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This is some combination of grandstanding by the state prosecutors, abuse of the extremely vague statutes under which such suits can be brought, and a threat to

This is some combination of grandstanding by the state prosecutors, abuse of the extremely vague statutes under which such suits can be brought, and a threat to the rule of law. It strikes me as implausible that even if Exxon has published all of its internal climate research it would have made a substantive difference in people's likelihood to invest, or to consumers propensity to purchase Exxon gas. Because these are the only outcomes germane to the case aren't they? You can tell by the comments here that people want Exxon punished, they don't care much about the means by which this occurs.

amiga_500 7y ago
They didn’t just withhold, they actively sowed disinformation https://climateinvestigations.org/drilled-climate-change-denial/ https://climateinvestigations.org/drilled-climate-change-den...
- Gravityloss 7y ago
  And the think tanks and lobbying organizations are funded to this day, continuing to fight against climate legislation.
- seventytwo 7y ago
  Exactly. It’s fraud against every citizen and shareholder.
  - fennecfoxen 7y ago
    My understanding is that the fraud claim — if it matches the fraud claim in the New York case, at least – is this. Exxon had an internal figure used to represent one kind of climate change costs for one purpose. Investors never saw this. There was also an external figure shared with investors, to help investors assess risks to Exxon stock. The case for fraud is that these weren't different for a good reason, but because they sought to mislead investors. The pricier of these figures is the external figure, so they're being charged for being too alarmist with the public. In either case I don't think it has much to do with the previously linked research claims in this thread. (To this, there is added some consumer fraud by... not labelling gas pumps with warnings about global warnings, among other things, I think it was? This is the weaker claim, and I would not expect it to prevail.)
    - beerandt 7y ago
      This happens all the time, and isn't considered fraud. San Fransisco is doing it- claiming one risk of climate change for the purposes of setting regulations and filing lawsuits, and using another for applying for insurance. And I don't think being punished for using an overly conservative figure is likely, unless the court invents some duty owed to short-sellers. And it's not something we want to encourage.
- makomk 7y ago
  The trouble is, the leaked internal documents point to Exxon actually genuinely believing the climate change doubt narrative they were pushing externally. So any argument to the contrary has to make clever use of tricks like selective out-of-context quotation, emotional appeals, and plausible-sounding but logically nonsensical arguments to trick the reader. For example, this lawsuit. The overall tactic is to argue that Exxon knew fossil fuels could potentially cause catastropic climate change but decieved people by sowing uncertainty about whether they would cause climate catastrophe, which isn't even a contradiction, but let's put that issue to one side. They then hit it out the park with a humdinger - in May 2019, CO2 concentrations hit 415 ppm, and 37 years ago Exxon's scientists predicted this in a graph. This astonishing accuracy shows Exxon's scientists knew exactly how much CO2 emissions and warming they were causing. Here's the leaked document this graph was taken from: https://insideclimatenews.org/sites/default/files/documents/1982%20Exxon%20Primer%20on%20CO2%20Greenhouse%20Effect.pdf https://insideclimatenews.org/sites/default/files/documents/... Some choice quotes from it that somehow didn't make it into the complaint: "There is currently no unambiguous scientific evidence that the earth is warming", "Overall, the current outlook suggests potentially serious climate problems are not likely to occur until the late 21st century or perhaps beyond at projected energy demand rates", and also apparently coastal flooding wouldn't happen for centuries even in the worst case scenario. There's quite a bit more too. The supposedly super-accurate secret internal report didn't contradict Exxon's external talking points, it matched up with them exactly. (There's also weirdly gratuitous dishonesty. For instance, the Exxon document argues that if a rapid move away from fossil fuels was necessary to prevent climate catastrophe, nuclear power was the only feasible option and renewables such as solar were completely infeasable since it'd take at least 40-50 years to achieve significant power production using them. For some reason, the complaint claims that Exxon recognised measures such as energy conservation and shifting to renewable sources were the only viable options. I guess the prosecutor reckoned renewable power was more sympathetic and popular than nuclear... The complaint also goes on to accuse Exxon of misleading the public by claiming that efficiency improvements in their products reduce greenhouse gas emissions because producing and using them still emits greenhouse gases. Do they want to actively discourage energy efficiency improvements?)
