New York State\u2019s Attorney General has one of the nation\u2019s most powerful legal tools to take on corporate wrongdoers.\u00a0 The tool is the \u201cMartin Act,\u201d which grants the Attorney General expansive law enforcement powers to conduct investigations of securities fraud and bring civil or criminal actions against alleged violators.<\/p>\n
The nearly 100-years old Martin Act was not used frequently until then-Attorney General Elliot Spitzer began using it to bring civil cases against Wall Street firms. \u00a0It has since become the basis for a number of high-profile cases.<\/p>\n
It was that tool used last week by Attorney General Barbara Underwood to initiate legal action against oil giant ExxonMobil.\u00a0 The lawsuit, based on a three-year investigation, alleges that ExxonMobil deceived investors on how the company was addressing the financial threats posed by a warming planet.<\/p>\n
The investigation is effectively a response to media reports on how Exxon knew decades ago that the burning of fossil fuels would heat up the planet to dangerous levels.<\/p>\n
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, cutting-edge research on climate change was conducted by Exxon. \u00a0The oil giant even equipped one of its supertankers, the Esso Atlantic, as an oceanic laboratory to measure for CO2<\/sub> in the air and water.<\/p>\n The company\u2019s studies from decades ago confirmed the role of fossil fuels in global warming, and Exxon researchers at the time warned top executives of the potentially catastrophic effect \u2013 risks that posed threats to millions of humans and civilization itself.<\/p>\n Yet, instead of acting responsibly, the company spent the next two decades discrediting the findings of its own researchers and others who were increasingly raising the alarm as well.\u00a0 Exxon and other oil, coal and gas companies spent millions of dollars to advance fake science, support front groups, pay lobbying expenses and make campaign contributions to undermine the science and to block any political momentum emerging from the consensus that global warming was real.<\/p>\n Losing those decades has resulted in the near-crisis situation that the planet is in today.\u00a0 Recently, the world\u2019s climate experts warned that energy policies must change \u2013 both dramatically and quickly \u2013 within a decade if the world has any chance of minimizing the harm from climate change.<\/p>\n The success of Exxon and others in building a powerful force to undermine science and elect climate change deniers has pushed the world to the precipice.<\/p>\n Whether the world will heed the new warning is debatable.\u00a0 President Trump and the Congressional leadership ignore \u2013 in fact mock \u2013 the science on climate change and advance policies that will accelerate the global warming day of reckoning.<\/p>\n It is likely that the national policies of the United States will lead to unimaginable suffering for hundreds of millions \u2013 perhaps billions \u2013 of people, all of which would have been avoidable if Exxon had been a responsible corporate citizen.<\/p>\n Since the legal tool is the Martin Act, the Attorney General\u2019s lawsuit is framed less about climate change and more about the impact that Exxon\u2019s climate change deceptions had on investors and would-be investors.<\/p>\n The AG stated, \u201cExxon built a facade to deceive investors into believing that the company was managing the risks of climate change regulation to its business when, in fact, it was intentionally and systematically underestimating or ignoring them, contrary to its public representations.\u201d<\/p>\n The Attorney General said that Exxon\u2019s fraud had a direct impact on New York investors. \u00a0For example, New York State\u2019s pension funds were placed at risk.<\/p>\n Exxon called the lawsuit \u201ctainted\u201d and meritless.<\/p>\n We are, and will continue to be, feeling the harmful effects of global warming resulting from the burning of fossil fuels.\u00a0 It is important that those responsible \u2013 corporate, individual and political \u2013 are held accountable for their actions.\u00a0 Whether the suit brought by the New York Attorney General is successful or not, the world is learning more and more about the deceptions of the fossil fuel industry.\u00a0 Hopefully, as that knowledge becomes widely public, it will turn into the power needed to force the actions necessary to avert climate disaster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" New York State\u2019s Attorney General has one of the nation\u2019s most powerful legal tools to take on corporate wrongdoers.\u00a0 The tool is the \u201cMartin Act,\u201d which grants the Attorney General expansive law enforcement powers to conduct investigations of securities fraud and bring civil or criminal actions against alleged violators. The nearly 100-years old Martin Act […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2133"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2137,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2133\/revisions\/2137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}