On Wednesday, New York supreme court justice Barry Ostrager ordered ExxonMobil and its accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), to produce 40 years’ worth of the energy giant’s documents pertaining to climate-change. Ostrager’s decision sets a dangerous precedent: A public-policy debate can be settled through judicial fiat.
The ruling comes in response to an investigation opened last November by New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman. He, along with other members of an attorney general–led coalition known as “Green 20,” allege that the company suppressed its scientific findings about the consequences of burning fossil fuels for the climate. Schneiderman holds that by doing so the company would have violated New York’s anti-securities fraud statute, the Martin Act, because it would have deceived investors. ExxonMobil attorneys argue that Schneiderman’s subpoena is void because any lawsuit should be filed in Texas where ExxonMobil is headquartered, and Texas has accountant-client privilege laws that would shield the company from Schneiderman’s subpoena. Ostrager ruled against that legal argument. New York is the correct jurisdiction since the company does business in the state, he argued, and even if the lawsuit was in Texas, ExxonMobil attorneys had a flawed interpretation of the state’s accountant-client privilege.
Wednesday’s ruling marks the first, and what ought to be the only, victory for Schneiderman in what is bound to be a long, politically motivated lawsuit.
Green 20 is not a legal coalition; it’s a political coalition that has abused its law-enforcement authority in the context of a public-policy debate. From the get go, Green 20 members explicitly stated their common interest: “Limiting climate change and ensuring the dissemination of accurate information about climate change.” Virgin Islands attorney general Claude Walker, a member of the coalition, said that the goal of his ExxonMobil probe was to “make it clear to our residents as well as the American people that we have to do something transformational [on climate change].” He proceeded to label climate-change skeptics as “selfish”; after all, they are acting “to destroy the planet.” Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey has also demonstrated the extent to which she has been playing politics, as I previously wrote for National Review Online:
A month before the subpoenas were even issued, Healey forcefully highlighted the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s climate-change-policy achievements while promising to hold ExxonMobil accountable for its supposed fraudulent activity. That timetable and Healey’s overheated rhetoric make it clear that the “investigation” has been nothing but a witch hunt from the very beginning — with politics, not the law, in mind.
Schneiderman, Healey, Walker, and other members of Green 20 have made ExxonMobil and climate-change skeptics out to be the enemy, all while political-advocacy organizations have aided their agenda by attempting to sway public opinion. In January 2016, the Rockefeller Family Fund held a meeting with environmental activists, and, according to the Wall Street Journal, the agenda was “to establish in public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm.” To date, ExxonMobil has released over 1 million documents related to its climate research, none of which provide evidence that it pushed humanity toward climate chaos.