_Nat_ 7y ago
> This is [...] a threat to the rule of law. Could you elaborate on this point?
- noirbot 7y ago
  Not the OP, but my guess would be that they're worried about the precedent set by fairly explicitly using a law meant to outlaw X to punish someone for doing Y just because the government dislikes that someone is doing Y. If the government wanted to outlaw promoting self-serving doubt/misinformation, they could do that, but that's not really what "fraud" is for. Part of the rule of law is that the government doesn't just get to make up laws because it wants to punish you. It's why there's generally a prohibition for punishing people for things they did before it became illegal to do them. A lot of this is symptomatic of both sides of the political spectrum feeling impotent to pass laws that actually do what they want, so they're doing what they can do bend existing law to do what they don't have the votes to do in new law. The whole situation is bad on a number of levels.
  - _Nat_ 7y ago
    I think I'd understand the concern if a regulatory body within Massachusetts were directly penalizing Exxon without judicial oversight. But since they're taking Exxon to court for the legal system to determine if the case is valid, isn't this just what the rule-of-law looks like?
    - noirbot 7y ago
      For sure, that would be a worse case. That said, defending a case against the government, even for a company as large as Exxon, isn't without cost. They're certainly an unsympathetic victim here, but in general, you want the government not to be bending the law to bring a case against an unpopular defendant. It's one thing for private citizens/companies to file vague or spurious lawsuits against each other, only to have the courts throw it out. It's another for the government, who hypothetically represents the Law, to be bending/testing the limits of it. It also presupposes that the court system is fair, and not inclined to side with the government. Obviously in this case, there's a claim to be made that it might be biased towards a massive corporation too, but in general prosecutors tend to get what they want in cases. I'd be shocked if this gets thrown out/refuted by the court without going to trial.
jddj 7y ago
Everything is securities fraud
- jnordwick 7y ago
  He is a national treasure.
esarbe 7y ago
They knew about the dangers of climate change since the 1970s and pumped millions into climate change denial think tanks and did everything they could to prolong their dirty business a bit longer, while externalizing all the cost and hauling them upon the public they were actively misleading. It'd be a different thing if they hadn't tried to hide the findings of their own scientists and hadn't spent that much resources to discredit people actually trying to get us to fix stuff. They're guilty as hell. Morally, probably even legally.
lugg 7y ago
What is vague about misleading consumers, misrepresentation of product, fraud, carrying out greenwashing campaigns and generally lying to the public to maintain a marketable position? Capitalism is about leveling the playing field. Not enabling crony assholes to play by their own set of rules.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  "Lying to the public to maintain a marketable position" is incredibly vague. If I tell people my software is great and easy to use, but it's actually hard to use, can Massachusetts sue me for that? Can I sue Samsung for saying they sell the best phones if I think iPhones are actually the best phones?
  - brennankreiman 7y ago
    Your examples are matters of opinion, the Exxon case is a matter of hiding facts known to the company which are not vague as an opinion of quality.
