October 30, 2019

Trial against oil giant Exxon Mobil opens in New York City

topic:	Energy
located:	USA
editor:	Yair Oded

Last week, New York State’s lawsuit against Exxon Mobil began in New York City. The State is accusing the oil giant of misleading its shareholders and the public about the actual costs of climate change and portraying a false projection of how the climate crisis would impact the company’s value and expenditures. 

The lawsuit hinges on an elaborate investigation into Exxon’s internal handling of information, based on millions of documents as well as secret financial books and email accounts. 

The State of New York claims that Exxon Mobil “repeatedly represented that it expected governments to adopt more costly and stringent climate change regulations over the coming decades.” The lawsuit goes on to mention that, “Exxon Mobil’s statements would have led a reasonable investor to believe that it used this cost of carbon in projecting the costs associated with the company’s emissions from its investments and operations,” yet the company “did no such thing.”

New York accuses Exxon of disregarding its publicly released projection of carbon costs, and instead force its own employees to incorporate the internally used estimates, which indicate lower costs of carbon. Thus, Exxon crafted a false image to its investors, making its assets seem far more stable and lucrative than they were in reality. Considering New York's tough shareholders protection laws, Exxon Mobil may be required to pay hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in compensation should the company lose the trial. 

While the ongoing trial against Exxon is a step in the right direction, and may set a precedent for future climate litigation, let us not forget that the charges brought against the company are relatively narrow in scope, given the magnitude of the damage it, along with other oil giants, inflict on our planet.

Exxon Mobil is among the 100 companies responsible for over 70 per cent of global CO2 emissions. For decades, the company was not only defrauding its shareholders, but was withholding from the public information its own research teams gathered on the catastrophic implications of climate change, and poured a fortune into the hands of climate change denying organisations in order to distort the facts Exxon knew to be true since the 1970s. 

Holding such companies accountable should not only benefit their pool of shareholders, as their polluting practices and extensive misinformation campaigns are destabalising the entire planet, and threaten the survival of species and humans across the world. 

And so, with all due respect to shareholders, it is time for climate lawsuits to address the overall damage inflicted by the fossil fuel industry, and bring justice to wider swaths of the population.

We must ensure that oil companies’ potential defeat in trials will result in the funding of comprehensive climate action, renewable energy solutions, disaster relief, and the uplifting of communities experiencing the brunt of the climate emergency. 

READ in "Eco-Crimes" about other oil companies like Shell being a primary culprit in our planet ecological collapse and climate crisis.

Image: Johnny Silvercloud/flickr/(CC BY-SA 2.0)

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