And thanks to their willingness to sucker the world, the world is now a chaotic mess.

This one comes from months of careful reporting by two separate teams, one at the Pulitzer Prize-winning website Inside Climate News, and the other at the Los Angeles Times (with an assist from the Columbia Journalism School). Following separate lines of evidence and document trails, they've reached the same bombshell conclusion: ExxonMobil, the world's largest and most powerful oil company, knew everything there was to know about climate change by the mid-1980s, and then spent the next few decades systematically funding climate denial and lying about the state of the science. [...]

A few observers, especially on the professionally jaded left, have treated the story as old news -- as something that even if we didn't know, we knew. "Of course they lied," someone told me. That cynicism, however, serves as the most effective kind of cover for Exxon (right alongside the tired argument that it's "not the fault of the companies -- they're just meeting demand from all of us"). What's beginning to sink in is the horrible impact of their lies: Exxon, had its leaders merely stated directly what they knew to be true, could have ended the pretend debate over climate change as early as the 1980s.

Washington Monthly:

A fossil fuel company intentionally and knowingly obfuscating research into climate change constitutes criminal negligence and malicious intent at best, and a crime against humanity at worst. The Department of Justice has a moral obligation to prosecute Exxon and its co-conspirators accordingly.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.