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      Some of the allegations are exactly that vague. One of the major alleged misrepresentations is that Exxon claimed to be environmentally conscious: > 687. ExxonMobil's greenwashing misleads consumers by saturating its brand with deceptive "green" images that portray ExxonMobil as a good environmental steward when, in fact, these images are contradicted by the actual environmental and public health impact of ExxonMobil's business. These images direct attention away from the massive and dangerous climate and public health harms caused by the routine production and use of ExxonMobil fossel fuel products and focus consumer attention instead on ExxonMobil's purported environmental responsibility and leadership.
      - cartoonworld 7y ago
        That part of the complaint is referring to ExxonMobil's greenwashing efforts in Massachusetts. The fairly vague wording of 687 follows dozens of pages including full color reproduction of the ads which make the case that Exxon sought to convince customers that using their whiz-bang petroleum product (motor oil) can meaningfully "clean" engines and will result in decreased environmental impact from fossil fuels. >645. ExxonMobil’s misleading statements and omissions are deceptive because, even if it is technically true that Synergy™ and Mobil 1™ improve internal combustion engine performance and/or efficiency relative to prior or other products, ExxonMobil’s claims that these products help reduce greenhouse gas emissions convey a false impression that using the products results in environmental benefits. To the contrary, the development, production, refining, and consumer use of ExxonMobil fossil fuel products (even products that may yield relatively more efficient engine performance) increase greenhouse gas emissions.
Dumblydorr 7y ago
Should cigarette companies have been punished for knowing their products kill and then misleading the public? Oil kills via air pollution. Oil companies hid this information. Do corporations get to willingly and maliciously lie to people?
- ThomPete 7y ago
  Cigarettes only kill people. Oil saves more lives than it kills and it makes lives better for all of us. You can't just take the negatives and ignore all the positives. Most of us wouldn't be here if it wasn't for oil, the internet would not be here if it wasn't for oil, most medicine, the ability to keep an incubator running let alone the materials for creating and I could go on we wouldn't be as many people on the planet today if it wasn't for our use of oil.
  - acollins1331 7y ago
    Sure, but lying about whether your product kills people is still a crime. They're not suing oil. They're suing Exxon for lying about it and funding lies.
    - ThomPete 7y ago
      Technically you might be able to make that claim, but I have a hard time understanding the point if it saves more people than it kills. Then at least morally I would question who is really in the right here.
      - acollins1331 7y ago
        I'll give you a hint: it's not the company that lied about whether their product kills people and paid others billions to do it as well. Exxon could've just been honest and oil would still have been sold and used and saved people, we could've just been using it more responsibly. But they lied, for profit.
      - jklinger410 7y ago
iridikkro 7y ago
It’s ludicrous to suggest that if the entirety of what the oil industry was doing to hide the truth had been revealed it wouldn’t have changed minds. They were actively advertising as if this could on forever, with no problems! You don’t see how “oh wait we’ve been hiding scientific evidence that’s not true” wouldn’t be of material impact? We’ve all become paid shills of industry. Explicitly defending the indefensible because implicitly we’re addicted to our emotional models of “how reality functions.” But society doesn’t owe us that and literally tears down its own history all the time. It’s moving on and removing the profit motive of this industry for a good reason. Get over it.
jklinger410 7y ago
>It strikes me as implausible that even if Exxon has published all of its internal climate research it would have made a substantive difference in people's likelihood to invest You only say this because the marketing campaign against global warming, designed by this company because of the outcomes of said research, has been so effective.
jforman 7y ago
It's a bit of a stretch to say that a lawsuit is a threat to the rule of law.....
joe_the_user 7y ago
