ExxonMobil Facing Scrutiny By European Parliament Members

Exxon a publicly traded oil company is about to face public questions for the first time over this role in creating a climate crisis that threatens the upend human civilizations and render dozens of major cities uninhabitable before the end of the century.

Documents that were leaked 4 years ago revealed Exxon Mobil Corp. understood that fossil fuel emissions are causing the planet to warm before it began funding a Big Tobacco-style misinformation campaign to discredit climate science.

A hearing in Brussels by the European Parliament members (EP) could strip Exxon Mobil of lobbying access and deepen the oil giant’s mounting legal issues.

“The historical evidence is incontrovertible,” Geoffrey Supran, the Harvard University researcher who co-authored the first peer-reviewed analysis of Exxon Mobil’s history of climate communication, said by phone. “The evidence points only one way, that these companies and trade associations funded misinformation to stifle policymakers.”

Per the meeting organizer Exxon Mobil declined to testify on the front of the EP members.

Under the new rules, the European Union’s lawmakers could ban the company from lobbying the transnational parliament overseeing a market that in 2015 made up to 14% of tis global oil and gas production and into which it invested $2 billion last year to expand a new refinery.

The same European Parliament barred the agrochemical giant Monsanto owned by German Conglomerate Bayer; after the company refused to testify at a hearing on its potential influenced into the safety the glyphosate used in the RoundUp weedkiller.

Supran will give testimony alongside Italian European parliamentarian Eleonora Evi, Dutch European parliamentarian Bas Eickhout and Food & Water Europe campaigner Frida Kieninger.

“Parliamentarians will show that they do take this issue seriously,” Evi said in a statement to HuffPost. “I call on fellow MEPs to use this hearing as a stepping stone to start tackling Exxon Mobil’s undue and heavy influence in EU decision-making now.”

Earlier in January, the Supreme Court refused the company to bid on the Massachusetts block, forcing Exxon Mobil to turn over decades of records on what it knew about climate change as port of a fraud probe.

Last February, a state judge allowed New York Attorney General Letitia James to file a motion to dismiss Exxon Mobil’s motion alleging prosecutorial misconduct in the Empire State’s own lawsuit against the oil giant for allegedly misleading investors about the risks of climate change.

In March, Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine tweeted a link soliciting outside legal counsel to help an investigation and potential lawsuit against Exxon for possible fraud.

Exxon Mobil is facing a host of other litigation in the United States, too, including a federal lawsuit from Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation claiming the company failed to protect an oil storage facility in Massachusetts from the effects of climate change. A federal judge in Boston last month allowed the lawsuit to proceed.

As the legal situations are unfolding will see if the EP is going to barre the company.