(New York Attorney General Letitia James. Credit: Flickr Creative Commons)New York State Attorney General Tish James withdrew two counts of fraud against ExxonMobil during her closing arguments in a case against the energy giant.
The two dismissed counts revolved around alleged underreporting of how the threat of both rising temperatures and changing public policies could affect Exxon’s bottom line. ExxonMobil investors began pressuring the company to disclose more information about climate change risks as far back as 2013. ExxonMobil had been long been using a projected cost of carbon to estimate how stricter climate policies might affect its finances, but an internal presentation brought to light the fact that the company was actually using two different versions of the projected cost – a “conservative” and a “non-conservative” view. James contended that Exxon has used one set of projected carbon costs to present to investors, while internal planners used a different set for evaluating its own investments.
According to a recent piece in Forbes, “the case that originated as a much-ballyhooed multi-state effort to prosecute ExxonMobil under the false allegation that it somehow knew all about greenhouse gas theory decades before Dr. James Hansen and then-Senator Al Gore started talking about it in the late 1980s, concludes with the Attorney General for the State of New York admitting that she can’t even prove that the company’s public disclosures about its bookkeeping damaged a single investor."
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