Exxon has a small chance to show Massachusetts is withholding information related to alleged hypocrisy – that the State sued oil companies over climate change but ignored its own emissions rules.
The case in Boston state court sought public records that were eventually turned over. They showed regulators failed to report the annual greenhouse gas emissions of state vehicle fleets, even as Massachusetts was one of dozens of local and state governments to sue companies like Exxon and Chevron over global warming.
The documents revealed Massachusetts never complied with regulations the Department of Environmental Protection was charged with enforcing under a 2008 law. Those regulations, detailed in a report by the CommonWealth Beacon, require Massachusetts agencies that operate more than 30 vehicles to compile a variety of statistics including CO2 emissions and post the results on a public website…