No one knows how the US Supreme Court will rule in Suncor v. Boulder, the case that will kick off the court’s fall term next week and will likely decide whether the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, will be able to put oil giants ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy on trial for deceiving the public for decades about the climate harms of fossil fuels.
But one thing that can be said with certainty is that Big Oil and the fossil fuel industry are absolutely terrified of facing cases like Boulder’s at trial, where state and local governments will be able to present evidence of Big Oil’s decades-long climate deception to a jury. Big Oil’s own lawyers have admitted that the companies face “massive monetary liability” from the dozens of climate deception cases against them, and that stopping communities from having their day in court is a “big priority… for the entire industry.”
That’s because the evidence of Big Oil’s climate lies is overwhelming—and the discovery process in climate deception lawsuits could produce even more damaging proof that companies like Exxon have knowingly fueled climate chaos for decades while concealing the harm, undermining the science, and obstructing every effort to address the problem. As the Supreme Court prepares to hear Exxon’s pleas to escape trial in just one of the dozens of climate deception lawsuits, the Center for Climate Integrity has released a newly updated collection of 101 internal industry documents and other pieces of evidence that the fossil fuel industry is desperate to stop a jury of Americans from seeing…