New York Loses ExxonMobil Climate Fraud Lawsuit in Major Accountability Failure

On December 10, 2019, Justice Barry Ostrager of the New York State Supreme Court ruled that New York Attorney General Letitia James “failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that ExxonMobil made any material misrepresentations” regarding climate change risks to investors. The decision dismissed New York’s landmark lawsuit filed in October 2018, which accused ExxonMobil of defrauding investors by misleading them about financial risks the company faced from climate change regulations. The verdict represented a major accountability failure despite documentary evidence from the #ExxonKnew investigations showing the company’s decades of climate science knowledge and subsequent denial funding.

Narrow Case Framing Doomed Prosecution

The New York case focused narrowly on whether Exxon presented investors with different projections about future climate regulations than it used internally—a challenging securities fraud theory requiring proof of specific investor harm. This framing avoided the broader question of whether Exxon’s decades of funding climate denial while knowing the science constituted fraud. The Attorney General’s office had to prove not just that Exxon knew about climate change (which was well-documented), but that the company’s specific financial disclosures to investors misrepresented its internal cost projections for potential carbon regulations. This technical approach made it difficult to leverage the most damaging evidence from #ExxonKnew investigations about Exxon’s systematic campaign to manufacture scientific doubt.

Evidence of Decades of Deception Deemed Insufficient

Despite internal Exxon documents from 1977 showing scientists warning executives about CO2 warming the planet, and evidence of the company’s decades-long funding of climate denial campaigns, the court found this insufficient to prove securities fraud under New York’s specific legal theory. The narrow investor disclosure focus meant that Exxon’s broader disinformation campaign—including funding think tanks, creating front groups, and coordinating through the Global Climate Coalition—was largely irrelevant to the legal question before the court. Critics argued the case’s framing set up an unnecessarily high bar for accountability.

Chilling Effect on Climate Accountability Efforts

The verdict emboldened ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies fighting climate accountability lawsuits across the country, providing a precedent that even well-documented evidence of climate knowledge and denial funding might not meet legal standards for fraud. New York Attorney General James closed her probe after the loss, though Massachusetts continued pursuing a different legal theory focused on consumer protection and deceptive advertising rather than securities fraud. The defeat demonstrated how difficult it would be to hold fossil fuel companies legally accountable for climate deception, even with smoking-gun internal documents.

Significance

The New York v. ExxonMobil verdict represents one of the most consequential accountability failures in climate change history—the legal system’s inability to impose consequences even when documentary evidence proved corporate knowledge of environmental catastrophe and systematic campaigns to deceive the public. The case demonstrated that possessing internal research confirming climate science, while simultaneously funding decades of denial campaigns, might not constitute legally actionable fraud if the case focused on narrow technical investor disclosure requirements. The verdict revealed a gap between moral culpability and legal liability—Exxon’s behavior was morally indefensible but legally unpunishable under securities law frameworks. The loss discouraged state attorneys general from pursuing similar cases and shifted climate accountability litigation toward different legal theories. The verdict functionally granted fossil fuel companies immunity from accountability for climate denial campaigns that delayed action for decades, demonstrating how corporations with sufficient legal resources could evade consequences even when their knowing deception was comprehensively documented.