Exactly. It’s fraud against every citizen and shareholder.

My understanding is that the fraud claim — if it matches the fraud claim in the New York case, at least – is this. Exxon had an internal figure used to represent one kind of climate change costs for one purpose. Investors never saw this. There was also an external figure shared with investors, to help investors assess risks to Exxon stock. The case for fraud is that these weren't different for a good reason, but because they sought to mislead investors.

The pricier of these figures is the external figure, so they're being charged for being too alarmist with the public. In either case I don't think it has much to do with the previously linked research claims in this thread.

(To this, there is added some consumer fraud by... not labelling gas pumps with warnings about global warnings, among other things, I think it was? This is the weaker claim, and I would not expect it to prevail.)

This happens all the time, and isn't considered fraud. San Fransisco is doing it- claiming one risk of climate change for the purposes of setting regulations and filing lawsuits, and using another for applying for insurance.

And I don't think being punished for using an overly conservative figure is likely, unless the court invents some duty owed to short-sellers. And it's not something we want to encourage.

And the think tanks and lobbying organizations are funded to this day, continuing to fight against climate legislation.

The trouble is, the leaked internal documents point to Exxon actually genuinely believing the climate change doubt narrative they were pushing externally. So any argument to the contrary has to make clever use of tricks like selective out-of-context quotation, emotional appeals, and plausible-sounding but logically nonsensical arguments to trick the reader.

For example, this lawsuit. The overall tactic is to argue that Exxon knew fossil fuels could potentially cause catastropic climate change but decieved people by sowing uncertainty about whether they would cause climate catastrophe, which isn't even a contradiction, but let's put that issue to one side.

They then hit it out the park with a humdinger - in May 2019, CO2 concentrations hit 415 ppm, and 37 years ago Exxon's scientists predicted this in a graph. This astonishing accuracy shows Exxon's scientists knew exactly how much CO2 emissions and warming they were causing. Here's the leaked document this graph was taken from: https://insideclimatenews.org/sites/default/files/documents/... Some choice quotes from it that somehow didn't make it into the complaint: "There is currently no unambiguous scientific evidence that the earth is warming", "Overall, the current outlook suggests potentially serious climate problems are not likely to occur until the late 21st century or perhaps beyond at projected energy demand rates", and also apparently coastal flooding wouldn't happen for centuries even in the worst case scenario. There's quite a bit more too. The supposedly super-accurate secret internal report didn't contradict Exxon's external talking points, it matched up with them exactly.

(There's also weirdly gratuitous dishonesty. For instance, the Exxon document argues that if a rapid move away from fossil fuels was necessary to prevent climate catastrophe, nuclear power was the only feasible option and renewables such as solar were completely infeasable since it'd take at least 40-50 years to achieve significant power production using them. For some reason, the complaint claims that Exxon recognised measures such as energy conservation and shifting to renewable sources were the only viable options. I guess the prosecutor reckoned renewable power was more sympathetic and popular than nuclear...

The complaint also goes on to accuse Exxon of misleading the public by claiming that efficiency improvements in their products reduce greenhouse gas emissions because producing and using them still emits greenhouse gases. Do they want to actively discourage energy efficiency improvements?)