This is desperation time. Given that CO2 pollution results promise from moderate to extreme environmental disaster world wide, some portion of people are quite worried and, people being people, another portion of people are doing everything they can to keep business as usual going. A US state suing an oil company might not be the best venue to force action but courts have been used repeated to force societal change and so it's not impossible Ma could get a result Exxon being punished isn't an important end-goal but actually forcing the oil industry to acknowledge CO2 pollution might be useful in forcing regulation stopping it (and yes, believe that the state directly forcing a decrease in CO2 is the only way that we can put a dent in greenhouse gas production. Carbon credit and even a CO2 tax are insufficient).
geofft 7y ago
It's implausible that if Exxon published its research, customers would have filled up at Chevron instead, yes. It is totally plausible that the global oil / fossil fuel market would have not been as big as it is now, that efforts (from government or from private entities) to find less-polluting alternatives would have been more popular, etc.
- beerandt 7y ago
  But that still doesn't establish an injury to shareholders.
  - fennecfoxen 7y ago
    Who needs to establish any injury to shareholders? That company is bad! Would you give evil the benefit of the law? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk
    - catalogia 7y ago
      > Would you give evil the benefit of the law? When you disrespect the law, you risk devaluing a powerful tool against evil (and one of the few tools against evil that's actually discriminating, one of the few tools to actually make a good faith attempt to distinguish guilt from innocence.)
      - fennecfoxen 7y ago
        Robert Bolt's rendition of the sentiment was more dramatic
fennecfoxen 7y ago
> You can tell by the comments here that people want Exxon punished, they don't care much about the means by which this occurs. Welcome to our latest age of populism. As usual in these cases, there are no rules, there is no law, there are no inalienable rights. There is only your chosen tribe, versus the other guys: enemies at worst, targets of opportunity at best. (If you criticize overreach and abuse on your side, breaking solidarity with the tribe, you get to be a particularly hated enemy.)
- blotter_paper 7y ago
  > As usual in these cases, there are no rules, there is no law, there are no inalienable rights. When the government routinely steals from citizens ("civil forfeiture"), calls invading other countries "military police action" so that Congress doesn't have to approve wars, gives specifically black citizens syphillis without their knowledge or consent just to see what happens when you don't treat syphillis, gives citizens LSD without their knowledge or consent (Operation Midnight Climax), claims LSD has no medical applications, tries to blackmail MLK into suicide, routinely has huge globs of cash disappearing, does obvious false flag operations (2nd Gulf of Tonkin incident, if you can't believe the ones the government hasn't confirmed yet), ignores their own constitution (Snowden et al.), etc., is it any wonder that people don't care about your laws anymore? All of the above criminality was committed by the US government within the last century, some of it within the last decade. These laws were made up to begin with, and they're typically used/broken in ways that hurt the small rather than the large. I don't know if Exxon broke any of your precious laws by systematically covering up climate change since at least the early '80s, but I'd enjoy seeing this lawless monstrosity of a government chew them up for it anyway -- just as entertainment. If you want people to respect laws when dealing with big players, maybe you should try building a system that respects laws when dealing with small players. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - pipermerriam 7y ago
    I agree with this sentiment. I've struggled to see a path towards real change that doesn't involve us all getting out our pitchforks.
badrabbit 7y ago
Yup, instead of passing relevant laws, punishing them seems to be what people want. Laws are boring I guess. They can make any level of punishment work, they can cut back in the US and expand elsewhere to make up for the loss. Meanwhile ,CNOOC and Gazprom are doing great. Big bad corp makes for a nice villain but in a democratic country lack of good laws (bad voters!) is the problem. Should there have been a law compelling companies to listen to their scientists? Should there be criminal punishment of execs who spread any level if false information? What about media execs? Is the lobbying problem the root cause? It all seems to me lack of good voting or the US system of democracy being inadequate. I mean,it's not like oil companies use oil strictly for fossil fuels and it's not like civilization at the moment does not depend on fossip fuels. Less pitch forks and better laws is all I'm saying.

