Part 3: The ESG Racket Exposed — Europe’s Bluff Collapses in the Strait of Hormuz
Guest post by Danielle Walker, The State of Freedom
Adversaries weaponize chokepoints precisely because the West chose self-denial over abundance. That is the strategic reality in May 2026. Iranian actions have throttled 20-25% of global oil and LNG through the Strait of Hormuz.
A wave of refinery and fertilizer plant incidents across multiple continents in 2025–2026 has raised serious concerns about energy and food supply chain fragility (see reports from The Conversation, Reuters, and others).
The risks of a severed feedstock line through the Strait of Hormuz starving Haber-Bosch production and triggering sharp crop yield drops have been widely analyzed by industry groups and agricultural economists. Europe, having engineered its own energy anorexia, now stands exposed. Their ESG sermons and Scope 3 demands on American producers have zero credibility left. They need molecules from producers who refused the scarcity gospel.
Who actually refused it? Not the biggest majors who bent the knee for Wall Street capital and ESG ratings — many did play along, chasing “net-zero” pledges, carbon offsets, and boardroom virtue to keep the financing taps open. But a core of independent producers, midstream operators, and Gulf Coast refiners — especially in Louisiana and Texas — kept drilling, refining, and exporting despite the headwinds. They faced higher capital costs, activist pressure, and regulatory drag, yet maintained output because hydrocarbons remain the most reliable path to profit and power. Louisiana’s independent operators and Southwest LNG terminals never bought the full scarcity sermon. They understood abundance creates leverage. The voices of Barbara Boyd, Susan Kokinda, Prof. Peter St. Onge, Catherine Austin Fitts, and Blaine Holt have highlighted this divide: the real resistance came from those grounded in physical reality, not financial theater.
Who drove the self-denial pivot? It was not random policy error. It was a deliberate cultural, political, and financial turn — the anti-Promethean backlash that took root in the late 1960s. The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (1972) provided the intellectual scaffolding, modeling doom from population, resources, and industry. Environmental elites, Malthusian revivalists like Paul Ehrlich, and a post-affluence cultural shift embraced “limits” ideology. Regulation, cultural guilt over progress, and centralized financial incentives followed. Catherine Austin Fitts has exposed how this matured into a financial control architecture — engineered scarcity that redirects trillions upward while ordinary citizens bear the costs in higher prices, lost opportunity, and eroded sovereignty. Prof. Peter St. Onge and likeminded economists diagnose the fatal conceit: central planners and asset managers who pretend they can manage complex systems they cannot possibly comprehend. ESG became the enforcement arm of that engineered scarcity agenda — the mechanism that punishes real energy production with higher costs and rewards compliance theater with easier capital.
Jason Lowery’s “Softwar” framework sharpens the picture. Energy dominance is the ultimate power projection tool according to Lowery’s thesis. His MIT work on power projection shows how non-kinetic, energy-based tactics can impose costs and establish dominance without direct confrontation. We are already in that soft war on our own turf. ESG and the CCS machine operate as precisely such a campaign against American energy supremacy: a sophisticated financial, regulatory, and cultural assault designed to constrain physical production, raise capital costs, and shift control upward. It is not environmentalism. It is power projection by other means.
Promethean Action voices, Blaine Holt, and Jason Lowery are blunt: energy is national power. Self-denial of available and accessible resources hands leverage to those who never embraced the scarcity gospel — the adversaries and competitors who continued building real capacity while the West tied its own hands.
Concrete examples of the scarcity-versus-abundance model:
- Europe’s Energiewende and net-zero dogma. Germany shuttered nuclear plants, leaned on Russian gas and intermittent wind, then begged for U.S. LNG after 2022. Limited coal plant restarts in 2025-2026 exposed the scarcity fraud, but industrial prices remained punishingly high, deindustrialization accelerated, and leverage disappeared.
- U.S. regulatory strangulation and legacy lawsuits. ESG-driven delays, endless reviews, and capital flight kept supply artificially tight. In Louisiana, legacy oilfield lawsuits — often decades-old claims with massive contingent liabilities — have long acted as a powerful deterrent to new investment.
- Louisiana’s domestic echo. ESG rhetoric shields the CCS machine: 45Q taxpayer credits are funding private multinationals to bury CO₂ under private land via the unconstitutional 2020 law. Minimal jobs. Permanent liability. Foreign profits. This is scarcity politics in green clothing.
The staggering power demand from AI data centers — with projections reaching the 150–200+ GW range globally in coming years — has been documented by Goldman Sachs, JLL, and the EIA. Hyperscalers need dense, dispatchable power. Virtue signals and burial pits will not suffice.
