gas. While legislation for wind energy infrastructure has been embraced, thanks to its overlap with offshore exploration, solar energy hasn’t enjoyed the same warm welcome.  

This was evident during a joint meeting Thursday of the House committees on Agriculture and Natural Resources on solar energy development. Summoned through a study resolution approved earlier this year, the hearing was rife with misinformation, unsubstantiated statements and contradictory data.

The Illuminator researched some of the most noteworthy claims made at the hearing to determine their accuracy and provide factual evidence to support or refute them.

Claim: Federal subsidies for renewable energy have created an unlevel playing field in favor of the renewable energy industry, according to Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry Commissioner Mike Strain. 

Fact check: Mostly false and misleading. While it is true that direct federal subsidies for renewables are currently greater than those for conventional energy sources nationwide, it is not the case for Louisiana and has only recently become the case in many other states. 

Louisiana has received $156 million in federal solar subsidies under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, the major source of federal clean energy funding. This amount is small compared with the roughly $1.6 billion in state tax subsidies that Louisiana hands out to the oil and gas industry each year, according to Louisiana Department of Revenue data. 

That amount doesn’t include fossil fuel subsidies from the state’s most lucrative incentive, the Industrial Tax Exemption Program.   

Nationwide, about 53% of federal energy subsidies were associated with renewables, including biofuels, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. About a third of that share, or roughly $7.5 billion, has gone to solar. That includes direct payments such as grants and agency spending, as well as indirect incentives such as loans and tax breaks. 

Federal subsidies for conventional energy sources — such as coal, nuclear power, natural gas and petroleum liquids — have reached about $5.3 billion per year. However, the natural gas industry has received the lion’s share in direct payment subsidies, amounting to $103 million in 2022 compared to $27 million for the solar industry, according to federal data.

Claim: Strain said some banks and activists have forced large companies to purchase expensive renewable energy by pressuring corporate board members to adopt environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies. Those purchases, he claimed, turned out to be poor investments because conventional fossil fuels are cheaper. Corporate boards are now reversing their ESG policies after realizing they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to not waste money on politically motivated initiatives, Strain said. 

Fact check: Partially true but misleading. Activist shareholders have managed to influence some companies’ investment priorities, and investment banks have created ESG funds that bundle stocks from companies that, for example, have smaller impacts on the environment or greater workforce diversity.  

However, many ESG funds and policies, for the large part, are branding opportunities to try to attract new customers by letting them choose investments that align with their personal values.  Most of the political pressure and legislation on this issue came from conservatives after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said it would require companies to disclose whether climate change poses a risk to their long-term financial positions. 

The Illuminator could not confirm any individual companies have lost money on renewable energy investment. 

Strain referred to John Deere as a recent example, but there have been no reports of the company losing money related to ESG policies. John Deere made headlines when it removed “socially-motivated messages” within its employee training manuals following targeted backlash from conservatives. Some companies have continued their core commitment to ESG and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, but some have simply dropped the acronyms or renamed the policies. 

Claim: The wind and solar industries would effectively collapse if not for federal subsidies because renewable energy costs much more than fossil fuels. 

Fact check: False. Rep. Danny McCormick, R-Oil City, made such claims throughout the meeting. He refused to accept testimony that refuted them from one of the state’s leading economists on the subject, Greg Upton, director of LSU’s Center for Energy Studies, who said utility-scale solar is the cheapest form of energy even without federal subsidies. 

“That’s contrary to everything everybody else said in the world,” McCormick said, adding that Upton’s department receives funding from the solar industry and accused him of having a financial incentive to reach certain conclusions.

Upton cited other research that’s reached the same conclusions and said the center receives a lot of money from oil and gas companies, too. 

It’s unclear where McCormick got his information as he didn’t mention a source, but news of renewable energy’s cost competitiveness is relatively old. Average power purchase agreement prices for solar supplanted the cost of burning fuel in existing natural gas units nearly a decade ago, according to a 2023 study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  

Onshore wind began undercutting all fossil fuels by significant margins in 2014. Utility-scale solar joined wind at the top of the affordability rankings a few years later, and they remain nearly tied with each other for being the cheapest forms of electricity — 33% lower than natural gas — even without government subsidies, according to a 2024 study by the financial firm Lazard.

