ExxonMobil RICO case a slam dunk?

sportbikerider78 said:

Do some research on Edenhofer and find out that his interest in economics and philosophy came from Karl Marx and John Dewey. His words not mine. As you very well know, Karl Marx is the father of communism and it its core is wealth redistribution. Dewey was a democratic socialist and humanist...which was in-line with Marx's beliefs as well.

Read some more of his writings. He morally condemns anyone that doesn't believe (not sure if I'm using the right term) climate change is a threat to humanity.

True science has no place morally condemning anyone for anything. Good theories stand on their own two feet and don't require heretical hysteria such as the sky is falling.

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Yeah, I read a lot of Marx in college too, and I have to say that he certainly seemed more right than wrong about a lot of things....largely about the effects of technology ('capital') on wealth distribution, and saying that unregulated capitalism is unstable against all the money eventually flowing to too few hands (who own the factory/technology). Clearly he, and early american socialists underestimated the effectiveness of the regulation of capitalism to avoid these worst features....and the debate about how to best regulate capitalism continues to the this day. As much as FDR is vilified by the right, the progressivism that he gave us is often credited with the US avoiding a socialist revolution (widely predicted at the time). Remember that 1984 was set in the UK.

More recently, we have had the Thomas Piketty celebrity and a self-described democratic socialist running for a major party ticket....I'm not a 'bro' but I did see a few thousand young and affluent looking people rallying excitedly around another fan of Marx in Washington Square. You might want to be a little more careful with using Marx as an epithet, comrade.

It is also true that in logic, the right answer does not depend on the morality of the arguments....and that a scientific conclusion cannot in itself be considered moral or immoral. That said, if I have logically and scientifically determined that the object under the bleachers is an armed bomb, that scientific and logical deduction leads directly to a moral question....to do something about the threat (moral) or to walk away (immoral)?

It is possible to conclude scientifically that global warming is a major (slow motion) threat to human well-being, and to then find that that conclusion leads to a moral imperative, without somehow being a 'bad scientist'. To label anyone who suggests that a scientific conclusion might lead to a moral dilemma as an 'alarmist' is a different kind of intellectual blindness.

The history of science is replete with these moral dilemmas being created by advances in technology, and yet the technology itself is neither moral nor immoral, of course. In the case of fossil fuels it was a slow burn....clearly the development of FF nearly 200 years ago brought with it the industrial revolution and amazing improvements to the human condition....clearly a huge moral good....but the same FF technology has latent in its use over longer periods of time the inevitable property of doing great damage to the same human condition...and so its use, sustained indefinitely...is now immoral.

Is this really so hard to understand?

jackatc1 said:

Another angle.

http://naturalgasnow.org/the-rockefeller-family-special-interests-behind-the-rico-scam/

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So, basically the Rockefeller family wants to expand its land holdings in upstate NY, including land currently leased by XOM, and has formed a conspiracy that includes the Gov of NY, the DOJ of several states including NY, the national environmental org NRDC, as well as bunch of climate activists and academics, to bring a baseless RICO charge against Exxon so.....Exxon will consider itself 'blackmailed' and will give up the leases to the land to the Rockefellers, who will then be able to buy it at less than market value....and drop all the charges.

Unstated is the assumption that the national media must be clueless (or in on the conspiracy) because they have not been reporting this obvious conclusion.

Did I get that right?

sportbikerider78 said:

Again,,the question is how much does the human species impact any kind of change on the climate? That is a very difficult thing to test, draw conclusions from and then impact economic policy based on the assumptions made.

Is that statement morally unjust? If so, by what moral standard?

Climate does change. We all know that...to say it does not would be ridiculous. But why does it change and how much is natural and how much is man caused? Why do we not openly have that conversation and dialogue? Because the people that are pushing this movement don't want that dialogue because they don't know the answer.
You hear one word when talking about climate change... and that word is "man". That is not scientific. That is political and it is incorrect.

Let's talk about how much is natural, how much is man caused and then figure out where to go from there.

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If you don't believe in 'man-made climate change', which I think is usually called anthropogenic global warming, AGW, then you would conclude that burning FF is a moral position. I get that. You might be making an incorrect conclusion, but not an explicitly immoral one.

"Why do we not openly have that conversation and dialogue?" We did. Its called the scientific literature and its open for all to read, and the data is usually online for anyone to replicate the study or analysis themselves. The result is that the models have been refined over time, their uncertainty has fallen, the observed AGW signal has gotten larger, so the 'statistical confidence' that recent climate warming is human caused has gone up significantly in the last 20 years.

Importantly, I personally don't feel the need to rely on a statistical argument or the 'observation' of AGW AT ALL....if we were speeding toward a cliff that we could see, should we not be alarmed until after we have gone over the cliff and feel ourselves falling?

