Come and listen to my story
‘Bout a man named Jed,
A poor mountaineer,
Barely kept his family fed.
And then one day
He was shootin’ at some food
And up through the ground came a-bubblin’ crude.
Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea.
Black gold, indeed. Texas wouldn’t be Texas without our Texas tea. It’s right there in our name. Take the x out of Texas and you’ve got teas. Take the ex out of Texas and add xon and you’ve Exxon. And Texas wouldn’t be Texas without Exxon either.
That’s why Texans take it kind of personally when someone attacks Exxon and the oil industry, which is what some greedy and ideologically daft California municipalities have been doing from some time now. But Exxon is fighting back, and so are Texans.
Those nutty, poorly managed West Coast municipalities filed suit against ExxonMobil for allegedly exacerbating the exaggeratedly dire effects of climate change, the fictitious phenomenon formerly known as global warming, but Exxon turned the tables on them, petitioning Tarrant County District Court for pre-suit discovery for a counter suit.
The municipalities unsuccessfully challenged the trial court’s jurisdiction, but won on appeal. The Second Appellate District ruled that the out-of-state actors “lack sufficient contacts for a Texas court to exercise specific jurisdiction.”
Nevertheless, the appellate court chastised the California municipalities for trying to accomplish through litigation what ought to be done through legislation or regulation.
“Lawfare is an ugly tool by which to seek the environmental policy changes the California Parties desire, enlisting the judiciary to do the work that the other two branches of government cannot or will not do,” the higher court chided.
But Exxon has just begun to fight. Our home-state oil giant has appealed to the Texas Supreme Court, arguing that “the potential defendants seek to wrest Texas policy decisions from Texas citizens by diminishing the pocketbooks and stifling the speech of its industry.”
Yep, that’s what they’re trying to do, but Exxon and Texans are not going to stand for it.