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Mass. AG: Exxon Can’t Shield Itself from Climate Fraud Suit with Anti-SLAPP Law

December 17, 2020 Filed Under: Uncategorized

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey's climate investigation into Exxon was cleared by the Supreme Court
By Karen Savage

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey pointedly rebuked Exxon’s claim that her climate fraud suit against the company qualifies as a SLAPP suit intended to silence its “views” on climate change. The AG’s office is responding to the company’s attempt to shield itself from her lawsuit using a statute designed to protect citizens who protest. 

Massachusetts state law prohibits SLAPP lawsuits—which are designed to harass and intimidate those exercising their First Amendment rights, most often filed by corporations or other powerful entities in an attempt to silence activists, consumers, community advocates and journalists. The law is meant to protect those people, who often lack the resources to defend themselves against wealthy corporations.

“ExxonMobil, one of the world’s most powerful companies, now invokes a statute intended to shield people of modest means from meritless suits by large private interests that seek to punish those people for exercising their right to petition the government,” the AG’s office wrote in a brief made public Tuesday. “ExxonMobil is not a person of modest means and the Commonwealth is not a large private interest.”

After a three-year investigation, the AG filed suit in Massachusetts state court in 2019, alleging Exxon has known for decades that its products drive climate change, but misled consumers and investors to bolster its own profits. Exxon has tried repeatedly to shake Healey’s investigation and lawsuit. Thus far, all have failed.

Healey claims Exxon used deceptive advertising, failed to disclose climate-related risks to its investors and failed to disclose how catastrophic climate impacts from continued fossil fuel burning could threaten the global economy. The AG amended the suit earlier this year, accusing the oil giant of continuing to deceive shareholders about future demand for its products.

“Nothing in the text of the anti-SLAPP statute demonstrates that it extends to actions by the attorney general … to protect consumers and investors from unfair and deceptive acts and practices and advance the public interest,” the AG’s office told the court, adding that to do so would hamper law enforcement. 

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Fossil Fuel Lobbying Group Floats Model Legislation to Limit Climate Suits

December 11, 2020 Filed Under: Access to Courts, State Legislation, Uncategorized

American Legislative Exchange Council
By Karen Savage

A prominent group that lobbies for fossil fuel interests floated a draft of legislation at a recent meeting designed to make climate liability and other lawsuits based on public nuisance laws nearly impossible.

The draft Public Nuisance Reform Act was submitted to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) States and Nation Policy Summit, but was withdrawn before it could be finalized. Had the organization formally endorsed the proposal, it would have called for limiting corporations’ liability under state laws. It proposed that a corporation could only be held liable only if it caused “an unlawful condition and controls that unlawful condition at the time it violates an established public right.”

The draft policy would have prohibited claims based on actions regulated by local, state or federal agencies. It stated that municipalities could not file suit if the public nuisance stemmed from activity that was “expressly authorized or encouraged” by regulatory agencies and would have prohibited suits stemming from the “lawful manufacturing, distributing, selling, advertising, or promoting of a lawful product.” That would have meant activities like fossil fuel production and selling tobacco, because they are regulated by government agencies, would be immune from state laws protecting consumers from knowingly dangerous products.

The intent was to “ensure that the tort of public nuisance may be pursued in a manner consistent with its historical scope,” according to the now-withdrawn draft.

Doug Kysar, a deputy dean and professor at Yale Law School, said that notion is appalling.

“The draft bill is utterly disingenuous in its claim to be consistent with the history and purpose of the public nuisance cause of action,” Kysar said. “Public nuisance developed precisely in order to empower the sovereign to challenge harmful and unreasonable conduct in the absence of legislative or executive restrictions.”

ALEC, which has been called a “corporate bill mill,” writes and shares model bills, or policy, with state legislators, who are encouraged to copy and paste wording into bills they sponsor. Most, if not all, favor large corporations and attempt to limit efforts by local communities to curb corporate power. After the bills are introduced, ALEC representatives help state lawmakers with background research and strategize how to get the proposed legislation passed into state law.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Access to Courts, State Legislation, Uncategorized

DC: Oil Companies Are Twisting Climate Lawsuit to Keep It in Federal Court

November 18, 2020 Filed Under: Latest News, Uncategorized, Washington DC Lawsuit

By Karen Savage

In trying to get the District of Columbia’s climate fraud case against them moved to federal court, ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and Shell are mischaracterizing the suit and do not have a reasonable argument, according to D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine.

In a brief filed Monday, Racine said the case—which accuses the companies of violating D.C.’s Consumer Protection Act with a coordinated, decades-long campaign to mislead the public about the risks their products pose to the climate—belongs in state court, where it was filed in June.

The companies moved the case to federal court shortly after it was filed and argue that Racine is attempting to use the consumer protection act “as a vehicle to force defendants to discontinue or reduce their extraction, production, and sale of fossil fuels around the world.”

Racine pushed back on that contention, telling the court that the companies’ argument for federal jurisdiction “distorts the district’s complaint in an effort to convert this case into something it is not.”  

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Latest News, Uncategorized, Washington DC Lawsuit

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