A simple energy balance calculation based on college-level math and physics correctly estimates the magnitude of the total greenhouse effect on the earth..about 40°F....a calculation done for the first time in the 1800s. So the idea that doubling one of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere could increase global temp by 3-4°F hardly seems far-fetched. Given the significant consequences of such a mean temp increase (human displacement, mass extinction, etc) it seems sensible and conservative to me to believe that doubling CO2 is unwise until proven otherwise. In fact, attempts to more exactly compute the effect of doubling CO2 show that it is (good news) somewhat smaller than estimated decades ago but (bad news) also exclude the 'no problem' case completely. And unrestricted burning of commercially recoverable FFs would way more than double pre-industrial CO2 levels.

And this would be just as true even if there had been no global warming observation over the last several decades. The observations that match predictions are just 'icing'....they are not the 'cake' of the argument.

Stated another way....the idea you propose....that someone somehow must prove or demonstrate that some portion of recently observed 'climate change' is due to human activity, and that failing that then AGW is 'unproven'...is itself not based on scientific or logical reasoning...and is a denier 'tactic'.

A bit of a sneak preview IMO of what we might see come out of the XOM/ALEC/CEI/Heartland Inst subpeonas....ClimateGate in reverse.

The climate denial funding network is laid bare by the bankruptcy filing of the (formerly) largest public coal company on earth: Peabody Energy. (For reference, in 2011 the company had a market cap above $20B.)

Turns out they were funding a lot of XOM's buddy think tanks....

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...rgy-coal-mining-climate-change-denial-funding

They were also behind the anti-Clean Power Plan lawsuits, put forward notably by 'liberal hero' lawyer (and Obama mentor) Lawrence Tribe. Turns out Tribe is personally getting paid at least $435k for 6 mos work this year on the case, which might be little more than just signing his name on the docs.

http://www.vox.com/2016/6/16/11939232/peabody-energy-the-worst

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/12/08/3600343/tribe-peabody-constitutional-carbon-rule/

Follow the money....

The latest....our man Lamar is now using his (unprecedented) subpoena powers to subpoena the MA and NY AGs documents related to the RICO case, claiming that he is protecting the free speech of scientists (at Exxon)....

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/...enas-state-ags-eric-schneiderman-maura-healey

this is an escalation of his earlier threats, after which some AGs caved...like the one in the Virgin Islands.

Sorry Doug, I couldn't read the WSJ article behind its paywall....excerpts?

An interesting article on the XOM shareholder's failed revolt....

http://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/col...exxon-mobil-proxy-vote-loss-small-but-telling

A recent rather informative article at NYTimes details the motivations and particulars of the Exxon RICO case:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/20/s...y-said-to-focus-more-on-future-than-past.html

The summary is very much in line with what has emerged in this thread....that this is about XOM not sharing their best projections regarding their future business model and profitability with their shareholders, simply because some projections show steeply decreasing income and profits due to reduced global oil demand and price. Period.

It is NOT about prosecuting XOM's past (or present) activities funding global warming misinformation. That is not illegal.
It is NOT about limiting the freedom of speech of the XOM 'entity' or any of its officers. Freedom of speech does not protect fraudulent speech by a company to its shareholders.

I also learned some stuff:

NYAG previously brought a similar case against coal giant Peabody Energy. The company settled, and as a term of that settlement was forced to disclose its own internal projections about its future business model, in a world with slowly declining coal demand.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/b...o-greater-disclosures-of-financial-risks.html

NYAG Schneider won. Peabody's stock price has fallen 96% over the last 5 years, due to an expectation that the coal business will slowly shrink, versus slowly grow over the next couple decades.

I also learned that NYAG has already received 100,000s of docs from XOM, and that he is ignoring the subpoena from XOM congressional lackey Lamar Smith, citing 'states rights'. I guess that congress' lack of an enforcement mechanism (they don't have troops or enforcement officers) makes the threat a little toothless for a DOJ. LOL.

Doug MacIVER said:

this is from a 10 year old article, still I think it remains relevant in todays politics of agw. here is one quote "Skeptics about global warming are often painted as hirelings of the oil and automotive industries. Such claims irritate me. I have never earned a nickel as a consequence of my skepticism. Indeed, I have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars by it. First, you have to understand how a large research university operates. The professors are expected to obtain research grants, and in the atmospheric sciences these grants come mostly from government agencies."

here is the link which is a question posed to a retired penn state prof http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/aprilholladay/2006-08-07-global-warming-truth_x.htm

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This article seemed quite thin gruel to me. A long rant by ONE retired prof in 2005....the guy may have retired in the 90s. He counts himself an honest AGW skeptic, based upon the science he (presumably) read up to 2005 (or 1995 or 2000, if he stopped staying current then).