amiga_500 7y ago

They didn’t just withhold, they actively sowed disinformation https://climateinvestigations.org/drilled-climate-change-denial/ https://climateinvestigations.org/drilled-climate-change-den...

Gravityloss 7y ago
And the think tanks and lobbying organizations are funded to this day, continuing to fight against climate legislation.
seventytwo 7y ago
Exactly. It’s fraud against every citizen and shareholder.
- fennecfoxen 7y ago
  My understanding is that the fraud claim — if it matches the fraud claim in the New York case, at least – is this. Exxon had an internal figure used to represent one kind of climate change costs for one purpose. Investors never saw this. There was also an external figure shared with investors, to help investors assess risks to Exxon stock. The case for fraud is that these weren't different for a good reason, but because they sought to mislead investors. The pricier of these figures is the external figure, so they're being charged for being too alarmist with the public. In either case I don't think it has much to do with the previously linked research claims in this thread. (To this, there is added some consumer fraud by... not labelling gas pumps with warnings about global warnings, among other things, I think it was? This is the weaker claim, and I would not expect it to prevail.)
  - beerandt 7y ago
    This happens all the time, and isn't considered fraud. San Fransisco is doing it- claiming one risk of climate change for the purposes of setting regulations and filing lawsuits, and using another for applying for insurance. And I don't think being punished for using an overly conservative figure is likely, unless the court invents some duty owed to short-sellers. And it's not something we want to encourage.
makomk 7y ago
The trouble is, the leaked internal documents point to Exxon actually genuinely believing the climate change doubt narrative they were pushing externally. So any argument to the contrary has to make clever use of tricks like selective out-of-context quotation, emotional appeals, and plausible-sounding but logically nonsensical arguments to trick the reader. For example, this lawsuit. The overall tactic is to argue that Exxon knew fossil fuels could potentially cause catastropic climate change but decieved people by sowing uncertainty about whether they would cause climate catastrophe, which isn't even a contradiction, but let's put that issue to one side. They then hit it out the park with a humdinger - in May 2019, CO2 concentrations hit 415 ppm, and 37 years ago Exxon's scientists predicted this in a graph. This astonishing accuracy shows Exxon's scientists knew exactly how much CO2 emissions and warming they were causing. Here's the leaked document this graph was taken from: https://insideclimatenews.org/sites/default/files/documents/1982%20Exxon%20Primer%20on%20CO2%20Greenhouse%20Effect.pdf https://insideclimatenews.org/sites/default/files/documents/... Some choice quotes from it that somehow didn't make it into the complaint: "There is currently no unambiguous scientific evidence that the earth is warming", "Overall, the current outlook suggests potentially serious climate problems are not likely to occur until the late 21st century or perhaps beyond at projected energy demand rates", and also apparently coastal flooding wouldn't happen for centuries even in the worst case scenario. There's quite a bit more too. The supposedly super-accurate secret internal report didn't contradict Exxon's external talking points, it matched up with them exactly. (There's also weirdly gratuitous dishonesty. For instance, the Exxon document argues that if a rapid move away from fossil fuels was necessary to prevent climate catastrophe, nuclear power was the only feasible option and renewables such as solar were completely infeasable since it'd take at least 40-50 years to achieve significant power production using them. For some reason, the complaint claims that Exxon recognised measures such as energy conservation and shifting to renewable sources were the only viable options. I guess the prosecutor reckoned renewable power was more sympathetic and popular than nuclear... The complaint also goes on to accuse Exxon of misleading the public by claiming that efficiency improvements in their products reduce greenhouse gas emissions because producing and using them still emits greenhouse gases. Do they want to actively discourage energy efficiency improvements?)

_Nat_ 7y ago

> This is [...] a threat to the rule of law. Could you elaborate on this point?

noirbot 7y ago
Not the OP, but my guess would be that they're worried about the precedent set by fairly explicitly using a law meant to outlaw X to punish someone for doing Y just because the government dislikes that someone is doing Y. If the government wanted to outlaw promoting self-serving doubt/misinformation, they could do that, but that's not really what "fraud" is for. Part of the rule of law is that the government doesn't just get to make up laws because it wants to punish you. It's why there's generally a prohibition for punishing people for things they did before it became illegal to do them. A lot of this is symptomatic of both sides of the political spectrum feeling impotent to pass laws that actually do what they want, so they're doing what they can do bend existing law to do what they don't have the votes to do in new law. The whole situation is bad on a number of levels.
- _Nat_ 7y ago
  I think I'd understand the concern if a regulatory body within Massachusetts were directly penalizing Exxon without judicial oversight. But since they're taking Exxon to court for the legal system to determine if the case is valid, isn't this just what the rule-of-law looks like?
  - noirbot 7y ago
    For sure, that would be a worse case. That said, defending a case against the government, even for a company as large as Exxon, isn't without cost. They're certainly an unsympathetic victim here, but in general, you want the government not to be bending the law to bring a case against an unpopular defendant. It's one thing for private citizens/companies to file vague or spurious lawsuits against each other, only to have the courts throw it out. It's another for the government, who hypothetically represents the Law, to be bending/testing the limits of it. It also presupposes that the court system is fair, and not inclined to side with the government. Obviously in this case, there's a claim to be made that it might be biased towards a massive corporation too, but in general prosecutors tend to get what they want in cases. I'd be shocked if this gets thrown out/refuted by the court without going to trial.

jddj 7y ago

Everything is securities fraud

jnordwick 7y ago
He is a national treasure.

esarbe 7y ago

They knew about the dangers of climate change since the 1970s and pumped millions into climate change denial think tanks and did everything they could to prolong their dirty business a bit longer, while externalizing all the cost and hauling them upon the public they were actively misleading. It'd be a different thing if they hadn't tried to hide the findings of their own scientists and hadn't spent that much resources to discredit people actually trying to get us to fix stuff. They're guilty as hell. Morally, probably even legally.

