We’ve reported on this counter-lawsuit before, but this article in Bloomberg yesterday raises the volume up to 11.
Exxon Sues the Suers in Fierce Climate-Change Case
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A ‘conspiracy’ was hatched in La Jolla, Calif., company says
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Exxon says the suits are violating its free speech rights
As climate-change lawsuits against the oil industry mount, Exxon Mobil Corp. is taking a bare-knuckle approach rarely seen in legal disputes: It’s going after the lawyers who are suing it.
The company has targeted at least 30 people and organizations, including the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts, hitting them with suits, threats of suits or demands for sworn depositions. The company claims the lawyers, public officials and environmental activists are “conspiring” against it in a coordinated legal and public relations campaign.
Exxon has even given that campaign a vaguely sinister-sounding name: “The La Jolla playbook.” According to the company, about two dozen people hatched a strategy against it at a meeting six years ago in an oceanfront cottage in La Jolla, Calif.
…
“The attorneys general have violated Exxon Mobil’s right to participate in the national conversation about how to address the risks presented by climate change,” said Dan Toal, a lawyer who represents Exxon. “That is the speech at issue here — not some straw man argument about whether climate change is real.”
BOOM. read the entire article here.
h/t to reader Allan MacRae
UPDATE: here is the report that came out of the meeting: http://www.climateaccountability.org/pdf/Climate%20Accountability%20Rpt%20Oct12.pdf
backup copy here: Climate Accountability Rpt Oct12 (PDF) h/t to Rud Istvan
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The obvious response of the alarmist community is to call Exxon’s actions a SLAPP. Surprisingly, to me at least, I could only find one website on the first page when I googled Exxon SLAPP. link
There are laws against lawyers engaging in frivilous lawsuits. There’s barratry:
There’s malicious prosecution but I think the AGs are immune to that.
There’s champerty and maintenance:
There’s also vexatious litigation
The alarmists point out that there’s nothing wrong with a group of lawyers getting together to coordinate a lawsuit. That’s fine for a single lawsuit. If a group of lawyers, AGs, and politicians get together to plan a coordinate campaign of lawsuits, IMHO it tips into harassment. They are using the courts to achieve a political end.
For about a decade, I followed groklaw. It covered lawsuits by a small software company, Caldera/SCO as it sued IBM, Novell, and others. I never ceased to be amazed at how SCO could keep their crap going through the courts. They stretched out their eventual bankruptcy in such a manner that their victims could not recover a single penny. As far as I could tell, no lawyers were sanctioned as a result. My take is that the whole mess is proof positive that the American legal system is seriously broken.
What do I expect from Exxon vs. AGs? I have no clue. I am, however, putting in a decade worth of popcorn in the pantry.
They may be immune from civil and criminal penalties for malicious prosecution, however they can be dis-barred. For one example, the DA that tried to prosecute the members of a university LaCross team for an alleged rape.
I guess I must have been off the planet when that happened. The case is sufficiently notorious that the DA, Mike Nifong, has a wiki page. If I have it correctly, DAs are immune from malicious prosecution charges. There’s no immunity for all the other crap that he perpetrated … what a mess!
And therein lies the problem; these things take years to end. This, however, offers perfect timing for the POTUS to start serious changes to the debate. First, he should openly challenge the CO2 endangerment rules from the EPA. If that would change, the damages claimed by the AGs and friends may have no basis. It also is time to dump the whole UN UNEP scam, and expose it for what it is. He has three more years (at least) to get things changed. I think Canada has had enough of our embarrassment and hopefully will vote him out. Let the dominos fall.
Make them prove the climate change charge. Consensus science is junk science. That should rattle them some having to prove the theory.
They don’t have to. All they have to do is wheel out the abysmal but true fact that all institution, journals and academia support it 100%. And they do.
They want you to believe that, but not every institute or university does support it. You just don’t hear about them.
