Exxonmobil, oil major, is going on trial after being accused of falsifying information on the investors about the potential impact of climate change regulations on the company’s operations, as it firstly used figures that were different from what they presented publicly when discussing the impact on laws and taxes.
The trial started on Tuesday, October 22, according to which the New York attorney general reported that the company used internal figures that weren’t in line with the external ones that they published, concerning the impact of climate change regulations of laws, taxes and other economic aspects.
The attorney general’s office addressed that the fraud costed to the investors about $1.6 billion. According to Kevin Wallace, an attorney representing the New York attorney general, the costs were important for the investors, since the increasing of carbon and greenhouse gas regulations could affect the profitability and even enforce the viability of Exxon’s carbon business.
Specifically, the company measured an all-encompassing dollar figure for all climate change regulations that would impact demand; in other words it changed the dollar amount to ”greenhouse gas costs” directly charging specific operational investments such as feed assessed for smokestacks at refinery.
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Exxonmobil predicted that the demand by 2040 would reach the $80 per ton due to the climate change regulation, where as the operational field would be affected by only $40 per ton. However, it used different methods of calculating costs in some cases. Although, the New York attorney general illustrates that only the larger figure was published.
In 2018, New York sued five oil majors, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and ConocoPhillips, and demanded that they paid the cost for protecting the city from the climate change that their operations caused; Yet, a New York federal judge dismissed the city’s complain, adding that it’s not the court’s jurisdiction to regulate GHG, as this task lies with the federal government.
