Reprinted by permission of MinnPost.
Minnesota has a proud history of holding bad corporate actors accountable — from tobacco companies to opioid manufacturers — when they knowingly conceal damaging information about their products from regulators and the public. This is particularly true when that secrecy results in harm to public health, private property, and public resources.
In late June, Attorney General Keith Ellison acted in Minnesota’s tradition of guarding the public interest when he filed a consumer protection lawsuit against three of the nation’s largest fossil fuel entities — ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute (API). In the lawsuit, he seeks to recover civil penalties and restitution for the harm to Minnesotans caused by these companies’ decades-long efforts to intentionally mislead the public about the relationship between fossil fuels, the climate crisis, and the resulting harm to public health, agriculture, infrastructure, and the environment.
The recent disclosure of thousands of internal corporate documents makes clear that ExxonMobil, Koch, API, and other large oil and gas companies have known for decades that the greenhouse gas emissions from their products would have what one internal Exxon document described as a “potentially catastrophic” impact on the climate. But rather than risk their profits, fossil fuel companies followed the playbook first created by the tobacco industry and intentionally deceived consumers, regulators, media, policymakers, and the general public about climate science.
Exxon, the world’s largest oil company, Koch Industries, the largest oil refiner in Minnesota, and API, the largest oil and gas trade association, worked tirelessly to fund and support misleading ads, high-paid lobbyists, think tanks, industry-funded scientists, and more in order to confuse the public and block federal attempts to regulate emissions from the fossil fuels that made their fortune. There is also evidence that these companies even encouraged a public “addiction” to oil and created hostility toward alternative, cleaner fuels, reminiscent of the tobacco companies’ efforts to increase individuals’ nicotine intake despite their ability to lower nicotine content.
Minnesotans are paying dearly for the oil companies’ actions. Record-breaking floods, extreme temperatures, and damaging storms have all become more common and severe. This changing climate poses myriad threats to our economy, food systems, vital infrastructure, and public health. And increased air pollution associated with fossil fuels has been linked to higher rates of asthma, cancer, and deaths caused by COVID-19.
As Minnesota and the nation work to confront the racism ingrained in our society and public policies, we must also recognize that the impacts of climate change often fall hardest on Black and Indigenous communities.
Climate change has also proven very expensive. Minnesotans have already spent hundreds of millions of dollars adapting to the changing climate to make our state more resilient. Many more hundreds of millions of dollars will need to be spent to address the effects of climate change, including hardening our highways, bridges, and other infrastructure; protecting our lakes, rivers, and streams; and ensuring the viability of our state’s agricultural economy.
Thankfully, Minnesota has some of the strongest consumer protection laws in the country, and few situations are better suited to them than the actions of Exxon, Koch, and API. For instance, the Prevention of Consumer Fraud Act aims to hold accountable “any fraud, false pretense, false promise, misrepresentation, misleading statement or deceptive practice, with the intent that others rely thereon in connection with the sale of any merchandise.” These companies’ own internal documents make clear that they made false and misleading statements in connection with the sale of fossil fuels in violation of Minnesota law. Other state consumer protection laws punish similar actions.
Minnesota’s historic lawsuit against Philip Morris in the 1990s relied on many of these same consumer protection laws. The case helped expose the tobacco companies’ decades-long conspiracy to mislead the public about the harm their product caused and resulted in a $6.6 billion settlement for the people of Minnesota.
If history and the law are any guide, Attorney General Ellison is once again putting Minnesota on the right side of history by standing up on our behalf against powerful corporations whose actions have caused and will continue to cause harm to Minnesota citizens.
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Alexandra Klass | July 21, 2020
In late June, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison acted in the state's tradition of guarding the public interest when he filed a consumer protection lawsuit against three of the nation’s largest fossil fuel entities — ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute (API). In the lawsuit, he seeks to recover civil penalties and restitution for the harm to Minnesotans caused by these companies’ decades-long efforts to intentionally mislead the public about the relationship between fossil fuels, the climate crisis, and the resulting harm to public health, agriculture, infrastructure, and the environment.
Katlyn Schmitt | July 21, 2020
The Maryland Department of the Environment recently issued a general discharge permit that covers pollution from most livestock farms, including concentrated animal feeding operations, across the state through July 2025. Unfortunately, the permit, which went into effect on July 8th, will likely jeopardize the 2025 nitrogen reduction goals under the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load and does not align with Maryland’s Phase III Watershed Implementation Plan commitments.
Darya Minovi | July 13, 2020
Nine months ago, residents of the Chicago suburb of Willowbrook, Illinois, scored a major victory in their fight to prevent emissions of a dangerous gas, ethylene oxide, into the air they breathe. In fact, their victory appeared to have ripple effects in other communities. But like so many other aspects of life in the midst of a pandemic, things changed in a hurry.
Michael C. Duff | July 2, 2020
Workers' compensation was created as a means to an end and not an end in itself. It addressed the outrageous frequency of workplace injury and death caused by railroads in the late 19th/early 20th century. The unholy trinity of employers' affirmative tort defenses – assumption of the risk, contributory negligence, and the fellow servant rule – meant that workers or their survivors were not being compensated adequately or, in many cases, not at all. For this reason, expert American investigators were dispatched to Europe between 1909 and 1911 to study the existing workers' compensation systems there. Our current system was the result.
Alice Kaswan | July 1, 2020
When California adopted its first-in-the-nation regulations requiring truck electrification on June 25, the state took a step (or drove a mile) toward reducing pollution in the nation's most vulnerable communities. The new regulation exemplifies a key feature of California's approach: its integration of climate goals, clean air goals, and, at least in this case, environmental justice goals.
Katie Tracy | June 19, 2020
Until this week, laws in a majority of U.S. states permitted some form of employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. On Monday, the law changed – dramatically, sweepingly, historically – when the U.S. Supreme Court made clear that in this respect the 1964 Civil Rights Act's anti-employment discrimination provisions mean exactly what they say. The Court's ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia makes clear that it is illegal to base employment decisions – hiring and firing, the allocation of work, the grouping of employees, compensation practices, harassment – on sexual orientation or identity. The prior patchwork of state laws – most of which permitted some type of employment discrimination based on orientation or identity – is no more.
William Buzbee | June 19, 2020
On June 18, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Trump administration's rescission of the Obama administration's immigration relief program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). In explaining and then defending its DACA rollback, the Trump administration had raised an array of claims that, if accepted, would have undercut numerous regulatory rule of law fundamentals. Instead, the Court strengthened these longstanding requirements. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) v. Regents will become central to battles over the many Trump administration rollbacks and reversals of environmental and other regulations.
Daniel Farber | June 18, 2020
On June 16, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decided two cases that add to the legal difficulties the Trump EPA will face in court. The difficulties relate to two proposed EPA rules that attempt to hamstring future efforts to impose tighter restrictions on pollution. Both EPA rules rely on vague, general grants of rulemaking authority from Congress. That just became more tenuous.
Darya Minovi | June 18, 2020
A blog post published last month by the Chesapeake Bay Program, a collaborative partnership focused on Bay restoration, addressed the many ways that the climate crisis will affect farms in the region. Data from the program shows temperatures on Maryland’s Lower Eastern Shore, home to a high concentration of industrial poultry farms, increased between 2 to 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit, on average, between 1901 and 2017. By 2080, temperatures in the Chesapeake Bay watershed are projected to increase by 4.5 to 10 degrees, posing a serious risk of heat stress to farmworkers and livestock.