Exxon not guilty of duping investors on climate change costs

A judge on Tuesday ruled in favor of ExxonMobil in a case that accused the company of misleading investors about climate-change regulations.

New York state’s attorney general launched an invetigation into Exxon in 2015 and sued the company last year, claiming it used two sets of numbers when calculating the cost of climate change regulations its operations. This accounting misled investors and made the company’s decisions to invest in certain carbon-intensive projects appear more profitable or less costly than they otherwise would have, the New York state AG alleged.

The court disagreed, however. In his decision, Judge Barry Ostrager wrote that New York “failed to prove that ExxonMobil made any material misstatements or omissions about its practices and procedures that misled any reasonable investor.”

He added that the judgment does not clear the company of contributing to climate change, however.

“Nothing in this opinion is intended to absolve ExxonMobil from responsibility for contributing to climate change through the emission of greenhouse gases in the production of its fossil fuel products,” Ostrager wrote. “But ExxonMobil is in the business of producing energy, and this is a securities fraud case, not a climate change case.”

Exxon still faces a number of lawsuits over its contribution to climate change from cities, investors and the state of Massachusetts.

With reporting by the Associated Press.