3 ms·

NY A.G. Sues Exxonmobil for Defrauding Investors about Risk of Climate Laws

• xoa 8y ago
  Original title was 67 char too long for HN, I did my best to keep most of it but if the mods have better ideas please change it. This seems like an interesting and potentially legally more threatening (in the immediate future at least) route to take in responsibility for global warming. The ultimate harm will be massive but also highly distributed and long after the fact, and the law around it nebulous. Even company PR to the public isn't necessarily that binding about anything. But material financial statements to investors by public companies and risk disclosures are very well trod areas of law with significant risk for a company breaking its own promises. This suit also appears to escape any sort of argument or debate around global warming itself by going one level meta: it's just about ExxonMobile's own statements about laws and regulations regarding it, which could be passed regardless of the state of the world since that's just politics. It doesn't build in all the externalities at all, nor all the risk, but requiring companies to at least be honest to investors is still a sort of low hanging fruit that would turn the screws on them just a bit.