From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

Tim O’Brien explains the climate lawfare in his PJ article Is California Attempting to ‘Suicide’ Big Oil and Write the Suicide Note? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Sometimes big corporations are their own worst enemies. They say things and do things that at the moment sound good and perhaps win an immediate PR battle, but those same words or positions can come back to bite them later. Such is the case for ExxonMobil. 

Back in 2006, almost 20 years ago, the company’s then-CEO Rex Tillerson told the New York Times that a company report had acknowledged the link between the consumption of fossil fuels and rising global temperatures, saying, “We recognize that climate change is a serious issue.” He then added, “We recognize that greenhouse gas emissions are one of the factors affecting climate change.” 

This massive gesture of appeasement was a major concession, and it awarded a huge victory to climate alarmists. In that same article, the Times suggested that if Tillerson was successful, ExxonMobil would “no longer be the oil company that environmentalists love to hate.” 

How’d that work out? Did they back off of ExxonMobil and other big oil companies as a result? No, they ramped up the pressure so steadily and so heavily that over the years, “climate change” activists led ExxonMobil by the nose. It went full bore into “sustainability,” and it even supports the Paris Agreement, also known as the Paris Climate Accord. 

After years of incremental surrender to the left, the company now finds itself in the position of having to sue the state of California over a pair of 2023 “disclosure laws” that amount to the state mandating what companies can and cannot say about certain climate change matters. 

Last week, the company sued California in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California on claims that Senate Bills 253 and 261 “trumpet California’s message.” The message in question, apparently, is that big oil and other major companies are “uniquely responsible for climate change.” In its lawsuit, Exxon Mobil said it considers this sort of message as “misleading.” The suit challenges both laws on grounds that they are First Amendment violations. The intent of the litigation is to stop these laws from going into effect in 2026. 

The climate alarmists and their entire sector are portraying the laws as requiring basic “climate-related transparency.” 

But if you dig into these laws, it reminds me of that old saying about free speech. It goes like this: “Communist China believes in free speech. So long as you say what the government likes, you can say whatever you want.” That pretty much sums up this situation.

More specifically, ExxonMobil contends that to comply, it would need to
rely on “frameworks that place disproportionate blame
on large companies like ExxonMobil.”

Senate Bill 253

Gov. “Slick” Newsom signed Senate Bill 253 (the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act) into law in 2023. It requires big companies to disclose a wide range of emissions, and not just the stuff coming out of their industrial pipes and smoke stacks. They’d even have to report “direct and indirect emissions” that would include quantitative measurement of and a cost for employee business travel and product transport. 

I’ve seen some of this type of internal tracking and reporting up close, and it’s ridiculous. It’s all in line with ESG measurements and processes that are inconsistent at best. Just as often, it’s a scoring system built on “Wild A** Guesses.” 

Senate Bill 261

Senate Bill 261 (or the Climate-related Financial Risk Act ) gets even more pointedly at the First Amendment issues at play. This law requires businesses that generate more than $500 million per year to “disclose” the financial impacts and risks they face from climate change, and how they will respond. 

More to the point, ExxonMobil said that if it even tried to comply with this law, it would have to guess on things it can’t even know about in advance. Essentially, it would have to try to predict the future and put those predictions on its own website. 

At the same time, the suit points out that Exxon doesn’t even have
any crude oil or natural gas exploration, production, manufacturing,
transport or refining operations in California. 

On the First Amendment issue, in ExxonMobil’s case, the company is expected to argue that both laws require companies to speak publicly in specific ways. The laws don’t simply mandate that the company disclose factual data on past activities and results, but rather that it must speculate in ways it cannot reasonably and responsibly do. 

This is “compelled speech.” While the First Amendment protects the right to speak, it also protects the right not to have the government force you to speak, or to incorporate the government’s desired message. This is known as the “compelled speech doctrine.” While it is usually described as it pertains to individual rights, there is some history of commercial businesses running into this same issue.

What all of this amounts to is it seems that as industries go, California is attempting to “suicide” Big Oil, and it even wants to write the suicide note for the industry.