Connecticut
nothing here before?
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gmail cci 1225
connecticut-is-closer-than-ever-to-putting-exxon-on-tria
December 1, 2025
Connecticut’s climate accountability lawsuit is one step closer to trial after a state judge last week rejected ExxonMobil’s attempts to strike the case, delivering a major win for the state’s effort to hold the oil giant accountable for its decades of climate deception.
“ExxonMobil is throwing the kitchen sink at us, trying every angle to invalidate our case,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said in a statement. “Once again, they have failed on every count.”
The lawsuit, filed in 2020, argues that Exxon’s historic and ongoing “campaign of deception” about the climate harms of fossil fuels violated the state’s consumer protection law and has inflicted “decades of avoidable harm” and “catastrophic consequences” on Connecticut’s people, infrastructure, and ecosystems. The storms hitting Connecticut’s coastline and flooding communities’ homes have been supercharged by climate change that Exxon knew it was fueling decades ago. By one estimate, sea-level rise caused by climate change created an additional $8.1 billion in damages during Hurricane Sandy, which hit Connecticut in 2012.
In a ruling Wednesday, Connecticut Superior Court Judge John B. Farley rejected all of Exxon’s claims that the state’s case was preempted by federal law, barred by the First Amendment, and other unfounded legal arguments.
“[T]he fundamental objective of the lawsuit,” Judge Farley wrote, is “to remedy the defendant’s alleged unfair and deceptive marketing practices.”
Connecticut’s case — which aims to make Exxon stop deceiving the public, disclose internal climate change research, disgorge profits made while engaging in illegal activity, and fund a “corrective education campaign” about climate change — now enters the discovery phase of litigation.
“Our case is simple and strong — ExxonMobil amassed billions of dollars in profits off a decades-long campaign of lies, and they must be held accountable,” Attorney General Tong said. “We are in the midst of discovery and are aggressively prosecuting this case in Connecticut to uncover and expose ExxonMobil’s lies and to hold the company accountable for the harm their deception has caused.”
As climate accountability cases like Connecticut’s move closer to trial, the oil and gas industry is trying to find ways to block accountability outside the courthouse. Fossil fuel companies are lobbying Congress for a legal shield that would block communities from being able to access the courts and limit the ability of state lawmakers to demand accountability for the industry’s illegal actions. In June, more than a dozen Republican attorneys general proposed creating a “liability shield” for fossil fuel companies modeled on a 2005 law protecting gun manufacturers from lawsuits, and the New York Times later confirmed that securing similar legal protections is a priority for the fossil fuel industry this Congress.
“Exxon and other Big Oil companies are desperate to avoid facing the evidence of their climate lies, but as this ruling makes clear, the people of Connecticut deserve their day in court,” CCI President Richard Wiles said about the ruling. “As the fossil fuel industry lobbies Congress for a ‘get-out-jail-free’ card in cases like Connecticut’s, it’s critical for elected officials to stand up and protect communities’ access to the courts.”
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CLIMATEWIRE | In a win for local governments suing oil and gas majors over climate change, a federal appeals court Wednesday became the seventh to reject the industry’s bid to move a lawsuit to federal court.
In a unanimous ruling, three judges with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the state of Connecticut, upholding a lower court decision that said the state’s lawsuit against Exxon Mobil should be heard in state court.
In a twist, the decision was written by Judge Richard Sullivan, who wrote a 2021 decision for the appeals court that found that New York City’s claims in a climate lawsuit were preempted by federal law.
The industry has relied on the 2021 ruling to argue that it represents a split among the courts. An industry attorney cited it as recently as Tuesday in an effort to get a similar case in Delaware dismissed.
But Sullivan, who called the Connecticut and New York lawsuits “very different” in oral arguments last September, noted in Wednesday’s opinion that the court was joining its sister circuits in rejecting the company’s request to move the cases.
Connecticut’s lawsuit is one of more than two dozen filed by municipalities that accuse the industry of lying to the public about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. The industry has sought to move the cases to federal court where producers believe they have a better chance to toss the cases under the Clean Air Act.
But Sullivan wrote that the Connecticut case presents a “total mismatch” between the business practices that Exxon Mobil argued were subject to federal control and the behavior that Connecticut is challenging.
Connecticut’s claims, Sullivan wrote, “ultimately concern neither extracting oil and gas nor burning them, but talking about what happens to the environment when they are burned.”
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong (D), who filed the case in 2020, welcomed the decision and said his office is ready to “aggressively prosecute” the lawsuit in state court.
