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🌎 The Undercurrent: Exxon’s Latest Strategy to Silence Climate Transparency

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By Abigail Bassett 

When California rolled out its landmark climate-disclosure laws in 2023, Senate Bill 253 (SB 253) and Senate Bill 261 (SB 261), known together as the Climate Accountability Package, many observers expected that the fossil-fuel industry would grumble, but mostly comply. 

Few expected Exxon Mobil to respond by claiming a First Amendment violation. But just this week, the oil giant filed suit in U.S. District Court in Sacramento, arguing that California’s climate-disclosure laws “compel speech” and therefore infringe Exxon’s constitutional right to free expression.

The surprising piece of this puzzle, beyond the long-established “personhood” claim, is that the suit is packed with a laundry list of climate mis- and disinformation, and that its framing of the argument is a fight over transparency dressed up as a fight over free speech.

Starting in 2026, SB 253 will require public and private companies with revenue of more than $1 billion annually that do business in California to publish an accounting of their carbon emissions. As Reuters reports, “The law requires the disclosure of both the companies' own emissions and indirect emissions by their suppliers and customers.” SB 261 separately requires companies with more than $500 million in revenue to disclose both their climate-related financial risks and the strategies they’re using to mitigate those risks. 

On its surface, Exxon Mobil’s complaint targets the main features of the California laws, arguing that, taken together, the laws force the company to “parrot” ideas and metrics it rejects, such as estimating downstream emissions from consumers burning its fuels. 

Beneath the legalese, however, lies a familiar set of talking points that echo decades of oil industry messaging: that we already disclose voluntarily; we can’t be forced to adopt your methodology; that this is political speech disguised as regulation, and that California is overreaching. The complaint reads less like a technical objection and more like a greatest-hits compilation of climate-disinformation tropes adapted to a post-fact world. This time, instead of flatly denying that climate change exists, Exxon is arguing that any attempt to describe it accurately would be tantamount to a violation of the company’s rights.

To understand the argument, we have to unpack some of the history and context that surrounds the idea of a corporation with the legal personhood. The history of corporate personhood stretches back to the medieval period when the Catholic Church was granted legal persona in order to buy and sell property–the goal of which was to ensure that the legal entity could both outlive the people who made up the corporation, as well as any inheritance laws that might become problematic down the road. 

According to NPR, in the United States, “the advantages of incorporation were essential to efficient and secure economic development. Unlike partnerships, the corporation continued to exist even if a partner died; there was no unanimity required to do something; shareholders could not be sued individually, only the corporation as a whole, so investors only risked as much as they put into buying shares.”

Yet corporations are not mentioned anywhere in the American Constitution. It wasn’t until the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886) that corporations were initially granted rights under the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Corporations were mostly limited in their claim to the same rights as people thanks to a law passed by Congress in 1907, which prevented corporations from getting involved in Federal elections. Then, in 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti that corporations had a First Amendment right to spend money on state ballot measures. However, 70 years later, the fateful 2010 Citizens United vs FEC decision completely changed the legal and political landscape for corporations, granting them the right to unlimited independent expenditures in federal, state, and local elections. Many consider Citizens United a pivotal case that has led to the decline in American democracy. 

Each of these rulings progressively  strengthened the concept that corporations are not merely economic entities but speakers in the public square, with protected rights. It is that very legal architecture that has enabled Exxon to claim, in this filing, that climate-disclosure laws, which require factual reporting of emissions and financial risks, amount to forced ideological speech. Exxon is effectively turning rights once meant to protect citizens against powerful interests into tools that protect those interests from democratic oversight.

California, with its huge population and its position as the fourth-largest economy in the world by GDP, has long used its size to influence federal rules and regulations. Take tailpipe emissions regulations, for example, which were in place until the current administration undid them this year.  

The state’s laws were designed to set a national benchmark, compelling large corporations (including global ones like Exxon Mobil) to account for their climate footprints. Dozens of states and the SEC have eyed similar frameworks, and a victory for Exxon could chill that momentum, effectively weaponizing the First Amendment against transparency itself.

Legal scholars say the argument is novel, but risky. Courts have long distinguished between commercial speech (which regulators can compel to prevent consumer deception) and ideological speech (which enjoys stronger protection). For example, requiring a food label to list calories isn’t considered a violation of free speech. Exxon’s gambit hinges on convincing a court that its climate disclosures are akin to ideological statements rather than factual data.

It’s a stretch, but in the current judicial climate, not an impossible one to imagine holding sway. As the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has expanded religious and speech-based exemptions for corporations, industry lawyers see opportunity. The play may well not be to win outright but to delay implementation, sow doubt, and make disclosure look politically radioactive.

Legal experts expect the state to argue that the laws are commercial in nature and factual statements about emissions and risks. California is also likely to argue that it has the right to impose standards and laws on companies doing business within its borders, though, as we have seen with the emissions laws there, that argument could be challenged. 

The stakes in Exxon’s First Amendment challenge in this case are not purely about speech, but rather control. After decades of denying, delaying, and deflecting responsibility, the industry’s newest tactic reframes accountability itself as oppression. Whether the Court buys that argument will determine more than the fate of two California laws. It will test whether the First Amendment still protects the public’s right to know, or if it has become a weapon for those most responsible for the climate crisis to keep the truth at bay.

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