I am asking as an information question, but what was the truth or otherwise of the articles that appeared a year or two ago that Exxon’s investigators had buried their own report on climate change back in the 1980s?
It was untrue but spun to make it look as though Exxon were sinister.
The email in question is printed in full in this Guardian article. The article itself is good example of twisting the facts to present the worst possible interpretation of the story.
The key point is that Exxon were aware of the risks of CO2 induced climate change. But that does not mean they knew that CO2 climate change was significant or even if it existed at all (it was 1981). Only that regulations caused by Green pressure groups could affect the bottom line.
Here is the relevant paragraph from the email:
It’s also not true that they tried to bury the reports.
Thanks, I read it as that in the 1980s, Exxon needed to understand the potential for concerns about climate change that might lead to regulation that would affect Natuna and other potential projects but Exxon did not have (no one at that time had) the science to say what the consequences of the venting of CO2 would be. What Exxon was concerned about is what regulations might be brought in when either the science developed subsequently or when another actor was successful in bringing in regulation even without the science to back it.
As one in the Australian mineral industry in the 1980s, I am surprised that any corporation, in hindsight, would say that they knew about climate change and CO2 adequately to make policy about it. For example, we searched for data and found very little after reading how excessive UV light was causing blindness in salmon fish in far Sth America, in Gore’s book “Earth in the Balance”.
We concluded that much of that book had hearsay science, far below the standards needed for policy formulation and so we didn’t make policy. Geoff.
When the Exxon law Department moves all wrong doers should beware.
Rex Tillerson is responsible for this situation. Rex is a soft corporate criminal. Rex is a globalist energy tax advocate. Now in the WH, Trump is a fool for bowing to pressure from conservative power brokers to employ Rex.
How much oil and gas do you use then?
Getting oil out of the ground does not cause global warming. It is burning it that does.
So, from a legal point of view, why are the AGs not going after car drivers, factories, govt offices, and everybody else who uses oil, gas and coal?
Is Eric Schneiderman really saying that Exxon knew about AGW, but New York did not when it was using oil to stay alive?
Paul, you are using logic to point out the absurdity of this. Warmunists and progressive politicians like Schneiderman abhor logic (and simple irrefutable facts). That’s why they want to shut down debate and silence bloggers like you and Anthony. But in the internet era outside Google and Facebook, they cannot win and, with facts and logic as our weapons, skeptics cannot lose. Just takes a while.
Which brings up in my mind this interesting article.
It seems like some people think you might be a criminal if you are a foreigner commenting on an American website about American politics (if you haven’t followed the proper procedures, the ones that got the Russian trolls in trouble for not following:
https://lawandcrime.com/opinion/does-mueller-indictment-mean-clinton-campaign-can-be-indicted-for-chris-steele/
Does Mueller Indictment Mean Clinton Campaign Can Be Indicted for Chris Steele?
“Mueller’s unprecedented prosecution raises three novel arguments: first, that speaking out about American politics requires a foreign citizen to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act; second, that speaking out about American politics requires a foreign citizen list their source and expenditure of funding to the Federal Election Commission;”
end excerpt
The rest of the article is very interesting, too.
We ought to have a thread on the Mueller indictment since our friends in other lands might be getting nervous after reading the above. They’ll be looking over their shoulders to see if Mueller is close behind. 🙂
https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download
The win would come a lot quicker if the oil companies just ceased shipments of all their products to the states or municipalities filing suit. All commercial vehicles that are using the offending product and or transporting it refused to enter the state or municipality. All ships using or transporting the offending product divert to ports in other states or municipalities. All aircraft using the offending product divert to other states or municipalities. All pipe lines carrying the offending product cut off to the states/municipalities have their flow diverted elsewhere. Yea, I know it’s not a practical and won’t happen but I like to think about what the rapid reaction would be if even one of those things occurred in response to this waste of time and resources. I would like seeing the idiot AGs and activist idiots go through what would look like the stages of death and dying very quickly.
