https://earther.gizmodo.com/exxon-is...s-s-1839268301

The New York Attorney General’s office has been pursuing Exxon for years for everything from climate denial to fraud. The oil company that made billions while funding climate denial has tried to avoid ending up in court. But despite its best efforts, Exxon went on trial in a New York courtroom on Tuesday over claims that it defrauded investors.

The case is a landmark moment for climate litigation, marking the first climate fraud case to go to trial. New York Attorney General Letitia James and her office allege that Exxon defrauded investors by essentially keeping two sets of books.

A number of Big Oil firms assume future climate policies like a carbon tax or market will come into play, and they build that “price” into their analysis of whether fossil fuel projects can make money or not. In their public-facing reports, Exxon said it priced carbon at $80 per ton for all of its projects, which is much more aggressive than the current carbon pricing mechanism. Internally, the company priced carbon much lower, court documents say. The effect essentially made Exxon look like a better investment than it was, the lawsuit claims, thus defrauding shareholders to the tune of between $476 million and $1.6 billion, according to the New York AG’s office.
And theres more! Baltimore, Colorado, and Rhode Island are also suing petroleum companies for damages due to the effects of climate change in their areas for the money to deal with the damages.

We are well past the confirmation and consensus of climate science into using it now to litigate against the companies that have tried to cover it up for so long. The science now can determine specifically how the weather has changed in different regions due to the amount of Co2 in the atmosphere and can directly link it to petroleum company output.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics...back-on-trial/

If an oil pipeline breaks, you can easily point to who was responsible for the spill. However, climate change is a global problem, caused by global emissions that have uneven impacts. To sue someone, you have to prove that they caused you measurable harm. By its very nature, climate change is a difficult problem for courts to untangle.


With increasing specificity and speed, scientists have been able to tell us how much worse climate change made an extreme weather event.


Except that has changed. With increasing specificity and speed, scientists have been able to tell us how climate change intensified an extreme weather event. Now we can learn the effects almost in real-time. For instance, within weeks of the extreme heat wave in Europe this summer or the flooding from Hurricane Harvey in Houston in 2017, researchers published working papers explaining how much worse they were made by climate change. (Europe’s heat wave was 10 times more likely because of warming, and in Houston there was 38 percent more rainfall.) Still another paper analyzed how climate change fueled California’s 2012-2014 drought (up to 27 percent worse). Yet another focus of research looks at how much, say, Exxon’s historic pollution is responsible for today’s climate impacts—another area of attribution science called source attribution.


“The court room is a new frontier around addressing climate change, and I think there’s a relatively small number of scientists including myself who are engaged,” says Peter Frumhoff, chief climate scientist with the advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists. “But as these cases emerge and proliferate, there’s an opportunity for attribution science to inform climate law…This work is at an early proof-of-concept stage.”


As E&E News noted last month, environmental lawyers expect “the next wave of climate litigation is not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when.'”


The lawyers working on advancing climate liability cases in the courts see the advances in the science as integral to building their cases against governments for inaction, and major fossil fuel polluters for misleading the public and investors. It helps them explain why plaintiffs have standing to sue, and how the corporations and governments turned a blind eye to the robust evidence before them.
Litigating the petroleum companies for some of the tax free billions they made while they pushed climate denial wont undo the damage but at least will justly share the cost of fixing it for everyone.