The state of New Jersey filed suit against multiple major oil and gas companies Tuesday, accusing some of the world’s wealthiest energy companies of deceiving the public about fossil fuels and their contribution to climate change.
A 200-page complaint, led by the office of state Attorney General Matthew Platkin, accuses five integrated oil and gas giants and the industry’s leading trade association of engaging in a decadeslong “coordinated campaign of disinformation and deception” about how the combustion of their products increase greenhouse gas emissions and warm the globe. The complaint, filed in New Jersey Superior Court, also accuses the defendants of deceiving consumers about the extent of their investments in alternative energy sources and seeks compensatory, natural resource, and punitive damages for the state and its residents.
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The state accuses the defendant companies, which include Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips, and the American Petroleum Institute, of “systematically concealing and denying their knowledge that fossil fuel consumption could have a catastrophic impact on the climate.”
“This successful climate deception campaign had the purpose and effect of inflating and sustaining the market for fossil fuels, which — in turn — drove up greenhouse gas emissions, accelerated global warming, and brought about devasting climate change impacts” to New Jersey, the complaint said.
Platkin, in a statement of his own, said it’s “long overdue that the facts be aired in a New Jersey court, and the perpetrators of the disinformation campaign pay for the harms they’ve caused.”
The New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs and the state’s Department of Environmental Protection are also listed as plaintiffs.
With the suit, New Jersey joins a host of other Democratic-led jurisdictions, and Democrats in Congress, in an ongoing legal campaign to punish large oil and gas companies for climate change. Rhode Island, Massachusetts, the city of Baltimore, the District of Columbia, and other Democratic-led jurisdictions have leveled similar charges in court.
The Democratic-led House Oversight Committee has also held hearings during this Congress at which leadership accused past and present executives of spreading disinformation about fossil fuels and climate change.
Last November, outgoing Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney issued subpoenas to all defendants in the New Jersey suit, with the exception of ConocoPhillips, demanding access to internal documents so the committee could “get to the bottom of the oil industry’s disinformation campaign.”
Defendant energy companies have disputed the charges of deception leveled by congressional Democrats and by those brought in formal legal complaints by various jurisdictions. In general, they’ve argued that company operations were aligned with the best available climate science at any given time and that their products have made modern life possible.
“The record of the past two decades demonstrates that the industry has achieved its goal of providing affordable, reliable American energy to U.S. consumers while substantially reducing emissions and our environmental footprint. Any suggestion to the contrary is false,” a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute said in response to New Jersey’s complaint.
New Jersey’s decision to file the complaint in state court is notable, considering active legal battles in which energy companies accused of liability for climate change seek the Supreme Court’s intervention to determine the proper legal venue for such cases to be decided.
Suncor Energy and Exxon, which were sued initially in state court by Colorado localities seeking damages for climate change, have petitioned the Supreme Court to throw out an earlier federal appellate ruling that remanded the case back to the state court level.
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Energy companies have argued that state-level climate cases are preempted by federal laws and must be heard in federal courts.