Big Oil and Climate Change: A 'Tobacco' Moment?

As the oil industry weathers a big patch of historically low prices, it faces a threat on another front: a broadening investigation by US state attorneys general on "whether fossil fuel companies such as ExxonMobil have misled shareholders and the public about what they knew — and when — about the risks of climate change," as Brady Dennis of The Washington Post puts it.

Led by NY attorney general Eric Schniederman, who began investigating ExxonMobil last year, the idea is there's evidence "Exxon’s in-house researchers were concerned about climate change from fossil-fuel emissions decades ago, and yet for a long time, the company publicly raised doubts about the science."

The legal theory would be that concealing this violated shareholder and consumer protection laws.

I put it to Lucy Marcus, a noted expert on corporate best practices and herself a board director and consultant. We don't know where these cases are going yet, Marcus said in an interview, but "it really could be a major turning point in the way we look at the sector and the kind of scrutiny the sector is under."

"This is happening at a time where a lot of other things are putting pressure on the industry," Marcus says. "So it’s not just the business climate that we need to think about but also the consumer climate, the geopolitical climate, the social climate, the political climate itself," she said. "It might just be a perfect storm.”