On Friday, it was revealed that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission would drop its investigation into ExxonMobil for the company’s “climate change risk disclosure” to investors. This means the SEC decided against trying to penalize the company over its disclosures and how it accounted for oil and gas assets.
There is a fulsome record compiled from FOI requests of New York’s Office of Attorney General, the NY State Comptroller, the NYC Comptroller, and Vermont Treasurer showing the use of those offices to compel “climate risk disclosure”. Which is the activists’ trade name for forcing ‘confessions’ by publicly traded (particularly energy) companies that man made global warming is a real, big threat of which they are a part, that their reserves are worth little to nothing in the inevitable carbon-constrained world, they’ve been telling non-truths in their filings to date and… cue the ‘climate’ securities tort bar. It is also the subject of recent federal FOIA litigation filed by Government Accountability & Oversight on behalf of the Institute for Energy Research, available here.
GAO’s Chris Horner wrote about the campaign here and about how it fits in to the larger picture, here.
As with the climate litigation industry in which Attorneys General have immersed themselves, with donors, activists and plaintiffs’ lawyers, the CRD campaign kicked off in 2012 with Rockefellers working through the NY OAG. Ceres and some public employee pension funds are involved, as is BlackRock with the green pressure group NRDC. Other Wall Street interests are also promoting the campaign, including from their positions participating on SEC advisory bodies.
Just last year, the New York Attorney General changed legal strategies in its investigation into ExxonMobil, claiming that the energy company had misled investors about how it accounts for the impact of climate change on its operations.
The SEC’s decision to close the investigation into the energy company calls into question the legitimacy of the New York AG’s investigation into the energy company, all of whose “climate” campaigning has come under fire after FOI productions (available on ClimateLitigationWatch.org) revealed what was transpiring. Watch ClimateLitigationWatch.org for more, and very damning information on this in the near future.