lugg 7y ago

What is vague about misleading consumers, misrepresentation of product, fraud, carrying out greenwashing campaigns and generally lying to the public to maintain a marketable position? Capitalism is about leveling the playing field. Not enabling crony assholes to play by their own set of rules.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
"Lying to the public to maintain a marketable position" is incredibly vague. If I tell people my software is great and easy to use, but it's actually hard to use, can Massachusetts sue me for that? Can I sue Samsung for saying they sell the best phones if I think iPhones are actually the best phones?
- brennankreiman 7y ago
  Your examples are matters of opinion, the Exxon case is a matter of hiding facts known to the company which are not vague as an opinion of quality.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    Some of the allegations are exactly that vague. One of the major alleged misrepresentations is that Exxon claimed to be environmentally conscious: > 687. ExxonMobil's greenwashing misleads consumers by saturating its brand with deceptive "green" images that portray ExxonMobil as a good environmental steward when, in fact, these images are contradicted by the actual environmental and public health impact of ExxonMobil's business. These images direct attention away from the massive and dangerous climate and public health harms caused by the routine production and use of ExxonMobil fossel fuel products and focus consumer attention instead on ExxonMobil's purported environmental responsibility and leadership.
    - cartoonworld 7y ago
      That part of the complaint is referring to ExxonMobil's greenwashing efforts in Massachusetts. The fairly vague wording of 687 follows dozens of pages including full color reproduction of the ads which make the case that Exxon sought to convince customers that using their whiz-bang petroleum product (motor oil) can meaningfully "clean" engines and will result in decreased environmental impact from fossil fuels. >645. ExxonMobil’s misleading statements and omissions are deceptive because, even if it is technically true that Synergy™ and Mobil 1™ improve internal combustion engine performance and/or efficiency relative to prior or other products, ExxonMobil’s claims that these products help reduce greenhouse gas emissions convey a false impression that using the products results in environmental benefits. To the contrary, the development, production, refining, and consumer use of ExxonMobil fossil fuel products (even products that may yield relatively more efficient engine performance) increase greenhouse gas emissions.

Dumblydorr 7y ago

Should cigarette companies have been punished for knowing their products kill and then misleading the public? Oil kills via air pollution. Oil companies hid this information. Do corporations get to willingly and maliciously lie to people?

ThomPete 7y ago
Cigarettes only kill people. Oil saves more lives than it kills and it makes lives better for all of us. You can't just take the negatives and ignore all the positives. Most of us wouldn't be here if it wasn't for oil, the internet would not be here if it wasn't for oil, most medicine, the ability to keep an incubator running let alone the materials for creating and I could go on we wouldn't be as many people on the planet today if it wasn't for our use of oil.
- acollins1331 7y ago
  Sure, but lying about whether your product kills people is still a crime. They're not suing oil. They're suing Exxon for lying about it and funding lies.
  - ThomPete 7y ago
    Technically you might be able to make that claim, but I have a hard time understanding the point if it saves more people than it kills. Then at least morally I would question who is really in the right here.
    - acollins1331 7y ago
      I'll give you a hint: it's not the company that lied about whether their product kills people and paid others billions to do it as well. Exxon could've just been honest and oil would still have been sold and used and saved people, we could've just been using it more responsibly. But they lied, for profit.
    - jklinger410 7y ago

iridikkro 7y ago

It’s ludicrous to suggest that if the entirety of what the oil industry was doing to hide the truth had been revealed it wouldn’t have changed minds. They were actively advertising as if this could on forever, with no problems! You don’t see how “oh wait we’ve been hiding scientific evidence that’s not true” wouldn’t be of material impact? We’ve all become paid shills of industry. Explicitly defending the indefensible because implicitly we’re addicted to our emotional models of “how reality functions.” But society doesn’t owe us that and literally tears down its own history all the time. It’s moving on and removing the profit motive of this industry for a good reason. Get over it.

jklinger410 7y ago

>It strikes me as implausible that even if Exxon has published all of its internal climate research it would have made a substantive difference in people's likelihood to invest You only say this because the marketing campaign against global warming, designed by this company because of the outcomes of said research, has been so effective.