In my experience, there were a lot more honest skeptics in the 90s and 00s. The computer models back then were VERY primitive compared to what we can do now (one example....many models then treated the atmosphere as only one or two dimensional). The volume of papers (addressing different questions) was smaller, so there were a lot of unanswered questions at that point. In 2016, the models and data have both improved massively, and I don't know anyone in the sciences who remains an 'honest skeptic'.

He's basically complaining about alarmism in the media, which the media uses to sell advertising. I agree with the premise.

The 'conspiracy theory' part of the quote is that the govt will only fund projects that support its viewpoint....nuts. For one, when the article was written in 2005 the govt was in GOP control. Why didn't all this 'AGW skeptic' work get funded and published then? Answer: because it doesn't hold water. Maybe he's saying the senior scientists (like the NAS) are blocking the truth for their own gain....NAS members I know are all fat and happy money-wise, and have no motivation to form a grand conspiracy...and more to the point, they don't seem like the personality types to pull one off if they tried.

Other than that I got a Grandpa Simpson vibe from the guys rant...'Hey kids, get offa my lawn'.

Snagdaddy said:

Here's some background on the legal shenanigans being used to push climate hysteria forward. The winning tactics used against big tobacco are in play:

https://nigguraths.wordpress.com/2015/11/02/rico-teering/

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This entire blog post seems very poorly reasoned. This guy starts with the premise that the merits of the XOM RICO case are non-existent, figures that the very idea itself is unimaginable, and so it must have been dreamed up by some malevolent actor who then formed a conspiracy that culminated in some state AGs bringing suit. Since getting AGs to bring a baseless suit is presumably difficult, this conspiracy must have some powerful players.

It is clear that this is the overall opinion of the suit by bloggers on the far right, and aligns with the stated positions of some elected official like Lamar Smith and Ted Cruz.

I don't feel the need to respond to it in detail, but this reasoning is (i) a lengthy logical deduction/speculation from a flawed starting point: "Assume that there is no AGW, XOM understands this, and there is nothing to cover up to its share-holders, then how does this RICO suit come to be..." and (ii) represents folks being played (IMO) by said elected officials (who actually are on the public record as receiving large payments from big oil) as 'useful idiots'.

Snagdaddy said:

Again, scientists are on a short leash these days because they won't get the big foundation money from george soros unless they play along.

http://netrightdaily.com/2010/11/ge...n-climate-change-shakedown-aimed-against-u-s/

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This thing is rather dated....being 6 years old. Indeed, as discussed upthread, the stalemate in global solutions to AGW at that time was the idea in undeveloped countries that our CO2 pollution was denying them the means of developing. IF only x amount of CO2 could be put into the atmosphere, and we have already put 0.9x into the atmosphere building our economy, then they are shut out. The only solution would be for the undeveloped countries to build out clean energy systems, which at the time were seen as prohibitively expensive, and so we (the US and EU) would need to foot the bill.

Aside: the $100B number is laughable...like Dr. Evil asking for "$1 meelion dollars." Building out the energy infrastructure for the developing world will likely cost many **trillions** of dollars. By the same token, if paid over time a $100B hypothetical payment would be negligible to the $35T per year EU/US GDP (0.3% of one years GDP, 0.03% if spread over a decade).

But, good news....all that thinking is OBSOLETE. The developing world now understands that clean energy is cheaper (especially when factoring in health costs and living standards) than fossil energy. China switched gears from the above tactic (asking the US/EU for cash) to becoming leaders in clean energy manufacturing and production in 2013. This sea change is the basis of the US's current agreement with China re CO2 emissions and the COP21. The premise of COP21 is a breakthrough precisely because it ends the above 'shakedown' logic.

Snagdaddy said:

Meanwhile, the world is heading toward another "tipping point" that could send the world spinning out of control. What a joke.

http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/04...n-first-issued-10-year-tipping-point-in-1989/

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I hate 'tipping points'. There do exist physical systems whose non-linear response makes them have multiple steady states with tipping points between them. IMO, the magnitudes of the non-linearities on the climate system have not been shown to lead to such instabilities...in other words, I do not think there is a point where the system suddenly 'snaps' to a dramatically different state.

Still, an article cherry-picking headlines from decades past to form a narrative is not well reasoned. The looser usage of the 'tipping point' language is probably correct...that if our goal is to avoid, say, 2°C warming, every day that passes at current emission levels means that the future changes necessary to meet/avoid the goal become that much more difficult or expensive.

In 2000 we had a bit more time to avoid 2°C warming, but reasonable people could be skeptical regarding the affordability of changing to clean energy. In 2015, the tech appears to be in place (with storage still in its infancy), but we have 15 fewer years to make the switch. In 2025 I expect all the tech will be out there at scale (solar, wind, EVs, mass storage) and growing exponentially, with global oil demand and CO2 emission peaks in the rearview mirror, but a future 2°C increase will probably already be baked in.