“Our case is simple and strong — Exxon Mobil amassed billions of dollars in profits off a decadeslong campaign of lies, and they must be held accountable,” Tong said.
He called the case a “straightforward consumer deception case” and said it was built on the state’s Unfair Trade Practices Act, which was argued in cases involving the tobacco and opioid industries.
The industry said the decision “misses” the real issue.
“The nature of climate change, this whole litigation and the remedies that Connecticut and other jurisdictions seek are all beyond the scope of any state law,” said Phil Goldberg, special counsel to the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, an initiative of the National Association of Manufacturers.
He argued that determining how best to address climate change is a “major national and international priority that cannot be decided piecemeal by state judges based on which companies each state or locality decides to sue.”
Sullivan, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, wrote that the Supreme Court has cautioned that judges should “be reluctant” to find the authority that “converts an ordinary state common law complaint into one stating a federal claim.”
And he added that the judges were “wholly unpersuaded by Exxon Mobil’s efforts to push the boundaries of the exceptions” it claimed.
He said the judges agreed with the lower court decision that found Connecticut accuses Exxon Mobil of lying to the state’s consumers and the “fact that the alleged lies were about the impacts of fossil fuels on the Earth’s climate is immaterial.”
He noted that the sides “vigorously dispute” whether federal pollution law is at play in the case. But he added the allegation that Exxon Mobil’s statements ran afoul of Connecticut’s “truth in advertising” laws, “have absolutely nothing to do with the federal common law of transboundary pollution.”
The company had argued the case should be heard in federal court because it leases oil drilling sites from the federal government and is subject to “myriad” federal regulations.
But the court was not convinced, with Sullivan writing that “Exxon Mobil has made this very argument to five of our sister circuits, all of which have squarely rejected it. We find their reasoning persuasive, and we now join them.”
Sullivan wrote that Exxon Mobil had argued the federal government had “significant control” over the means of oil and gas production during World War II.
“But World War II ended in 1945,” he wrote, adding that the conduct Connecticut cites dates to no earlier than the 1950s. “We are aware of no authority for the proposition that once a private company has acted under the close supervision of the federal government for some discrete period in its history, it may claim ‘acting-under’ status for the rest of time.”
He was joined in the case by Judge William Nardini, another Trump appointee, and Judge Myrna Pérez, an appointee of President Joe Biden.
The ruling comes as the Supreme Court earlier this year boosted a raft of similar cases by rejecting the oil industry’s latest efforts to derail them. Those rulings could pave the way for a flood of lawsuits against the industry to be heard in state courts from Maryland to Hawaii.
California earlier this month became the eighth and largest state to file a climate deception lawsuit.
The state of Delaware defended its lawsuit against the industry Tuesday in a three-hour hearing before Superior Court Judge Mary Miller Johnston.
Ted Boutrous, a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher who represents Chevron in a number of the climate liability cases, raised Sullivan’s 2021 opinion in the New York case, telling Johnston it “provides a road map” for her court and that federal law should govern the case.
He noted Delaware argues that the cases are different, but he insisted the cases contained “the very same allegations.”
Victor Sher of the law firm Sher Edling, who represented the state, said the New York lawsuit was based on a different liability standard.
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no lnx ya cheap bastard
Los Angeles Times
POLITICS
People live longer in blue states than red; new study points to impact of state policies
States that have pursued more liberal policies in education, environment and civil rights have a longer life expectancy.
States such as California that have pursued more liberal policies in education, environment and civil rights have seen a swifter rise in life expectancy than more conservative states. Above, the California Capitol in Sacramento.(Los Angeles Times)
By NOAM N. LEVEY STAFF WRITER
AUG. 3, 2020
WASHINGTON — Weak environmental protections, safety rules and labor and civil rights protections may be cutting lives short in conservative states and deepening the divide between red and blue states, according to a new study on links between life expectancy and state policy.
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The report, published Tuesday in the health policy journal Milbank Quarterly, finds that states where residents live longest, including California, tend to have much more stringent environmental laws, tougher tobacco and firearms regulations and more protections for workers, minorities and LGBTQ residents.
Since the mid-1980s, the gap among U.S. states in how long their residents live has widened, reversing decades of progress toward greater equality.
One group of states, mostly in the Northeast and the West, have seen average life expectancies rise relatively steadily, placing them on par with the wealthiest nations of Western Europe. Those states tend to have more stringent regulations.
By contrast, the life expectancy in states with more conservative health, labor and social policies — concentrated in the South and Appalachia — have stagnated in recent decades, according to the study, which adds to growing research on health and political disparities between states.
