Eric Schneiderman, New York’s Attorney General, has launched an investigation of Exxon Mobil. But it isn’t your typical investigation. He is demanding documents going all the way back to 1970, when global cooling was still the popular environmental scare, that would show the company knew about global warming and failed to warn its investors.
Or so it seems. After all, this probe is supposed to be secret. But in the long tradition of politically ambitious New York attorneys general, Schneiderman has made sure the public knows just enough to assume guilt and support his crusade.
The apparent theory is that the oil giant defrauded investors by feigning ignorance about how global climate change could affect its profits. Even as it did so, it was funding opposition to green climate change policies.
The evidence? What is known at this point is that the company observed rising temperatures at its Arctic drilling sites decades ago. It responded by devising strategies for how to cope with or even benefit from worst-case changes in temperatures and weather patterns.
The problem with this conspiracy theory is that it doesn’t prove much even if it’s true. There is robust agreement among the majority of today’s scientists that global warming is true, but even now far less is known about its effects or timing. Exxon’s old research into changing Arctic climates made this very clear with its references to less predictable Arctic weather. Global climate models used today to forecast warming trends have proven to be notoriously imprecise, to put it kindly. Another way of putting it is that the models and the observed facts don’t match up — and in those circumstances it is the models, not the facts, that are wrong. Earth’s has not warmed in the way that the models predicted.
As for the effects of global warming on a particular business, this might as well be calculated through astrology. According to the Los Angeles Times’ recent reporting on Exxon’s old climate research — the report that supposedly inspired this probe — a warmer Arctic was expected to help Exxon’s business in some ways and harm it in others. Executives are even described as frustrated with the lack of solid conclusions about how to deal with the problem.
Even today, with much more agreement (both voluntary and coerced) on climate change than anything that existed in the 1990s, it is unclear whether or when climate change will affect any particular company’s bottom line.
The important thing to note about Schneiderman’s investigation is that it is not about business-related misrepresentations, but about the suppression of political advocacy. Schneiderman isn’t acting out of any selfless concern for investors, and there is no evidence that even a single shareholder lost a dime because of anything Exxon said or failed to say.
With his attention-grabbing investigation, Schneiderman is really trying to criminalize political activity that he disagrees with and to raise his own profile. Impressive guy, huh? Exxon at one point funded advocacy against climate alarmism, and it is being belatedly punished. Schneiderman hopes to use the power of the state to instill fear in anyone who would oppose policies that will harm human well-being, especially in the developing world, without doing much to change global temperatures anyway.
Scientific dissent should not be criminalized, even if it is demonstrably wrong. But how much more ridiculous it is to watch public officials try to criminalize dissent on policy that is very loosely based on scientific concerns.