jforman 7y ago

It's a bit of a stretch to say that a lawsuit is a threat to the rule of law.....

joe_the_user 7y ago

This is desperation time. Given that CO2 pollution results promise from moderate to extreme environmental disaster world wide, some portion of people are quite worried and, people being people, another portion of people are doing everything they can to keep business as usual going. A US state suing an oil company might not be the best venue to force action but courts have been used repeated to force societal change and so it's not impossible Ma could get a result Exxon being punished isn't an important end-goal but actually forcing the oil industry to acknowledge CO2 pollution might be useful in forcing regulation stopping it (and yes, believe that the state directly forcing a decrease in CO2 is the only way that we can put a dent in greenhouse gas production. Carbon credit and even a CO2 tax are insufficient).

geofft 7y ago

It's implausible that if Exxon published its research, customers would have filled up at Chevron instead, yes. It is totally plausible that the global oil / fossil fuel market would have not been as big as it is now, that efforts (from government or from private entities) to find less-polluting alternatives would have been more popular, etc.

beerandt 7y ago
But that still doesn't establish an injury to shareholders.
- fennecfoxen 7y ago
  Who needs to establish any injury to shareholders? That company is bad! Would you give evil the benefit of the law? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk
  - catalogia 7y ago
    > Would you give evil the benefit of the law? When you disrespect the law, you risk devaluing a powerful tool against evil (and one of the few tools against evil that's actually discriminating, one of the few tools to actually make a good faith attempt to distinguish guilt from innocence.)
    - fennecfoxen 7y ago
      Robert Bolt's rendition of the sentiment was more dramatic

fennecfoxen 7y ago

> You can tell by the comments here that people want Exxon punished, they don't care much about the means by which this occurs. Welcome to our latest age of populism. As usual in these cases, there are no rules, there is no law, there are no inalienable rights. There is only your chosen tribe, versus the other guys: enemies at worst, targets of opportunity at best. (If you criticize overreach and abuse on your side, breaking solidarity with the tribe, you get to be a particularly hated enemy.)

blotter_paper 7y ago
> As usual in these cases, there are no rules, there is no law, there are no inalienable rights. When the government routinely steals from citizens ("civil forfeiture"), calls invading other countries "military police action" so that Congress doesn't have to approve wars, gives specifically black citizens syphillis without their knowledge or consent just to see what happens when you don't treat syphillis, gives citizens LSD without their knowledge or consent (Operation Midnight Climax), claims LSD has no medical applications, tries to blackmail MLK into suicide, routinely has huge globs of cash disappearing, does obvious false flag operations (2nd Gulf of Tonkin incident, if you can't believe the ones the government hasn't confirmed yet), ignores their own constitution (Snowden et al.), etc., is it any wonder that people don't care about your laws anymore? All of the above criminality was committed by the US government within the last century, some of it within the last decade. These laws were made up to begin with, and they're typically used/broken in ways that hurt the small rather than the large. I don't know if Exxon broke any of your precious laws by systematically covering up climate change since at least the early '80s, but I'd enjoy seeing this lawless monstrosity of a government chew them up for it anyway -- just as entertainment. If you want people to respect laws when dealing with big players, maybe you should try building a system that respects laws when dealing with small players. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- pipermerriam 7y ago
  I agree with this sentiment. I've struggled to see a path towards real change that doesn't involve us all getting out our pitchforks.

badrabbit 7y ago

Yup, instead of passing relevant laws, punishing them seems to be what people want. Laws are boring I guess. They can make any level of punishment work, they can cut back in the US and expand elsewhere to make up for the loss. Meanwhile ,CNOOC and Gazprom are doing great. Big bad corp makes for a nice villain but in a democratic country lack of good laws (bad voters!) is the problem. Should there have been a law compelling companies to listen to their scientists? Should there be criminal punishment of execs who spread any level if false information? What about media execs? Is the lobbying problem the root cause? It all seems to me lack of good voting or the US system of democracy being inadequate. I mean,it's not like oil companies use oil strictly for fossil fuels and it's not like civilization at the moment does not depend on fossip fuels. Less pitch forks and better laws is all I'm saying.