California has among the highest average life expectancies in the country, at 81.3 years. It also had the most liberal policies in the nation in 2014, the most recent year the study analyzed, according to the system the authors developed to rank states.
Although the study’s authors note that they can’t prove that state policies caused the gap in life expectancy, the correlation is a persistent one across multiple states and several decades.
“It’s disheartening to see another example of a missed opportunity by policymakers,” said David Radley, senior scientist at the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund who studies differences in state health policies and the effects on people’s health. Radley was not involved in Milbank report.
[pix Bakersfield, CA., March 4, 2020 - Jenny Morones, 26, of Bakersfield poses for a portrait on Wednesday, March 4, 2020 in Bakersfield, California. Morones is working mother struggling to raise three children on a low income. Morones fled an abusive relationship and though in her twenties, has dealt with health challenges.Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, Morones had health insurance that protected her from financial ruin. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)]
Coronavirus widens healthcare divide between red states and blue states
May 25, 2020
The new report may help shape efforts to rethink government policy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which has exposed deep structural weaknesses in the U.S. as well as yawning gaps in many state safety nets.
“The overarching conclusion is clear: States that have invested in their populations’ social and economic well-being by enacting more liberal policies over time tend to be the same states that have made considerable gains in life expectancy,” the study’s authors wrote.
Even before the current public health crisis, life expectancy in the U.S. had been declining, setting America apart from most other wealthy nations. That decline has fueled tough questions about domestic policy.
The opioid epidemic, which has had a devastating impact on regions of the country already hit hard by economic stagnation, has been the focus of a lot of the discussion about that shift.
But Syracuse University sociologist Jennifer Karas Montez, the lead author of the new study, said the impact of opioids may be only part of the story.
“When we look at what is happening with life expectancy, the tendency is to focus on individual explanations about what Americans are doing,” she said, noting obesity and smoking behaviors as well as drug use. “But state policies are so important.”
To assess what role these policies may be playing, Montez and other researchers reviewed more than 120 policies enacted by states over the years and assessed whether each policy choice in each state was more liberal or more conservative.
Policies included housing rules such as rent control; health and welfare policies such as Medicaid eligibility and welfare limits; labor protections such as paid sick leave and minimum wages; and civil rights policies such as gender discrimination bans, hate-crime laws and same-sex marriage.
They also looked at state abortion restrictions, tax policy, education spending, immigration rules and gun control laws.
Each state was ranked by how liberal or conservative its policies overall have been, going back to 1970.
The researchers then compared these findings to trends in life expectancy in all 50 states.
Montez said the trends they saw were unmistakable. They also correlated with important points in the nation’s political history.
Through the 1960s and 1970s, for example, state life expectancies generally converged. That trend began to reverse in the mid-1980s, around the same time that a conservative movement, led by President Reagan and mirrored in many state capitols, became ascendant.
The gap between states accelerated further after 2010, when sweeping Republican victories in state elections shifted policies further to the right in many places.
By 2017, residents of the state with the highest life expectancy — Hawaii — were living on average seven years longer than residents of the state with the lowest life expectancy — Mississippi.
By contrast, the gap between the best- and worst-performing states in 1984 was less than five years.
The gap is not only about policy: States where people live longer tend to be wealthier and have better educated populations, for example.
But Montez noted that decisions by state leaders have helped shape those factors.
“States like Connecticutare investing in their population, investing in schools, setting an economic floor for their workers, discouraging behaviors like smoking that kill people,” she explained. “You have other states like Mississippi and Oklahoma that aren’t doing any of this.”
In Connecticut, whose policies have become steadily more liberal over the last half century, life expectancy increased 5.8 years between 1980 and 2017 to 80.7 years.
In Oklahoma, which has become markedly more conservative, life expectancy increased only 2.2 years over the same period, reaching 75.8 years in 2017.
Identifying which state policies may have the most impact on how long people live is difficult, the researchers concede. But the study points to a group of policies that appear to correlate most closely with longer lives.
These include some unsurprising candidates such as tougher environmental laws, which the authors note may protect people from toxic substances. The authors also found a correlation between longer life expectancy and labor policies that increase economic security, such as a minimum wage.
Tougher gun laws appear to track with longer life expectancies, the study notes, as do stricter tobacco controls.
The authors also point to civil rights laws, which they suggest may protect residents from ill health related to persistent stress.
And they found a correlation between longer life expectancy and better access to abortion, which the study notes may reflect other research that has linked abortion restrictions to women’s poverty and ill health.
