A view of the Exxon Mobil refinery in Baytown, Texas, Sept. 15, 2008.
Photo: jessica rinaldi/ReutersHere we go again. The Attorneys General of Minnesota and Washington, D.C., recently filed lawsuits accusing oil companies of covering up climate change for decades. Last winter New York state finally lost its anti-Exxon legal crusade, after nearly four years of investigating. A Democratic-appointed state judge tossed that lawsuit, calling its claims “hyperbolic.”
The new cases, against Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, Chevron and Koch Industries, dredge up old internal documents, but they look political from top to bottom. Minnesota’s suit, focused on Exxon, helpfully includes links to source files. Clicking through reveals so many tendentious quotations that Attorney General Keith Ellison refutes his own claims.
In a 1978 memo, the lawsuit says, an Exxon scientist “urged” his bosses to begin “trying to define and counteract the ‘CO2 problem.’” The memo actually suggests Exxon “take the lead in trying to define whether a long-term CO2 problem really exists and, if so, what counter measures would be appropriate.”
A 1979 memo, the lawsuit says, reached “the damning conclusion that the present trend of fossil-fuel consumption would cause dramatic effects before 2050.” But the document says this is a “widely held theory.” An image of the memo, embedded in the lawsuit, cuts off the succeeding paragraph, which calls this view “very speculative” and built on “very ill-defined” effects that are “not well understood.” The memo also says it “is not obvious” that climate changes “would be all bad or all good.”
A 1996 article in an Exxon internal publication, the lawsuit says, insists “that the greenhouse effect is ‘definitely a good thing.’” Yes, but that’s in the context of explaining how gases like CO2 trap heat: “If they didn’t, the earth would be frigid, desolate and uninhabitable.” Then the article takes up more nuanced arguments, such as: “Technological advances will make greenhouse emissions reductions easier in the future.” Fracking, anyone?
And on it goes. Mr. Ellison faults oil companies for donating to the American Enterprise Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and other such “climate denial groups.” Minnesota’s claimed damages range from extra heat-exposure emergencies (was there a drop in cold exposures?) to assertions that high temperatures can “lead to crop damage.” The lawsuit mentions the Red River flood of 1997. Was it caused by climate change? “Scientists don’t know for sure,” Minnesota Public Radio reported in a 2017 retrospective.
The lawsuit reads like an ambitious politician’s attempt to cherry-pick from decades of debate on a shifting issue. The case brought by Karl Racine, the D.C. Attorney General, is similar. It cites some of the same files and attacks oil companies’ advertising as “greenwashing.” If the public weren’t misled, it says, “people might purchase less fossil fuel products, or decide to buy none at all.”
Where’s the evidence for that? Alarming climate headlines aren’t scarce, yet voters keep rejecting a carbon tax. Climate change is such a thorny issue precisely because fossil fuels have powered the economy since the Industrial Revolution, and few Americans will sign up to cut their standard of living.
One defendant in the Minnesota lawsuit operates the Pine Bend Refinery, which pipes jet fuel to the Minneapolis airport. Mr. Ellison was in Congress when many of these industry memos were published years ago. Did he announce that he would henceforth commute to Washington, D.C., by electric car?
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