TA February 17, 2018 at 7:06 pm: Mueller seems to be on firmer ground with the alleged fake IDs but it’s pretty thin (an expensive) gruel. The ads. that pop up seem to think I’m in Dagenham (UK, in fact about 40 miles east) so I think I’m safe.
“Is Eric Schneiderman really saying that Exxon knew about AGW, but New York did not when it was using oil to stay alive?”
Yes that’s exactly what they are saying and the precedent has already been set by tobacco cases. The evil Exxon are the experts and had in-depth knowledge from the outset about the negative consequences of the product they were peddling but went ahead anyway for unscrupulous profit. The poor utility Co’s and public were duped by the unscrupulous Exxon. The morons have even admitted culpability by playing along with the garbage science.
Now at this late hour they see the feeding frenzy building and are going into panic mode. I don’t blame them. Their idiotic appeasement policy has dumped them up to the nostrils in the ordure.
Really do think if at all possible all the oil players need to close ranks at this point and go major offensive including embargoes to all cities/states engaging in this type of open warfare.
There are controversies about the products produced during normal cigarette smoking combustion vs. what cigarette smoking machines combustion produce, and cigarette makers are accused of making cigarettes that behave differently in smoking machines.
Car makers are accusing of cheating the car tests. Euro car testing has long been criticized as very unnatural, unlike real driving.
Some ISP are accused of breaking net neutrality to discriminate in favor of connection speed test tools against useful uses of the connection.
But nobody is disputing the fact that fossil fuel combustion produces CO2.
The whole world has been told about climate change, global warming, whatever you want to call it for over 20 years. If Exxon has any guilt then so does everyone else – every single person who has used a fossil fuel including that hypocritical ex VP in the picture. Tobacco was different – addictive chemicals and the user was hurting overwhelming just him/her self. There’s nothing addictive about oil, gas and coal and yet the harm is supposedly universal so Oreskes 2012 argument simply does not compare. I’ll bet my house that Oreskes has used a fossil fuel after attending her meeting. Hypocrite, 100%. What the activists are looking for here is an admission, even unintentional, that Exxon thinks CAGW is proven beyond all doubt because then they, the activists, will be able to apply huge pressure to governments to change the western world’s economic system. Exxon lawyers will be quite aware the ramifications of going anywhere near such an admission.
I cannot imagine Exxon filing a lawsuit like this had Hillary won the presidential election.
Are US legal systems really so in thrall to political masters? The law is meant to be blind.
Now the current predicament of her fundraiser, Harvey Weinstein, is a different story.
The fact that by the time this reaches the Supreme Court the Trump appointees may dominate it.
I believe Exxon sell petrol as Esso (and Texaco?) in the U.K. so I will make a point of using their petrol stations as a gesture of support. Good luck to them.
Used to be. Now either Exxon or Mobil branded gas stations. But a good idea.
It’s turned into a battle over a non problem and the wrong problem.
So what if Exon did know?
Knowing that the last 4 decades would feature the best weather and climate for most life on this planet in the last 1,000 years (the last time it was this warm globally) carried with it, exactly what responsibility?
Preparing farmers/crop producers so they would have much larger storage facilities for the unexpectedly massive crop yields and supplies?
That and the greening of our planet has been the biggest effect from the slight beneficial warming and huge benefit from CO2 fertilization.
Maybe they should have known that climate science would be hijacked for a political agenda and tax payers would be footing the bill and entities that got in the way would be attacked, mischaracterized, vilified and crushed for having an opinion that did not line up with theirs?
They very well know now that is the plan.
The response should be to expose the plan and planners via the weaknesses in the science………..which is mostly still based on a speculative theory that is represented by mathematical equations fed into super computers which project the next 100 years worth of climate and even more absurdly, regional weather.
Take away the simulation of a potentially catastrophic future climate in the distant future and we should ask……..what have been the actual damages that could have been avoided the past 40 years if we knew, 40 years ago that climate models would be too warm and the planet would be greening up and every extreme weather event(that has happened before) would be blamed on humans burning fossil fuels and “carbon” emissions?
