If top prosecutors in New York State have their way now, conniving climate killers like Exxon Mobil, British Petroleum and Shell Oil are headed down tobacco road.
That’s long overdue, says a former Clinton White House aide, who believes the oil industry’s fraudulent and decades long climate-change denial campaign may not only have permanently compromised the planet, but made them “vulnerable” as well -- “to legal challenges.”
Litigation and climate experts are comparing New York’s landmark investigation into Exxon et al with the probes that led to massive class action suits against tobacco giants -- holding them ruinously accountable for false claims which irreparably harmed generations of smokers.
In this case, however, the victims number well into the billions worldwide. The majority of whom unwittingly participated in destroying global ecosystems by relying on phony assurances from energy kingpins that the unbridled burning of fossil fuels “wasn’t harming the environment.”
According to NY State’s preliminary findings, that deceptive and injurious disinformation also hurt investors, and was started decades ago when oil execs financed independent research showing them conclusively that runaway fossil-fuel consumption would be the death of Earth and its inhabitants.
Worse, companies like Exxon, BP, and Shell then aggressively lobbied American lawmakers to block and even dismantle environmental protections, armed with intentionally erroneous “scientific data” that *debunked* climate change.
Faced this decade with overwhelming proof of global degradation, such as epic polar melts, mega-storms, floods, mass die-offs and droughts, energy corporations have been backing away slowly from that illegal approach.
But internal records show they long ago acknowledged behind closed doors that owning up to their Big Lie would be, by now, too little too late to save our warming planet.
Eponymous Rox
Criminal Fraud, Global Warming, Conspiracy
