The mayor of New York City is suing the five largest oil companies in the world over climate change.
Far left New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Jan. 10, his city was suing BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell seeking billions of dollars to “recoup money spent by the city for resiliency efforts related to climate change,” Associated Press reported. Some of the companies disputed his allegations or argued they’ve made “good faith attempts to address climate change.”
The Washington Post said the lawsuit “also charges that the companies and the industry they are part of have known for some time about the consequences but sought to obscure them.”
The liberal claims that the companies knew they were causing global warming and hid it almost certainly stems from earlier efforts against ExxonMobil. Those efforts were driven by Democratic Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of New York State, left-wing environmentalist groups and investigative journalism hit pieces from InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times in partnership with Columbia University.
But several of the most prominent “Exxon Knew” crusaders had in common liberal donors opposed to fossil fuels. Schneiderman, ICN and Columbia University all got funding from prominent left-wing donors and foundations.
ICN and Columbia were funded by the Rockefeller Family Fund and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. While ICN and Schneiderman both got funding from liberal billionaire George Soros. And Steve Coll, Dean of Columbia’s graduate school of journalism, once wrote a book attacking ExxonMobil. Coll previously worked as president and CEO of the New America Foundation — another Soros-funded group — and at The Washington Post.
National news media rarely reported those financial links and alliances and seldom asked questions of ethics about the anti-Exxon accusations.
ICN described the new NYC lawsuit against oil companies as “the latest from a coastal city seeking to hold fossil fuel producers accountable.” Revealing continued coziness with Columbia University, ICN’s Nicholas Kusnetz quoted a climate change lawyer from Columbia’s Sabin Center claiming it could increase pressure on the companies by inspiring other cities or states to sue.
According to Kusnetz’s bio, he previously worked at two Soros-funded organizations: the Center for Public Integrity and Propublica.
Bloomberg News was one of the few media outlets to admit the NYC lawsuit could fail, describing it as “an uphill battle as it tries to stretch current law to address climate change,”
In addition to the lawsuit, De Blasio announced that New York City would divest city pension funds of fossil fuel investments.
