To: Maura Healey, Massachusetts Attorney General
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey: Prosecute Exxon for Climate Deception
Launch an investigation of Exxon and its fellow fossil-fuel companies for deliberate and malicious climate deception.
Why is this important?
"Newly revealed documents show that Exxon’s own scientists were aware of and studying the dangerous impacts of greenhouse gases in the 1970s and 1980s -- until Exxon’s leadership decided to shut down the research and promote climate denial instead, in order to protect the company’s unfathomably large profits.
Now Bay Staters -- like all other American citizens -- are suffering from the damages of Exxon's unlimited greenhouse pollution. Extreme and unprecedented winter storms, fueled by global warming, have cost the state billions of dollars. State fisheries are under threat from warming oceans. Sea level rise is already harming Massachusetts's coastal communities. And the risks of continued global warming pollution to the state are many times greater.
The Massachusetts Attorney General's Office should use all of the tools at its disposal to prosecute Exxon’s deliberate deception -- such as state RICO laws, Massachusetts's Regulation of Business Practice and Consumer Protection Act (Ch. 93A, Sec. 1-11), consumer fraud statutes, or any other laws that are intended to protect Bay Stater citizens from deliberate corporate misconduct.
The attorneys general of 46 states successfully sued tobacco companies to pay for decades of deadly deceit -- now it’s time for Exxon and the fossil-fuel industry to pay for their climate crimes."