A new SCOTUS decision means climate court cases are about to get a lot more interesting.
from a Shell employee in 2020, for example, said that the company’s public promotion of a path toward zeroing out its carbon emissions “has nothing to do with our business plans.”
And now that the court cases can finally proceed, more evidence is likely to be uncovered. The next major step before a trial is “discovery,” in which both sides try to uncover evidence that could help make their case in court. It could unearth new documents related to what oil companies learned from their in-house scientists and to what extent executives suppressed that information or misrepresented it publicly. Industry employees could also be called in to answer questions.
“The discovery system is quite powerful in terms of unveiling hidden information,” more powerful than some federal agencies, Sokol said. A lot of what the public learned about the tobacco industry’s effort to cover up the link between lung cancer and smoking, for example, came out of the discovery process. Tobacco companies paid hundreds of billions of dollars in settlements.
It’s not a guarantee that the public will be able to see these documents or transcripts from witnesses in the climate cases, however. The industry might argue that the information is a “trade secret,” Wiles said. Judges get to decide what evidence gets released. Documents might come out in a slow drip, with lawyers attaching them to their arguments as supporting evidence, Wiles said, but there’s a chance they could be released all at once. In the recent Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit accusing Fox News of defamation, for instance, the judge releasedin the public interest, showing that the media company’s staff privately derided conspiracy theories about the 2020 election while promoting them on air.
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