Noam N. Levey writes about national healthcare policy out of Washington, D.C., for the Los Angeles Times. He covered passage of the 2010 Affordable Care Act and has written extensively about the landmark law and reported on its implementation from around the country. A former investigative and political reporter, he is a Boston native and a graduate of Princeton University. He joined the newspaper in 2003 and has reported from Washington since 2006.
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Massive Lawsuit Says Big Pharma Is Price-Fixing Drugs
FEATURING PETER MAYBARDUK - The state of Connecticut is leading a nation-wide lawsuit against the world's biggest generic drug manufacturer Teva Pharmaceuticals and a number of other drug makers alleging a
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Sandy Hook lawsuit court victory opens crack in gun maker immunity shield
Timothy D. Lytton, Georgia State University
The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims could sue a gun maker, a decision that could open the floodgates to more lawsuits.
ew 1/19
This State Might Require Public Schools to Teach Climate Change
Reading, writing, arithmetic ... and climate science. That doesn't have the same ring as the "three Rs" of education, but Connecticut could one day require the subject to be on the curriculum, The Associated Press reported.
A Connecticut state lawmaker is pushing a bill to mandate the teaching of climate change in public schools throughout the state, starting in elementary school....
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2013/06/19/red-states-rank-low-on-u-s-human-development-index/print/
The best state in the union? Connecticut, of course. When you’re the world’s headquarters to hedge fund traders, the wealth gets spread around. The state ranks 6.17. When considering education levels, 20% have just a bachelor’s degrees and 15% have advanced degrees. At least 53% graduated high school. And only 11.4% did not, which for the richest state in the country is still high, though the number includes much older generations and immigrants. Average life expectancy is 80.8 years old 81.8% of the state’s school aged population (3-24) are in school. Democrats control the joint
The governors of eight Northeastern states are fed up with the air pollution that blows their way from states to their west.
In the latest high-profile move to crush the antiquated practice of burning coal in the U.S., the governors filed a petition with the EPA today that seeks more stringent air quality regulations on coal-burning states such as Ohio, Kentucky, and Michigan. That’s because pollution from those states’ coal-fired power plants reaches the Atlantic coastline, sickening residents there. From *The New York Times*:
[There is] growing anger of East Coast officials against the Appalachian states that mine coal and the Rust Belt states that burn it to fuel their power plants and factories. Coal emissions are the chief cause of global warming and are linked to many health risks, including asthma and lung disease.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut, who is leading the effort by East Coast governors to crack down on out-of-state pollution, called it a “front-burner issue” for his administration. …
Mr. Malloy said that more than half the pollution in Connecticut was from outside the state and that it was lowering the life expectancy of Connecticut residents with heart disease or asthma. “They’re getting away with murder,” Mr. Malloy said of the Rust Belt and Appalachia. “Only it’s in our state, not theirs.”
And there’s more big air pollution news this week. From the Times:
The petition comes the day before the Supreme Court is to hear arguments to determine the fate of a related E.P.A. regulation known as the “good neighbor” rule. The regulation, officially called the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, would force states with coal pollution that wafts across state lines to rein in soot and smog, either by installing costly pollution control technology or by shutting the power plants.
Bloomberg reports on that “good neighbor” court case:
The Supreme Court will hear arguments over reviving an EPA rule that would limit sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions in 28 states whose pollution blows into neighboring jurisdictions. All are in the eastern two-thirds of the country.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down the rule. It said the regulation was too strict and that EPA didn’t give states a chance to put in place their own pollution-reduction plans before imposing a nationwide standard. The Obama administration and environmental groups are appealing.
Some energy companies have been powering down their coal-fired stations, citing financial losses, but plenty of coal-burning plants are still pumping out pollutants. In October, Wisconsin Energy Corp. sought permission to shutter its 407-megawatt Presque Isle coal-fired power plant in Michigan. The request was denied by the regional grid operator, which said the region couldn’t manage without the power plant’s electricity supply. The grid operator is now in talks over compensation, to help the energy company continue operating the plant at a loss.
The Supreme Court case could decide the fate of Presque Isle and many other coal plants, so it’s one to watch. Another air-pollution case is also being argued tomorrow, this one in the D.C. Circuit Court over the EPA’s mercury rules. “This is the biggest day for clean air in American courts — ever,” John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council told Bloomberg.
Source
- Eastern States Press Midwest to Improve Air, The New York Times
- Obama’s Pollution-Control Agenda Goes to Court Tomorrow, Bloomberg
John Upton grist
Connecticut made food history last week when Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) signed the first state law in the nation mandating the labeling of foods that contain genetically modified ingredients.
But there's a catch that's bigger than the fry of an escaped GMO salmon: The new law might never actually lead to the labeling of GMO foods.