Claim: Louisiana utilities could generate cheaper electricity using natural gas, but it’s being shipped overseas. As a result, utility companies are forced to buy renewable energy.

Fact check: False. McCormick asked about this after Upton tried explaining how oil and gas markets are global and largely unaffected by domestic factors such as the increase of solar developments in Louisiana. Upton said solar electricity isn’t a direct competitor to oil and gas companies that make most of their money on the global market.

Utilities are not being forced to use renewable energy. Rep. Jerome Zeringue, R-Houma tried to clear up the confusion, explaining that utilities purchase the lowest cost wholesale electricity through the regional grid operator regardless of how it’s generated. When they’re purchasing renewable electricity, it’s simply because it’s the cheapest electricity available at that time and not because they’re being forced to do so, Zeringue said.

Claim: Solar’s use of land poses a risk to the state’s food supply, which is dwindling because people are eating more food than is produced. 

Fact check: Mostly misleading. Strain and others suggested solar could cause severe disruptions to farming, including sugar cane, by taking over a significant portion of the land being used for crops. 

“We’re consuming more food than we’re producing,” he said. 

Although some studies indicate the world could run out of food by as early as 2050, the problem is not the fault of the solar industry. Rather, it is primarily the result of unsustainable farming practices, wasteful eating habits and, to some extent, climate change.

Unsustainable farming practices such as overuse of fertilizers, intensive tilling and planting the same crop each year have caused severe soil degradation to the point of where land can no longer support plant life, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. 

But even when farms can produce enough food, Americans waste about 30-40% of it, data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show. 

Jim Simon, director of the American Sugar Cane League, testified that Louisiana’s sugar cane industry is fragile. The loss of a few thousand acres in a single area would lead to the closure of a mill, he said. When asked by lawmakers, he could not offer any data to suggest solar farms are displacing sugar cane fields. 

Simon’s organization announced last year that Louisiana sugar cane farmers had record-setting yields, producing the most sugar cane in the country. 

Upton said that even if Louisiana built enough solar farms to replace every other source of energy in the state — a virtually impossible scenario — those solar farms would still only take up a little over 1% of the state’s land.

A Louisiana woman who spoke at the Democratic National Convention about being denied miscarriage care in the wake of Louisiana’s abortion ban is criticizing Attorney General Liz Murrill and anti-abortion leaders for their reactions to her speech.

Kaitlyn Joshua was about 11 weeks pregnant when she started miscarrying in the fall of 2022, just a few months after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and triggered Louisiana’s near-total abortion ban. Joshua sought care at two separate hospitals — Woman’s Hospital in Baton Rouge and Baton Rouge General in Prairieville — and was turned away from both without treatment.

WWNO, NPR and KFF Health News first reported Joshua’s story in 2022. She has been sharing it routinely in the lead-up to the election in events across the country and on national television as she campaigns to elect a Democratic president to the White House. But her speech Monday night was the most high-profile and spawned a series of headlines in Louisiana and across the country.

After Joshua’s speech, Murrill posted on X that “Democrats have their facts wrong.”

“There is nothing in our bipartisan law that prohibits emergency care for someone having a miscarriage or any emergency situation during pregnancy. Nothing. Hard stop,” Murrill posted.

Murrill: ‘Democrats have their facts wrong’ on abortion ban exceptions

“In fact, doctors are legally required to care for a pregnant woman who suffers an emergent health crisis, whether that’s appendicitis or a miscarriage,” she continued.

News reports quote Murrill’s original post, which appears to have been edited, as stating that the law “was passed under Governor John Bel Edwards’ term.”

“It is so damaging, the fact that the Republican Party cannot own the fact that the reason why we’re in the predicament that we’re in as it relates to reproductive rights in Louisiana is 100% their fault,” Joshua told WWNO/WRKF in an interview.

“It is typical Republican behavior for them to denounce any possibility of having any accountability for their actions,” Joshua added, “them not wanting to look it in the face and see what it really looks like, what impact looks like when you pass laws that are harmful, especially what it looks like through the lens of Black maternal health.”

