
NY A.G. Sues Exxonmobil for Defrauding Investors about Risk of Climate Laws - xoa
https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/ag-underwood-files-lawsuit-against-exxonmobil-defrauding-investors-regarding-financial
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xoa
Original title was 67 char too long for HN, I did my best to keep most of it
but if the mods have better ideas please change it.

This seems like an interesting and potentially legally more threatening (in
the immediate future at least) route to take in responsibility for global
warming. The ultimate harm will be massive but also highly distributed and
long after the fact, and the law around it nebulous. Even company PR to the
public isn't necessarily that binding about anything. But material financial
statements to investors by public companies and risk disclosures are very well
trod areas of law with significant risk for a company breaking its own
promises. This suit also appears to escape any sort of argument or debate
around global warming itself by going one level meta: it's just about
ExxonMobile's own statements about _laws and regulations_ regarding it, which
could be passed regardless of the state of the world since that's just
politics. It doesn't build in all the externalities at all, nor all the risk,
but requiring companies to at least be honest to investors is still a sort of
low hanging fruit that would turn the screws on them just a bit.

