We didn’t see this story until Tuesday, even though it actually came out a week ago. It’s a piece in the Guardian UK, though it appears to have been written by a couple of people with the Louisiana-based envirocommunist DeSmog Blog – or as it’s now known, just DeSmog.

It’s a very cranky article which expresses much outrage over the fact that with Lake Charles becoming a major international hub for the export of liquified natural gas (LNG), McNeese State University in Lake Charles is building an LNG Center of Excellence, getting a host of natural gas companies involved in funding research activities and academic programs to train people to work the high-paying jobs the LNG facilities popping up all over Southwest Louisiana are creating.

Yes, Sara Sneath and Natalie McLendon, the two “climate journalists” who wrote this, think it’s a bad thing.

One of Louisiana’s top public universities has prompted concerns about “corporate capture” over its expanding relationship with the liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry, despite environmental warnings about pollution and prolonging fossil fuel use.

As the US’s LNG boom gained momentum in south-west Louisiana, McNeese State University courted the industry to help launch a new LNG Center of Excellence currently under construction, hired a director doubling as an LNG industry lobbyist, and approached federal regulators to co-locate their own research center at the university, according to emails obtained via public records requests by DeSmog and the Guardian.

A divestment movement aimed at pushing back on the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long creep into classrooms of all levels has grown in recent years out of concerns that industry-sponsored academic research could be a vehicle for climate obstruction. But near the Texas border in Lake Charles, Louisiana, McNeese State University welcomed industry right on in.

McNeese’s leadership team and the LNG industry tout this partnership as mutually beneficial, offering the university funding while providing the industry with educated workers, relevant research, and input on policy. However, alumni, environmental advocates, and researchers say the move raises alarms about the impacts of the LNG build out on communities and potential conflicts of interest.

So McNeese hired an industry expert to run a center dedicated to that industry. Quel horreur!

What’s hilarious about this is that the UK, where The Guardian is based even though they don’t seem to want to limit themselves to things on their side of the Atlantic, needs an absolutely massive amount of natural gas to keep their economy running. Great Britain has completely divested itself of coal, even though they have a sizable domestic supply of it and coal created the Industrial Revolution in that country, fueling its rise as an economic power and an empire, and now they’re crushingly dependent on imported natural gas.

Thirty percent of the British power supply comes from natural gas, a large amount of which passes through Lake Charles.

You’d think, given that natural gas is the cleanest-burning hydrocarbon among those in wide use, that the climate-alarmist loons writing this piece would be happy about McNeese trying to perfect the production and transport of LNG. Seeing as though electricity in the UK costs 77 percent more than it does here in America, one would expect Sara Sneath and Natalie McLendon to be rooting for McNeese’s LNG Center of Excellence.

And angry over the Biden administration’s stupid, counterproductive, spiteful and illegal ban on approvals of LNG export facilities – something which has greatly cramped Lake Charles’ economic growth (but not for long, as that ban won’t likely last the full day on Jan. 20).

Oh, but this is not so.

Jennie Stephens, a professor of climate justice at Maynooth University in Ireland, who co-authored a first-of-its-kind review of academic and civil society investigations into fossil fuel industry ties to higher education, said the McNeese LNG center is part of a larger pattern of private sector interests capturing public universities.

“It’s a classic example of academic capture where the private interests use the public infrastructure for their own profit-seeking motives rather than the needs of the community or the state,” she said after hearing details of the reporting by DeSmog and the Guardian.

Maynooth University? In Ireland? Well, OK.

Do DeSmog or The Guardian get their little noses out of joint when left-wing nonprofits lavish their filthy lucre on universities to capture the message and agenda of their instructional programs?

Who funds Jennie Stephens’ professorship of “climate justice” at Maynooth University? And who the hell is Jennie Stephens, anyway?