So should we have started getting it wrong sooner?
Should we have started exaggerating the weather and climate sooner?
Should we have started indoctrinating an earlier generation into the human caused catastrophic climate change religion, so that there would not be so many “deniers” today?
“Exxon says the suits are violating its free speech right”
The suit violates free speech right? Or is it the “regulation” (*) of finance and the “protection” of the investors by civil servants?
The problem I see is the idea that investors need to be protected by a body (beside being protected from obvious frauds like usurpation, fake titles, fake claims).
You end up with a “Ministry of truth” and “Ministry of final predictions of the future”.
(*) French: “réglementation”, not the “invisible hand” obviously
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/08-205.html
The whole analysis is worth reading.
It is looking more and more as if the courts are where the climate debate must be argued. Argument is impossible in academia, the arguers are censored in the journals. The same is largely true for legislatures.
Only the courts have rules of evidence.
The courts do not want the role, but it seems inevitable. Mann’s case against Tim Ball was dismissed on tangential grounds. Tim’s lawyers undoubtedly advised the weasel out for cost reasons. Mr. Mann’s use of data upside down needs to be entered into evidence.
US courts have discovery, too.
This could prove annoying for some so-called “universities”.
If all the smug people in the world emigrated to their own island, named it Smugland and held an election to install a leader based on his smugness, Al Gore would win by such a margin that he would be declared President-For-Life and referred to thereafter as Your Smugness Most High.
As the first exhibit for my hypothesis, I submit the photo illustrating this article.
Someone said of an MSM broadcast talking head: “Never knowingly out-snugged.”
Out smugged by ‘Smugglypuff’ perhaps.
High time. Leave no doubt. None. No quarter. No prisoners.
I’m certainly intrigued to see which particular line of argument Exxon chooses to adopt. There are many to choose from but presumably they have to be specific and choose only one of them in court?
As others have said, the strategic appeasement of the alarmists on the science front will still likely come back to bite Exxon and the whole industry. Just because fossil fuel products are too important to abandon, that doesn’t mean corporations will be allowed to make reasonable profits and returns on investment in the future. Donald Trump is probably only a breathing space and there is a high probability of later administrations being just as antithetical as Obama’s, or worse. This current bunch may lose in court, but along with EPA-Sierra-Greenpeace they are all still cooking up alternative schemes for how they are going to suck every last drop of blood from the patient. And they are doing it 9 till 5 on the public dime.
Serious long term investors in the industry really do need to get it into their skulls: They are coming for you.
The best approach in the future will still be to argue that the human effect is small. This of course has always been the most likely outcome, but who is going to argue the scientific case in public? The industry has done nothing to support those scientists brave enough to have done so. It might still have the opportunity to fund the unbiased scientists remaining in the climate field, but most of them have gone or learned how to shut up. It probably needs wealthy philanthropists to individually fund permanent positions for selected scientists who can demonstrate independence from the “97%-ers” because the climate-enforcers cabal has effectively removed all potential sources of dissent within the publicly-funded arena.
@Michael hart
“. It might still have the opportunity to fund the unbiased scientists remaining in the climate field, but most of them have gone or learned how to shut up.”
Somewhat off-topic, but an analogous phenomenon was seen in the UK, amongst groups studying Aluminum toxicity. In this case, the bad guys were not greenie radicals, but non-ideological Aluminum Industry corporations.
Here is professor Exley, one of the few who wasn’t scared away
from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ox-AjKCeA0 starting 16:53
“So that’s my philosophy (silica rich water consumption to combat aluminum toxicity) and why I’m more than happy to support a company who have been brave enough to continue their colaboration with me. Because people like me are not the most popular people in the world; and some of the governments, {unintelligible} charities, everyone who’s in the pocket of the Aluminium industry, believe you me, that’s more or less everybody. And so it does take a degree of bravery or stupidity to remain in my camp… The problem is I have lost – not literally – many researchers around the world who have not been able to continue their work in aluminium simply because they’ve been told by their bosses to stop. It is that absolutely true, and is the case.