Like it or not, this is the reality we face. Many of us remain deeply opposed to the breakneck scale of these AI data center projects, yet stopping them has proven nearly impossible as global demand surges. Louisiana’s own “Lightning Speed” deals — complete with blank NDAs signed behind closed doors with Meta and other hyperscalers — have made meaningful public scrutiny and course correction even harder. This is the classic elite playbook: top-down mandates and secrecy, forcing communities to absorb the consequences of decisions they never got to debate.
Whether these projects land heavily in Louisiana or not, the power demand is real and massive. It exposes the bankruptcy of the scarcity model. We cannot meet 190 GW of always-on load with wind, solar, and carbon burial schemes. This is exactly why we must reject ESG theater and CCS cronyism and build overwhelming, reliable baseload capacity instead.
Louisiana’s Roadmap: Reject Scarcity Politics, Reclaim Abundance
Here is the clear, no-nonsense path forward — our vision for Louisiana’s future. The window is wide open. The moment demands action.
- Declare ESG irrelevant to state policy. Prioritize production volume, reliability, affordability, and constitutional property rights over foreign scorecards or Wall Street ratings. Abundance defeats control mechanisms.
- Repeal the CCS eminent domain regime. Strengthen and pass SB 60 / HB 7 equivalents. End unitization coercion and private takings that violate Article I, Section 4. Redirect capital to real extraction and export.
- Build on recent legacy lawsuit reforms with a final, principled resolution. Recent changes to Act 312 (including Act 458 of 2025) have already moved the state in the right direction. Now finish the job: create a comprehensive, time-limited remediation framework with reasonable statutes of repose, strengthen the industry-funded coastal cleanup trust for verifiable wetlands and environmental impacts, and deliver full liability certainty for operators who meet transparent, science-based standards. This is not about letting anyone off the hook. It is about replacing the current endless litigation lottery — which has produced more lawyer fees than restored wetlands — with real, measurable stewardship that actually protects Louisiana’s coast while unlocking new capital and jobs. In return, we call on major producers to drop support for unconstitutional CCS projects in Louisiana and double down on traditional O&G expansion here. Pair it with production-focused incentives — expedited permitting and tax treatment that reward raw hydrocarbon output over carbon-burial credits. No new taxpayer burden. Just smarter rules that make traditional abundance the highest-ROI path in the Gulf — even against Texas competition.
- Unleash hydrocarbons without apology. Streamline constitutional permitting for drilling, refining, LNG (America’s densest concentration in Southwest Louisiana), and fertilizer capacity. Every extra barrel undercuts chokepoints and starves the racket. And right now, this could not be more urgent: the USGS just confirmed a massive new assessment of the Bossier Formation — 5 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, technically recoverable natural gas beneath northwest Louisiana (USGS Fact Sheet 2026-3004). This is the exact same region now under aggressive push for CCS pipelines and storage. We face a clear choice: bury carbon under prime productive geology, or develop one of the largest natural gas resources on the continent. The Bossier discovery changes everything.
- Deploy nuclear as the baseload multiplier. Louisiana’s 2026 Nuclear Strategic Framework pairs with hydrocarbons to power industry at home while freeing molecules for global markets.
- Data center deals with teeth. Require hyperscalers to co-invest in nuclear and gas generation — on Louisiana’s terms — or face full market consequences. Tie any incentives strictly to measurable local jobs and abundance.
Imagine Louisiana leading again — not just surviving, but thriving as America’s undisputed energy powerhouse. Picture thriving coastal communities with protected wetlands through real stewardship, high-wage jobs flowing into parishes across the state, reliable and affordable power lighting up factories, and Louisiana molecules flowing to those willing to embrace reality and leave behind the scarcity and climate hoax demands. This is not fantasy. It is the pragmatic, achievable future waiting for us the moment we reject engineered scarcity and choose real abundance.
The sabotage maps are warnings. The Fertilizer Cliff is the consequence. The ESG racket — exposed by Fitts, St. Onge, Promethean thinkers, Holt, and Lowery’s Softwar lens — is the trap.
Louisiana has the geology, infrastructure, workforce, ports, and constitutional duty to reject the anti-Promethean choice and become the undisputed leader in independent oil and gas production. The supermajority in Baton Rouge swore an oath to citizens and the Constitution. It is time to honor it.
Cut the hoax. Repeal the abuses. Protect property rights and the coast. Build the nuclear-O&G powerhouse that supplies those ready for reality.