DALLAS — ExxonMobil is attempting to use Texas law to “target and intimidate its critics on climate change,” according to a new report from The Guardian newspaper.
The story reports that ExxonMobil, based in Irving, is claiming that lawsuits that focus on the company’s history of denying and casting doubt on the science of climate change violate the U.S. Constitution's guarantees of free speech.
Several local governments in California are seeking billions in compensation from Exxon and 17 other oil companies for disasters caused by climate change, like wildfires and floods.
Those communities, led by the city of Imperial Beach, allege Exxon “wrongfully and falsely promoted, campaigned against regulation and concealed the hazards of use of their fossil fuel products.”
The Guardian story, published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story, reports:
The US’s largest oil firm is asking the Texas supreme court to allow it to use the law, known as rule 202, to pursue legal action against more than a dozen California municipal officials. Exxon claims that in filing lawsuits against the company over its role in the climate crisis, the officials are orchestrating a conspiracy against the firm’s first amendment rights.
A successful use of Texas Rule 202 could compel California officials to come to Texas and face questioning from Exxon’s legal team. In court records, Exxon claims to the Texas Supreme Court, that questioning these officials is necessary to collect evidence of “potential violations of ExxonMobil’s rights in Texas to exercise its First Amendment privileges.”
ExxonMobil responded to WFAA's request for comment by referring back to its legal filing that says it seeks to "to determine whether the California suits were baseless and brought in bad faith as a pretext to suppress the Texas energy sector's Texas-based speech and associational activities regarding climate change and to gain access to documents that Exxon keeps in Texas."
Texas’s Gov. Greg Abbott, has written a letter to the state’s supreme court supporting Exxon. He writes that California communities are attempting “to suppress the speech of eighteen Texas-based energy companies on the subject of climate and energy policies.”
“When out-of-state officials try to project their power across our border, as respondents have done by broadly targeting the speech of an industry crucial to Texas, they cannot use personal jurisdiction to scamper out of our courts and retreat across state lines,” Abbott wrote.
WFAA-TV has previously reported how Texans face greater risks of heat, drought and hurricanes, but no government agency in the Abbott administration has any plans to tackle future threats of climate change.
The governor’s office has not yet responded to a request for comment.
Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard professor and co-author of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, told The Guardian that “Exxon had a long history of attempting to bully its critics into silence.”
“Now that the arguments have moved into the legal sphere, this feels to me like an extension of the sort of harassment, bullying and intimidation that we’ve seen in the scientific sphere for the last two decades,” she said.
Oreskes told The Guardian that the legal strategy is also part of a broader public relations campaign to paint the company as a victim of radical environmentalists and opportunistic politicians when Exxon argues that it should be heralded for its efforts to combat the climate crisis.
“Exxon Mobil has for a long time now tried to make themselves out to be the victim, as if somehow they’re the innocent party here,” she told The Guardian.