Attorney General Eric Schneiderman subpoenaed the company on Wednesday evening, demanding extensive financial records, emails and other documents, the attorney general’s spokesman Stephen Barton told Reuters.
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The New York attorney general has launched an investigation into whether Exxon Mobil Corp XOM.N misled the public about the risks of climate change or its investors about how those risks may hurt the company’s oil business. Last month, a broad array of environmental groups demanded the U.S. Department of Justice investigate Exxon after a series of news reports said the company’s own scientists raised worries about global warming decades ago only to see their findings doubted by executives. Goldman Sachs set a $89.00 target price on shares of Exxon Mobil and gave the company a “buy” rating in a research note on Monday.
An Exxon Mobil spokesperson said the company is “assessing our response” to the subpoena, but dismissed reports that the company had sought to cover up climate change research as “inaccurate distortions of ExxonMobil’s almost 40-year history of climate research”.
The Exxon Mobil investigation might expand further, to encompass other oil companies, according to the people with knowledge of the case, though no additional subpoenas have been issued to date.
Thepeople spoke on the condition they not be identified, saying they were not authorized to speak publicly.
These calls often cite the work of Inside Climate News, the Guardian, and the Los Angeles Times, which have published several reports highlighting evidence that Exxon might have known about the impact fossil fuels had on the environment for decades – way back in the ’70s and ’80s – and drifted away from such research to focus on funding research that denies the existence of climate change. The attorney general’s office has also been investigating coal company Peabody Energy for the past two years, according to the Times report, for similar reasons; the Exxon Mobil probe could be expanded to include other energy companies. The news was originally reported by the New York Times.
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This could open up years of litigation and settlements in the same way that tobacco litigation did, also spearheaded by attorneys general, said Brandon L. Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia law school. Whether the same smoking guns will emerge, we dont know yet.