Women in Louisiana face some of the highest rates of maternal death and morbidity in the nation and Black women in the state are more than twice as likely to die as a result of their pregnancy as white women. One study from The Commonwealth Fund found that states with abortion restrictions are more likely to have fewer maternal health services and higher rates of deaths and morbidity. Research released earlier this year from Tulane University found that abortion restrictions are associated with an increased risk of maternal death.

Under Louisiana’s ban, doctors face up to 15 years in prison and $200,000 in fines for violating the law. It requires doctors to provide a diagnosis in a woman’s medical records along with proof from an ultrasound that a pregnancy “has ended or is in the unavoidable and untreatable process of ending due to spontaneous miscarriage.” Doctors have said that’s a high legal bar of proof that can make it difficult to act swiftly to treat miscarriages. In some miscarriage cases, a fetus can still have a faint heartbeat, which is what happened the first time Joshua sought care.

Earlier this year, a detailed report found multiple cases of women being turned away from hospitals while miscarrying. One doctor reported that hospital officials stopped a woman’s abortion while they debated whether her treatment was legal under Louisiana’s ban. The report found other dangerous changes to pregnancy care in Louisiana, including physicians giving women unnecessary and invasive C-sections to avoid even the appearance of providing an abortion.

Republican lawmakers killed bills in the last two legislative sessions that were aimed at easing the burdens and threats contained in the law for health care providers, including requiring solely a doctor’s diagnosis that a pregnancy is ending before providing care.

Who’s Kaitlyn Joshua, the Louisiana woman who spoke at the Democratic National Convention?

Lawmakers also rejected bills to add rape and incest exceptions to the law.

Joshua told WWNO/WRKF that the “logical thing” to do after two years of impacts on pregnancy care and maternal health would be to make changes to the law.

“You guys were very proud of the work that you did in 2022 to obliterate our rights around reproductive health care in our state,” Joshua said, referring to Republicans, including Murrill.

“And now you’re seeing it play out in real time, and it’s looking you in the face, and instead of you taking accountability for it, you want to kind of put it on someone else, like John Bel [Edwards].”

Louisiana’s ban was authored by Democratic lawmaker Katrina Jackson, passed by a Republican majority in the legislature, and signed by Edwards.

Before being elected attorney general, Murrill was Louisiana’s solicitor general, during which time she helped defend Louisiana’s abortion ban. She worked under then-Attorney General, now Gov. Jeff Landry. When state courts briefly halted Louisiana’s abortion ban in the summer of 2022, Landry threatened doctors with prosecution if they provided abortion care.

Louisiana Right to Life also released a statement Wednesday defending the state’s abortion ban and calling Joshua’s story an example of “gross misinterpretation” of the law by health care providers.

Communications director Sarah Zagorski said the responsibility for Joshua’s care lies with hospitals that misinterpreted the law, and that the law clearly allows for miscarriage treatment.

“Unfortunately, the DNC is utilizing a tragic story to elicit confusion and disapproval for pro-life laws,” Zagorski said in a statement. “They are not concealing their agenda, but proudly providing abortions at their own convention.”

Louisiana Right to Life also released statements from a New Orleans OBGYN who said she continues to treat miscarriages, and Tara Wicker, the director of Louisiana Black Advocates for Life.

“There is no denying Kaitlyn Joshua experienced inadequate healthcare in the community I love dearly. I also acknowledge there are systemic problems in our health system, which especially impacts women of color,” Wicker said. “However, these problems are not alleviated or solved by legal abortion.”

Joshua pushed back on Zagorski’s claim that the law clearly allows for miscarriage treatment and asked what relevance comments from a New Orleans OBGYN bore to her case.

In an Instagram post, Joshua said it was “alarming” to see Murrill comment on her case nearly two years after she first began telling her story.

“If Liz wanted to highlight the Black maternal health care crisis that we see in the state of Louisiana, she could have done that, but instead, she chose to use her power and her voice to obliterate someone’s story,” Joshua said.

Joshua said that she wanted people to know “what’s happening in our state of Louisiana, where women speak out and then they are pressured or threatened or get messages from an attorney general.”

She added that Murrill had not reached out to her personally, but said she would be “happy” to talk to Murrill about her experience “and we don’t need to hide behind social media or public statements.”

