(C) Minnesota Reformer
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Supreme Court lets Minnesota climate lawsuit go forward [1]
['Christopher Ingraham', 'More From Author', '- January']
Date: 2024-01
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected a plea by ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute and Koch Industries to move a high profile Minnesota lawsuit from state to federal court.
Minnesota is one of several states and municipalities suing oil companies over deceptive advertising and messaging practices intended to mislead consumers about the harmful environmental effects of fossil fuel burning. Those companies have spent the past several years attempting to convince federal judges to move the cases out of state jurisdiction but have been unanimously rebuffed by the courts.
“This decision is another step forward for Minnesota’s efforts to hold fossil fuel giants accountable for their climate lies and the harm they’ve caused,” said Richard Wiles, president of the advocacy group Center for Climate Integrity, in a statement. “Big Oil companies will continue fighting to escape justice, but for the third time in a year, the U.S. Supreme Court has denied their desperate pleas to overturn the unanimous rulings of every single court to consider this issue.”
In June 2020, Attorney General Keith Ellison filed a lawsuit claiming consumer fraud, false statements and deceptive trade practices by the oil companies. The suit draws on now-publicly available internal documents to show that they were aware of the scientific consensus on climate change as far back as the 1970s, and that they then embarked on a disinformation campaign to sow doubt and uncertainty about that consensus among the public.
“Despite their superior understanding of climate change science … Defendants did not disseminate this information to the public or consumers. Instead, they engaged in a conspiracy to misrepresent the scientific understanding of climate change, the role of Defendants’ products in causing climate change, the potential harmful consequences of climate change, and the urgency of action required to mitigate climate change,” the suit alleges.
An internal Exxon document from 1988, for instance, states that the “Exxon position” is to “emphasize uncertainty in scientific conclusions regarding the potential enhanced Greenhouse effect” and to “resist overstatement and sensationalization of potential Greenhouse effect which could lead to noneconomic development of nonfossil fuel resources.”
The companies and their industry allies ran numerous print advertisements denying the reality of global warming, while acknowledging it internally. Advertorials in leading newspapers like the New York Times were a key part of that strategy.
Ellison’s lawsuit alleges all of these actions misled Minnesota consumers, resulting in increased fossil fuel consumption and all of the well-documented harm to the state’s people and environment that followed.
“While the Attorney General is entitled to disagree with particular statements about climate and energy policy,” the oil companies wrote in one of their first filings in the case, “he is not entitled to use state power to suppress speech and deter free association as part of a coordinated campaign to change federal climate and energy policy.”
The overall legal strategy against the fossil fuel industry – dozens of lawsuits filed against powerful industry forces in several states – recalls the successful campaign to hold the tobacco industry accountable for its own deceptions in the latter half 20th century.
Minnesota played a role in those lawsuits as well.
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https://minnesotareformer.com/briefs/supreme-court-lets-minnesota-climate-lawsuit-go-forward/
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