BATON ROUGE, LA – Louisiana Attorney General issued the following statement after yesterday’s press conference by former Vice President Al Gore and those state Attorneys General supportive of the EPA’s power plant regulation halted last month by the United States Supreme Court:

“While I was not surprised to see these Attorneys General announce their intention to continue working in support of the unlawful and misguided Clean Power Plan – I was disturbed by their parallel announcement to ‘use all tools at [their] disposal to fight for Climate Progress,’ including the unfettered investigation of individual coal, oil, and natural gas companies’ past or current climate opinions, views, or research. It is one thing to use the legal system to pursue public policy outcomes; but it is quite another to use prosecutorial weapons to intimidate critics, silence free speech, or chill the robust exchange of ideas.

We have seen powerful forces at work nationally targeting, most recently and visibly, our nation’s coal industry. It is now abundantly clear that the crosshairs have shifted to our country’s oil and natural gas industries.

In contrast to yesterday’s news conference by 16 state Attorneys General from largely non-oil and gas producing states, Louisiana stands with more than 29 states and state agencies who remain in steadfast opposition to the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. I will continue to work my fellow Attorneys General from across the country to ensure Louisiana workers, job creators, and consumers are not burdened by the EPA’s overreach or threatened by this new and disturbing development of unleashing the prosecutorial arsenal to quell dissent on such an important issue of public debate.”

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