In the UK, 20 something years ago, we host meetings every 2 years called the
Q (?) meetings of Aluminium. Our first meeting is in 1995 with 25 groups in the UK working on aluminium in 1995. The next Q (?) meeting on aluminium, will be Q 12, which will be in Vancouver, which will be in March this year. There’s one group in the UK working on {unintelligible, but from context must mean “working on Aluminium”}, and you know which one it is. {laughter, because it is obviously Exley’s group}.
If Exxon play this right and put the thin edge of the wedge into the right place, the cases that follow will open up a grand canyon to exploit.
A pity it’s not about climate.
Post Al Gore’s monthly oil, gas and elec bills
Go get ’em !!
This is long overdue. It’s time the rest of them (e.g., Royal Dutch Shell, Total, Statoil, BP and ENI ) figured out that appeasing the Klimate Krazies will only lead to more extortion and harassment.
In the Northeast, they are very smug about stopping fracking in NY state (and more) and stopping pipelines all over. Which means that in really cold times they are getting their gas….from Russia!!! By ship. But it costs lots more (duh). Mission accomplished.
You should sanction Russia (for posting images of Jesus Christ on the Web apparently) and let these people die in the cold. That’ll teach Vladimir Putin a lesson!
To some extent Exxon is missing the point of the lawsuits. Those suing are convinced that Exxon caused climate change (ignoring that consumers used the oil) which they also claim has caused them damages. There is no proof of any damages to date. Those suing are also under the mistaken belief that if they could shut down Exxon, then no one would buy oil anymore, and climate change would be solved.
No, the idea is that Exxon “knew” something about climate that academia ignored, and kept others in the dark. Contrast with the claim NSA knew something about cryptanalysis that academia ignored and used this knowledge to alter ciphers recommended by NSA to weaken these.(*)
There is no evidence Exxon had climate research significantly in advance of academic research. And that claim destroys the whole “established science” narrative anyway:
– the science is firmly established, has been for a century;
– more research spending is needed to have some idea what’s going to happen;
– we may or may not be able to explain the pause, or other climate changes…
(*) Indeed NSA knew something about cryptanalysis that academia ignored, specifically the differential cryptanalysis approach and how to apply it to DES (Data Encryption Standard): the design of S-boxes in DES is optimized to resist differential cryptanalysis:
https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/16/how-were-the-des-s-box-values-determined
NSA made DES stronger, not weaker.
Blame Rex Tillerson. When he became Secretary of State he wanted the US to sign onto the Paris agreement – because he believes in globalism and global warming. The previous head of Exxon was switched on to the climate con and funded sceptics personally. But now that it is fighting back, belatedly, Exxon should follow on with a scientific education campaign demonstrating how beneficial increased CO2 is. And they should send a delegation to Pruitt to encourage him to end the endangerment finding.
Hopefully this means that Exxon is learning the fallacy of appeasement. It’s never more that a short-term solution – if that – and it simply encourages and reinforces attacks.
Bottom line – there is no ‘meeting half-way’ when the other side wants you expunged from existence.
As a customer of Exxon I fully expect they will defend the legal sale of products that are responsible for
massive increases in the quality of life on earth but I don’t expect them to brag about it in their report to shareholders . I hope the warming trend that got us out of the current ice age continues . Thank you Exxon and all fossil fuel companies for the added bi- product of fossil fuel
our friend CO2 .
The purpose of eco anarchists , like the tiny clique of AG’s, is to try and bully Exxon and ultimately other fossil fuel companies into paying shut up money to bankrupt States . The real issue is the gross incompetence of politicians who have squandered $Trillions and are now hoping someone will bail them out .
I sincerely hope that the attorney general and governor of my state of Washington are called out by Exxon-Mobil for participating in these unlawful acts.
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