Former Vice President Al Gore formally launched his comeback on Tuesday as the nation’s leading climate change crusader, joining New York and several other states in investigating Exxon Mobil and other energy companies for covering up the reality of global warming.
“Years from now, this meeting by [New York] Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and his colleagues here today may well be looked back upon as a real turning point,” Gore said. He said Tuesday’s action is “the best, most hopeful step” to contain global warming, in going after commercial interests that have been “deceiving the American people, communicating in a fraudulent way, about the reality of the climate crisis and the dangers it poses.”
The former vice president under President Bill Clinton made a name for himself in the 2000s as a champion against climate change with his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”
The probe that Gore announced, and Schneiderman is leading, would investigate if Exxon Mobil and other fossil fuel companies committed fraud in lying about the effects of climate change, even after the companies’ own internal investigations may have shown manmade emissions were harming the Earth’s atmosphere.
“Financial damages alone may be insufficient,” said Schneiderman, given the effects climate change is having globally. “The First Amendment does not give you the right to commit fraud.”
Gore and Schneiderman made the announcement with 16 other state attorneys general from Vermont to the U.S. Virgin Islands at a press conference with 16 other attorneys general to discuss climate change initiatives the states could work on. The conference also was meant to discuss the states’ joint filing in federal appeals court on Tuesday in support of the Obama administration’s far-reaching Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of the president’s climate change agenda.
The climate plan directs states to cut their greenhouse gas emissions a third over the next decade. Thirty states are suing to kill the climate plan.