So, am I despondent? Not at all. The coming clean energy revolution, even if it 'fails' and we get 2.5 or 3°C warming is WAY better than the business as usual outcome with a biosphere destroying 4, 6 or 8°C warming by 2100.

Doug MacIVER said:

The 'conspiracy theory' part of the quote is that the govt will only fund projects that support its viewpoint....nuts. For one, when the article was written in 2005 the govt was in GOP control. Why didn't all this 'AGW skeptic' work get funded and published then? Answer: because it doesn't hold water. Maybe he's saying the senior scientists (like the NAS) are blocking the truth for their own gain....NAS members I know are all fat and happy money-wise, and have no motivation to form a grand conspiracy...and more to the point, they don't seem like the personality types to pull one off if they tried.

If you ever read any of the other side you'll find it quite a common complaint. curry and spencer often bring up trouble in funding.apprently funding. bias which this old guy dealt with in the past is now noexistant. good to know.

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Everyone complains about funding on both sides, and of course bias is unavoidable (and cuts both ways). That said, if someone had a **compelling** scientific argument (or model) for why AGW wasn't going to happen, I think they could get it funded quite easily by the govt, and failing that, I would bet the 'think tanks' would throw money at them. And yet these people don't seem to be coming forward. Weird.

Its also hard to get grants that prove that 2+2=5.

The author is a financial advisor with no apparent legal training, writing a very lazy article. He apparently got as far as the 'fight against freedom of speech' BS letters, bought them hook line and sinker, and stopped there. He did not get so far as actually examining the particulars of the case at all. No shareholders, no SEC, no carbon bubble, no demand projections, no stranded assets.

The author makes a straw man out of the AG's case, and then kicks it over. Where do I get that job?

Another take on the Schneiderman case:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-exxon-mobil-probe-accounting-idUSKCN11M2HP

Basically, that it is about (at least partially) XOM not writing down now unprofitable assets when oil prices fell in Nov 2014. The article says that the oil cos have a lot of leeway to judge whether the oil price move is temporary (so no asset write-down is needed) or long-term/permanent (in which case it is required by accounting rules). IOW, the oil cos are the 'experts' on guessing future oil price, relative to the SEC, so they get to make up their own accounting rules.

The article goes own to say the other oil majors HAVE written down their assets relative to 2014, XOM is the last major holdout. It also mentions that they have not written down their gas assets either, despite gas prices being low now for many years.

So we now have a wide range of different 'explanations' of the NY AG RICO case:

A) Its a conspiracy of the Rockefeller family to acquire land in NYS (Doug's crazy link)
B) Its a conspiracy of lefty enviros and academics to punish Exxon for emitting carbon (the Ricoteer RICO stuff)
C) The NY AG is a proxy for the Obama administration in an anti-free speech intimidation campaign forwarding the AGW 'hoax' (Cruz and Smith in signed letters)
D) Its about XOM's accounting rules not correctly factoring in long-term oil price threats, e.g. from EVs, COP21 or the 'Carbon Bubble' (NY Times and British papers)
E) Its about XOM's accounting rules not correctly factoring in **current** low oil prices and their near future prospects for recovery (Reuters).

Note that issues 'D' and 'E' are really the same thing: XOM accounting rules....they shade into each other depending on the timeframe considered. Both are also offered by 'mainstream' media sources, rather than politicos, shills or bloggers.

Rex's public statements of TINA: 'There Is No Alternative' to oil, are consistent with XOM accounting choices to consider both current low prices a temporary 'blip' and future high oil prices to be secure indefinitely into the future. XOM shareholder battles to alter accounting rules or add new people to the board similarly reinforce this picture.

There is a 'war' going on within XOM, re understanding how its market will evolve in the future and what it should do about it. Its public and shareholder statements on the subject are increasingly at odds with US and global public policy trends, RE technology AND the accounting rules and market projections of the other oil majors.

So, maybe

1) there will be a breakthrough research finding in AGW that will show that previously undiscovered negative feedbacks (like clouds) can account for the recent warming 'pause' and significantly reduce future warming projections, RE will falter and fade as subsidies dry up (wind PTC phase out in the US, German and UK populists roll back their costly subsidies, etc) and REX is proven correct. XOM's stock price soars.

or

2) RE and EVs and CO2 and AGW awareness and concern continue a relentless rise, global oil demand usage and CO2 emissions both peak and begin to slowly decline. Rex and/or his current board are forced out or to reconsider their accounting practices, and XOM's price falls.

EDIT: the new story is triggered by a WSJ article: http://www.wsj.com/articles/exxons-accounting-practices-are-investigated-1474018381
It also makes clear that this is a NEW line of investigation for Schneiderman, in addition to the previous case: so, D) and E).