Jennie C. Stephens is a feminist, climate justice scholar-activist and Professor of Climate Justice at Maynooth University’s ICARUS Climate Research Centre in Ireland. She was a Climate Justice Fellow at Harvard-Radcliffe (2023-2024) and Professor of Sustainability Science & Policy at Northeastern University in Boston.

Oh, and she’s a published author. Here’s a book you’ll surely want to knock out over the holidays…

Yes, that’s a “never worked a day in her life” vibe that book’s cover is giving off.

Anyway, here comes the shocking news Sneath and McLendon broke in the story…

In recent years, McNeese’s relationship with the LNG industry gained momentum when LNG developer Tellurian sought federal approval to build Driftwood LNG gas export terminal 10 miles south of McNeese in 2018.

The company emailed the university’s then president, Daryl Burckel, for help. Internal emails obtained through public records requests show Burckel sent a verbatim letter of support ghostwritten by Tellurian to the federal regulator overseeing the construction of LNG export terminals. “University presidents are very busy managing many responsibilities,” current McNeese president Wade Rousse said in a written statement, “Requesting a sample letter for a project you already support illustrates that point.” Tellurian did not respond to requests for comment.

In May 2020, the head of the Lake Area Industry Alliance (LAIA), a lobbying group for industry in south-west Louisiana, raised the idea of an LNG Center of Excellence with Burckel. “I know some people of influence with Cameron LNG, Lake Charles LNG and Tellurian (Driftwood),” the executive director of the LAIA, Jim Rock, wrote to Burckel. “If you are interested, I could try to arrange a discussion with them to gage [sic] interest, understand their needs and to get their input on what such a ‘center’ would look like.”

A review of internal emails and other documents show how McNeese then ran with the idea of an LNG center.

Tellurian went on to become one of the top donors to the university’s LNG Center of Excellence. The LNG company was among the area LNG developers who in 2021 recommended McNeese hire Jason French, a Tellurian lobbyist at the time, to head the center, which the university did. “It is counterintuitive to believe a university would start work on a Center of Excellence in LNG without engaging people working in that industry,” French said in a statement to DeSmog and the Guardian.

Gosh, you don’t say.

This is precisely how every one of these ridiculous “___ Studies” programs turns up at every university in the western world. It’s apparently only newsworthy or outrage-bait when corporations decide to fund programs which might result in knowledgeable, qualified and hirable employees.

And a supposed major global newspaper thought this was somehow scandalous enough to print.

They even let us know that Tellurian raised $26,000 for John Kennedy’s latest Senate campaign. Holy smoke! They must absolutely own Kennedy for an amount like that!

Naturally, of course, any enviro-loon story about Lake Charles has to have a quote from the corpulent windbag Roishetta Ozane, who we’ve noticed in a couple of previous entries here and elsewhere. If you’ve never heard of her, she’s a “single mother of six,” meaning not somebody all that well known for making wise decisions, who has been promoted as something of a fatter, blacker version of Greta Thunberg by the climate nuts, and she’s good for as many bromides about “environmental racism” as the ink-stained wretches at outlets like the Guardian might need.

Including this…

Roishetta Sibley Ozane, a graduate of McNeese and a local environmental justice leader, said fossil-fuel project developers often find support in wealthier, white community leaders who are less likely to be affected by pollution from the proposed facilities. “But the people most impacted by these projects are the last consulted,” she said.

Most of the LNG export facilities in the Lake Charles area are in Cameron Parish, where almost nobody lives. Cameron Parish has a population of around eight thousand people despite being one of the state’s largest parishes by land volume.

Frankly, if the loons at DeSmog-slash-the Guardian hadn’t decided to make a big deal out of this, most people probably wouldn’t know that McNeese is building a place to turn out experts in the LNG business, and that folks wanting to get into the industry should consider Lake Charles as a place to spend four years of their college experience.

But now they do. The guess is the folks at McNeese are nowhere near as worried about that fact as Sara Sneath and Natalie McLendon want them to be.