Murrill’s comments on X that “doctors are legally required to care for a pregnant woman who suffers an emergent health crisis” appears to refer to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, known as EMTALA, which requires hospitals that received Medicare or Medicaid funding to provide stabilizing treatment for all patients.

But her office has argued that EMTALA should not require emergency treatment for pregnant women if that treatment is banned by state law.

In 2022, the Biden administration sued Idaho in the wake of that state’s abortion ban — amid stories of women routinely being flown out of state to get care because of the ban. Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily allowed emergency abortions in Idaho.

Idaho had argued that state law takes precedence over EMTALA, meaning that the federal requirement for emergency medical treatment should not be extended to pregnancies in states with abortion bans. It also argued that a fertilized egg qualifies as a patient.

Murrill, as Louisiana’s attorney general, signed an amicus brief to the US Supreme Court along with 21 other states siding with Idaho and arguing that “EMTALA cannot be read to preempt state laws regulating medicine, including abortion restrictions.”

State Sen. Blake Miguez, R-New Iberia, is picking a fight with the University of Louisiana Lafayette over its new off-campus gun-free zones. He believes the designated areas could lead to a lawsuit that he foresees ending firearm restrictions entirely at all schools. 

Miguez is a competitive marksman who has made a name for himself in the Legislature by carrying bills to loosen gun restrictions. He’s taken issue with the university for declaring gun-free zones at a museum it operates in downtown Lafayette and at two hotels where it is housing students because its on-campus dorms are at capacity. 

The gun-free zone’s radius around the museum would make it a crime to carry a firearm in most of downtown. 

Miguez has asked Attorney General Liz Murrill to issue an opinion regarding the university’s position that the three sites be kept gun-free. 

In an interview Friday with conservative radio talk show host Moon Griffon, Miguez said ULL’s stance could spur gun rights advocates to file a lawsuit, which he speculated could result in Louisiana’s law prohibiting guns on or near school property being struck down as unconstitutional. 

The university’s announcement last week that its campus police would patrol and enforce a 1,000-foot gun-free school zone around the UL Lafayette Science Museum became a source of contention with the Acadiana senator, who believes it would be a violation of state law. 

“[Lafayette Consolidated Government and the University of Louisiana Lafayette] together are making a decision to violate citizens [sic] civil rights through resuming enforcement of their position that the Lafaytte [sic] Science Museum is ‘school property’ in order to accomplish their goal of making downtown Lafayette a gun free zone,” Miguez posted Friday on X, the platform previously known as Twitter. 

“To add insult to injury, ULL is now also declaring contracted private hotels used for student housing as ‘school property’ to trigger more gun free zones across Lafayette Parish,” Miguez added. 

Miguez did not respond to a request for comment for this report. 

Louisiana’s law prohibiting firearms in school zones defines a school as “any public or private elementary, secondary, high school, or vocational-technical school, college or university.” It defines a campus as all facilities and property within the boundary of the school property. 

@LCGTweets and @ULLafayette together are making a decision to violate citizens civil rights through resuming enforcement of their position that the Lafaytte Science Museum is “school property” in order to accomplish their goal of making downtown Lafayette a gun free zone.

To… https://t.co/1u8s9BRUMV

— Blake Miguez (@BlakeMiguezLA) August 23, 2024

The two hotels ULL is using for overflow student housing are exclusively rented to the university, meaning no other guests are staying on the property. One of the hotels is within the gun-free zone of the Episcopal School of Acadiana, university spokesman Eric Maron said. 

Murrill has previously posted online that she does not believe the museum to qualify as a gun-free zone, but she has not weighed in regarding the two hotels. 

The university has not yet responded to questions about their legal reasoning for defining the hotels as gun-free zones. 

In his letter to Murrill requesting an opinion, Miguez raised concerns that the university’s stance could lead to a slippery slope. 

“Situations could arise where a school might assert that its ‘campus’ is anywhere where school business takes place,” Miguez wrote. “This could be a privately owned field where LSU conducts an anthropological dig, a convention center rented by Tulane to host a scientific conference, or a golf course where the university president regularly plays with potential donors.” 

Louisiana law allows public officials to request opinions from the attorney general, who usually responds within 30 days. In July, Murrill issued 12 opinions, which are position statements that  do not have the force of law but can influence government decision making.