【Beauty Salon Special Service 4】

Exxon is Beauty Salon Special Service 4in hot water.

The State of New York sued the Exxon Mobil Corporation for fraud, and the oil giant could not squirm out of what will almost certainly become a historic trial. New York alleges Exxon deceived its investors about how much looming climate change regulations will likely hurt the oil giant's profits as the planet continues to relentlessly warm. The oil company goes to trial on Tuesday at the neoclassically-designed New York State Supreme Court in the dead center of Manhattan's Financial District — a place where fraud, greed, and deception have, historically, abounded.

"We’re seeing the company for the first time confronted in open courts with the evidence of its climate deception," said Carroll Muffett, the president of the Center for International Environmental Law.

Over the past few years, a flood of evidence has come to light revealing how Exxon has known for decades that rising carbon dioxide emissions would heat the planet and alter a stable climate. At the same time, the corporation repeatedly sowed doubt about climate science and actively mislead the public about the severity of climate change.

Now, for the first time, the Exxon is on trial for climate deception, though not for the ways described above. New York Attorney General Leticia James has employed a powerful, nearly 100-year-old anti-fraud law, called the Martin Act, to reveal how the oil giant misled investors about the future cost of extracting and selling fossil fuels.

"This is at its heart a case about fraud," said Muffett.

"This case seeks redress for a longstanding fraudulent scheme by Exxon, one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies...concerning the company’s management of the risks posed to its business by climate change regulation," the state wrote in a complaint last year.

Specifically, the state alleges that Exxon, in forecasting how much money its fossil fuel operations would make in the future, did not faithfully account for how much expected climate change regulations (like a tax on carbon or on certain types of carbon-heavy fuels) would reduce demand for fossil fuel and hurt the company's bottom line, and ultimately its investors. Exxon calls the assumed price of carbon emissions from government regulations CO2 "proxy costs."

In New York's 91-page complaint, the state cites a number of ways Exxon misguided investors, particularly by grossly underestimating how much it would cost to extract oil from 14 oil sand projects in Alberta, Canada — one the largest oil reserves on Earth. Exxon lowballed these costs by a whopping $25 billion, argued the state.

"If the investors had known what the real cost of climate change regulations would be, they might not have invested in Exxon," said Patrick Parenteau, a professor of law and senior counsel in the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic at Vermont Law School.

Sometimes, the state concluded, Exxon did not account for proxy costs at all, including for giant, multibillion-dollar projects in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore before 2016.

What's more, throughout various economic forecasting reports provided to its investors, Exxon used confounding language to explain how they were accounting for the future costs of extracting and selling fossil fuels.

"At a bare minimum, their communications were totally confusing," noted Parenteau. "They used five different terms to describe how they were costing out carbon regulations," including "price of carbon," "cost of carbon," "proxy cost," "GHG cost," and ‘GHG proxy cost.”

Exxon, however, staunchly denies deception and wrongdoing.

"The New York Attorney General’s allegations are false," Steven Soper of Exxon's Corporate Media Relations said via email. "We tell investors through regular disclosures how the company accounts for risks associated with climate change. We are confident in the facts and look forward to seeing our company exonerated in court."

Exxon's doom

Exxon's potential trial downfall hinges on the fact that the state doesn't have to prove the company intended to defraud its investors, only that it made misleading statements that caused investors to incur financial losses, often by losing stock value (this is called "material damage").

And there's evidence Exxon mislead its investors.

"The central fact does not seem to be in dispute: Exxon told investors it was using one proxy cost for carbon, and it was using another. Or sometimes none at all," said Michael Burger executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. "That's deception, or misrepresentation."

The trial, which could last three weeks, will debate whether material damage occurred as a result of Exxon's deceptions, explained Burger.

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Regardless of the verdict, Exxon is likely to come out an overall loser. The state, by way of the Martin Act, has accessed a wealth of documents showing how the corporation conducts business, and allegedly mislead and defrauded investors about climate change and climate science.

"There's a treasure trove of documents," said Parenteau. "There are tons of documents that we haven’t seen yet that the state has pried out of Exxon.

"The evidence comes to light," added Muffett. "It's a worst-case scenario for the company."

Although Exxon stands to potentially lose over $1 billion in this suit, the greater oil industry will feel ripples from the trial. "The larger damage is to the credibility of the industry," stressed Parenteau, noting that banks and financial markets are no longer going to believe oil companies' optimistic forecasts for massive returns. The oil industry, faced with the cost of selling carbon-rich fuels, will almost certainly be burdened with rising expenses, and they must genuinely account for these costs.

Exxon's time in climate court is likely just starting.

"This speaks to a future of the company that is characterized by non-stop climate litigation for years or decades to come," said Muffett.