Minnesota has a proud history of holding bad corporate actors accountable — from tobacco companies to opioid manufacturers — when they knowingly conceal damaging information about their products from regulators and the public. This is particularly true when that secrecy results in harm to public health, private property, and public resources.
In late June, Attorney General Keith Ellison acted in Minnesota’s tradition of guarding the public interest when he filed a consumer protection lawsuit against three of the nation’s largest fossil fuel entities — ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute (API). In the lawsuit, he seeks to recover civil penalties and restitution for the harm to Minnesotans caused by these companies’ decades-long efforts to intentionally mislead the public about the relationship between fossil fuels, the climate crisis, and the resulting harm to public health, agriculture, infrastructure, and the environment.
Described ‘potentially catastrophic’ impact
The recent disclosure of thousands of internal corporate documents makes clear that ExxonMobil, Koch, API, and other large oil and gas companies have known for decades that the greenhouse gas emissions from their products would have what one internal Exxon document described as a “potentially catastrophic” impact on the climate. But rather than risk their profits, fossil fuel companies followed the playbook first created by the tobacco industry and intentionally deceived consumers, regulators, media, policymakers, and the general public about climate science.
Exxon, the world’s largest oil company, Koch Industries, the largest oil refiner in Minnesota, and API, the largest oil and gas trade association, worked tirelessly to fund and support misleading ads, high-paid lobbyists, think tanks, industry-funded scientists, and more in order to confuse the public and block federal attempts to regulate emissions from the fossil fuels that made their fortune. There is also evidence that these companies even encouraged a public “addiction” to oil and created hostility toward alternative, cleaner fuels, reminiscent of the tobacco companies’ efforts to increase individuals’ nicotine intake despite their ability to lower nicotine content.
[image_caption]Alexandra B. Klass[/image_caption]
As Minnesota and the nation work to confront the racism ingrained in our society and public policies, we must also recognize that the impacts of climate change often fall hardest on Black and Indigenous communities.
Adapting is very expensive for Minnesota
Climate change has also proven very expensive. Minnesotans have already spent hundreds of millions of dollars adapting to the changing climate to make our state more resilient. Many more hundreds of millions of dollars will need to be spent to address the effects of climate change, including hardening our highways, bridges, and other infrastructure; protecting our lakes, rivers, and streams; and ensuring the viability of our state’s agricultural economy.
Thankfully, Minnesota has some of the strongest consumer protection laws in the country, and few situations are better suited to them than the actions of Exxon, Koch, and API. For instance, the Prevention of Consumer Fraud Act aims to hold accountable “any fraud, false pretense, false promise, misrepresentation, misleading statement or deceptive practice, with the intent that others rely thereon in connection with the sale of any merchandise.” These companies’ own internal documents make clear that they made false and misleading statements in connection with the sale of fossil fuels in violation of Minnesota law. Other state consumer protection laws punish similar actions.
Again on the right side of history
Minnesota’s historic lawsuit against Philip Morris in the 1990s relied on many of these same consumer protection laws. The case helped expose the tobacco companies’ decades-long conspiracy to mislead the public about the harm their product caused and resulted in a $6.6 billion settlement for the people of Minnesota.
If history and the law are any guide, Attorney General Ellison is once again putting Minnesota on the right side of history by standing up on our behalf against powerful corporations whose actions have caused and will continue to cause harm to Minnesota citizens.
Alexandra B. Klass is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and a Member Scholar at the Center for Progressive Reform.
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Climate Action!
AMEN to that, AG Ellison.
We need to quickly unite as a species, taking action on climate as
e pluribus unum.
If the COVID-19 response we see is prelude I fear people will remain clueless until the night before Armageddon.
Koch and Exxon and others not named knew of the damage to our atmosphere the energy derived from fossil fuels would inflict.
Court is a wake up call to other states and policy-makers.
Support our AG and the rapid change to our energy systems to electric.
Wind, solar pumped hydro. We can do this.
Thanks AG Ellison, for bringing this.
So appreciative, thrilled and heartened by this much-needed lawsuit to hold fossil fuel companies and their executives accountable for all the personal harm they have done to Minnesotans and our fellow North Americans and people all over the world through their selfish lies, greed and deceitful practices for decades! Global warming and deadly pollution are nothing less than crimes against humanity and upon nature which we treasure, love and depend upon for our very survival. When the average global surface temperature is meant to be below 15 degrees Celsius for a stable and easily-inhabitable planetary climate for humans and existing species, the ongoing reckless creation of greenhouse gases that are on course to cause an increase of 3-6 + degrees Celsius from preindustrial times is nothing less than homicidal and ecocidal. With human-based methane emissions now at about 500 teragrams (trillion grams) per year and only about 5 of that is now determined as naturally-caused (see National Geographic based on ice cores), fossil fuel company executives are even now still CHOOSING to help warm our planet with not only carbon dioxide, but also with the greenhouse gas methane whose warming potential over ten to twenty years is 80-90 times more than even carbon dioxide through their unethical fossil fuel gas production, deliberate flaring and negligent leaking which is in addition to their significant groundwater pillaging, land and water poisoning, and earthquake causation due to shale gas and oil hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking which must be banned Immediately). Methane currently accounts for about 25% of global warming already (see NASA). How much more warming are people willing to accept in the next ten to twenty years before they more strongly demand NO MORE HARM AND DEATH from extreme weather and deadly climate change impacts and tipping points? Indeed, I join Greta Thunberg and countless other activists and attorneys such as ethical Attorney General Keith Ellison who are telling such harmful and deceitful fossil fuel companies: “HOW DARE YOU!” and we will hold you accountable one way or another.