Emails among the organizers of a 2012 meeting that helped launch a wave of climate change lawsuits against the oil industry show Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris had a front-row seat as California’s attorney general, even as event participants sought to keep their involvement secret.
Climate Litigation Watch published correspondence between the organizers of the meeting in La Jolla, California, where private lawyers, academics and state officials discussed using government subpoena powers to collect documents from the energy industry that they could use to paint companies as engaging in a conspiracy to hide the truth about global warming.
The strategy known as the “La Jolla playbook” aimed to compare oil companies to cigarette manufacturers, using internal documents to suggest they committed fraud by failing to tell consumers their products were dangerous to the climate.
Since then, six states - including New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Delaware, Rhode Island and Connecticut - have filed climate lawsuits against oil companies. Harris’ office announced an investigation into ExxonMobil at the same time as New York but never filed suit.
New York’s case ended in failure last year, after a judge rejected the state’s claims as “an ill-conceived initiative” of New York AG Letitia James, who inherited the case from her disgraced predecessor, Eric Schneiderman. In that case and in a pending lawsuit against Massachusetts, ExxonMobil claims the state AGs coordinated their efforts with environmental groups and private lawyers in a scheme to violate the company’s constitutional right to speak about climate science.
The emails published by Climate Litigation Watch indicate Jamil Richards, the coordinator of global warming initiatives under then-California AG Harris, participated in the 2012 La Jolla conference and may have been a lead speaker. Richards was the only government official on a list of “workshop participants” dated June 14, 2012, with the rest being academics or heads of nonprofit environmental groups.
In a “Note on confidentiality,” organizers said “some participants may wish to have their participation in this workshop and/or some information they present to be treated as confidential.” A final report on the La Jolla conference was distributed with a request to keep it among “scholars, practitioners and funders.”
Despite ExxonMobil’s protestations, a federal judge in 2018 dismissed the company’s lawsuit against Massachusetts, saying there was no evidence of a “missing link” between climate activists and private lawyers on one hand and state AGs on the other. Emails turned up by ExxonMobil during New York’s ill-fated lawsuit showed then-New York AG Schneiderman consulted with activists before launching a highly publicized investigation of the company in 2015, however.
ExxonMobil’s lawsuit against Massachusetts is on appeal before the Second Circuit, where a three-judge panel heard arguments in February. Ten states including Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin filed an amicus brief in 2018 condemning the Massachusetts action as an “unconstitutional abuse of investigative power.”
The New York and Massachusetts AGs “are embracing one side of a multi-faceted and robust policy debate, and simultaneously seeking to censor opposing viewpoints,” said the states, some of which have since flipped from Republican to Democratic control.
Climate litigation is a priority of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, with its roots in the company that became ExxonMobil, and the Resources Legacy Fund, which according to federal tax filings has paid more than $1 million to Sher Edling, a private law firm that represents climate litigants including the City of Baltimore.
Matt Pawa, a lawyer who made millions suing over the gasoline additive MTBE, helped organize the La Jolla conference and is now a partner with Hagens Berman representing government plaintiffs in climate litigation.