Exxon Mobil Corporation is suing the state of California over a pair of 2023 climate disclosure laws that the company says infringe on its free speech rights, specifically by forcing it to embrace the message that big business is solely to blame for climate change.
The Texas-based oil and gas corporation filed its complaint Friday in the Eastern District Court of California. It asks the court to stop the laws from taking effect next year.
In its complaint, ExxonMobil says it has publicly disclosed its greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related business risks for years, but that it fundamentally disagrees with the state’s new reporting requirements.
The company would have to use “frames that disproportionately place blame on large companies like ExxonMobil” in order to shame those companies, the complaint states.
Under Senate Bill 253, large companies will have to disclose a wide range of planet-warming emissions, including direct and indirect emissions, such as the costs of employee business travel and transporting products.
ExxonMobil disagrees with the state’s required methodology, which would focus on a company’s emissions worldwide and therefore blame companies only for being large rather than efficient, the complaint states.
The second law, Senate Bill 261, requires companies that earn more than $500 million a year to disclose the financial risks that climate change poses to their businesses and how they plan to address them.
The company said in its complaint that the law would require it to speculate “about unknowable future developments” and to post such speculation on its website.
A spokesperson for California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said in an email that it was “truly shocking that one of the biggest polluters on the planet would oppose transparency.”