News & Analysis
May 29, 2020
Oil giant ExxonMobil lost yet another fight this week over which court is the proper forum to hear arguments about its deception on climate change.
Following a three-year investigation, in 2019, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey filed a consumer and investor fraud lawsuit against Exxon in state court, charging the fossil fuel company with misleading consumers and investors about its role in causing climate change. “We are suing to stop this illegal deception and penalize the company for its misconduct,” Healey said at the time.
As it has done in many other climate change lawsuits, the oil giant sought to move Healey’s complaint to federal court, where it believes it stands a better chance of beating the case. But yesterday a federal court in Boston ruled that the lawsuit belongs in state court, allowing Massachusetts to press ahead with presenting evidence about the company’s deception.
U.S. Judge William G. Young concluded that the issue in the case was not about planet-wide global warming, as Exxon argued, but simple economics. “[N]amely, has ExxonMobil been sufficiently candid with its investors and customers in Massachusetts about the simmering calamity of global warming? That question is properly for the courts of the Commonwealth [and not federal courts] to decide.”
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