Attorney general sues Big Oil.

Byline: Kevin Featherly

Attorney General Keith Ellison has sued three oil industry titans, charging that they schemed to defraud and deceive Minnesotans by denying climate change, despite insider research confirming that continued consumption of their product would eventually lead to planetary disaster.

The suit was filed in Ramsey County District Court against ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and Koch Industries. The latter owns Flint Hills Resources, a company with an oil refinery and several asphalt plants in Minnesota.

Basing its allegations on information first unveiled by investigative journalists in 2015, the suit says that defendants began to learn as far back as 1954 that carbon dioxide was concentrating in the atmosphere, through "industrialization and the consequent burning of large quantities of coal and petroleum."

By the late 1950s, the 84-page complaint alleges, the industry began to connect greenhouse gases with climate change.

In 1969, the suit alleges, the Stanford Research Institute issued a report to defendants at APIthe industry's trade association, of which the other two defendants are members. It predicted that by the year 2000, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would hit 370 parts per million, with noticeable effects. Concentrations actually reached 369 parts per million that year, the suit says.

Throughout the 1970s, the suit alleges, "it was becoming increasingly clear that climate change could have serious implications for Exxon's business model." In 1982, an internal Exxon document (referred to as the "Cohen/Levine Memo") declares that climate science was "unanimous" in holding that greenhouse gases from fossil fuel consumption would "bring about significant changes in the Earth's climate."

Rather than modify business practices to mitigate or reverse the effects, the suit alleges, the industry in the late 1980s began a coordinated and heavily financed campaign to disseminate misleading information and confuse the public.

For example, Koch Industries co-owner David Koch told New York magazine in 2010 that climate change is actually good news. "The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because a far greater land area will be available to produce food," Koch said as recounted in Ellison's complaint.

All three defendants disseminated information suggesting that experts were split on the science, the complaint says. They paid large sums of money to outside groups, like the...