Exxon, Koch, API ‘should be held liable’ for climate deception in Minnesota courts, brief argues

Three architects of climate denial — ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute — promoted the use of their fossil fuel products to Minnesotans through decades of fraudulent, deceptive, and misleading practices and should be held liable in Minnesota state courts, a newly filed legal brief from a coalition of academics and nonprofit environmental groups argues. 

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison filed a consumer protection lawsuit against the three fossil fuel entities in state court last year to hold them accountable for engaging in a “campaign of deception” about their products’ role in climate change. In a now-familiar delay tactic that’s been deployed in climate accountability lawsuits across the U.S., Exxon, Koch, and API have argued that the lawsuit should instead be heard in federal court. But a federal district court judge became the latest to reject that argument in March, sending Minnesota’s lawsuit back to state court. Now, Exxon, Koch, and API are appealing the lower court’s decision to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. 

In support of Minnesota’s lawsuit, a coalition of environmental groups — including the Center for Climate Integrity, Fresh Energy, MN350,  Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, and Union of Concerned Scientists  — and leading scholars of the fossil fuel industry’s history of climate deception — including Drs. Naomi Oreskes, Geoffrey Supran, Robert Brulle, Justin Farrell, and Benjamin Franta, and Stephan Lewandowsky — have filed an amicus brief to provide the Eighth Circuit with full documentation of the “conduct at the core” of Minnesota’s lawsuit. 

The brief provides evidence of how Exxon, Koch, and API knew about the climate risks associated with their fossil fuel products as early as the late 1950s and no later than 1968. It then lays out how the fossil fuel defendants worked to conceal that knowledge and publicly discredit climate science while promoting the unabated use of their products to the public and privately protecting their own assets from projected climate damages. 

In short: they knew, they lied, and they need to be held accountable. From the brief’s introduction: 

At least 50 years ago, [Exxon, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute] had information from their own internal research, as well as from the international scientific community, that the unabated extraction, production, promotion, and sale of their fossil fuel products would result in material dangers to the public.  Defendants failed to disclose this information or take steps to protect the public.  Instead, they acted to conceal their knowledge and discredit climate science, running misleading nationwide marketing campaigns and funding scientists and third-party organizations to exaggerate scientific uncertainty and promote contrarian theories, in direct contradiction to their research and actions taken to protect their assets from climate change impacts.  

Defendants’ coordinated, multi-front effort, demonstrated by their own documents and actions, justifies the claims that the state of Minnesota has asserted here as Plaintiff.  As early as the late 1950s and no later than 1968, Defendants had actual knowledge of the risks associated with fossil fuels.  In the decades that followed, Defendants took affirmative steps to sow doubt and uncertainty, in part by funding contrarian science that advanced alternative theories.  While they told Minnesotans that there was no reason for concern, Defendants took climate risks into account in managing their infrastructure — for example, by raising the height of their oil rigs to account for rising sea levels.  In taking these fraudulent, deceptive, and misleading actions, Defendants violated Minnesota’s state consumer protection statutes, as alleged by Plaintiff, and therefore should be held liable.

Read the entire brief here.