Activists representing more than 350 environmental, civic, and college student organizations held a press conference in Downtown manhattan and delivered a letter to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in support of his investigation of ExxonMobil.

The Sierra Club has filed a lawsuit challenging the Securities and Exchange Commission for its failure to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and disclose documents regarding what the environmental group called the agency's "unprecedented rejections, on behalf of corporate polluters, of climate-related shareholder resolutions aimed at reducing harmful pollution, or adopting corporate sustainability and climate goals."

Climate resolutions introduced by shareholders for annual meetings of companies have risen in recent years, but the SEC's rejection of these proposals using what is called no-action letter relief have also increased under Trump administration. The agency has allowed companies not to hold votes on at least 12 climate-related shareholder resolutions in the last 18 months, including one that, if passed, would have compelled Exxon Mobil to disclose emissions targets in line with the Paris Climate Agreement.

Before that, a 2018 shareholder resolution planned at EOG Resources was blocked by company with the SEC's approval, and the agency saying in its no-action letter that the resolution "seeks to micromanage the Company by probing too deeply into matters of a complex nature which shareholders, as a group, would not be a in a position to make an informed judgment."

The lawsuit states that was the first time the SEC issued a no-action letter on the issue of greenhouse gas emission targets. The details of that claim are important to understand, according to Heidi Welsh, executive director of the Sustainable Investments Institute. Walsh explained that a few earlier proposals that asked for "net-zero" climate goals had been blocked by the SEC on the grounds that they were too specific and would "micromanage" a company and therefore constitute "ordinary business", which is the most commonly cited reason companies cite and use to block proposals.

But Welsh said the EOG proposal was the first to be blocked which asked for greenhouse goals generally.

"This proposal or very similar iterations of it had gone to votes more than 100 times previously, earning increasing levels of support from investors. What made the EOG no-action letter notable was that it marked a clear shift in the SEC staff's interpretation of greenhouse gas goals proposals. The SEC staff now appears to think that if a proposal mentions goals and any sort of timeframe, it is too specific and may be excluded. This is definitely new."

The Sierra Club filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California after the SEC failed to comply with a FOIA request made in April seeking records to help explain the rejections of shareholder proposals relating to climate change. Sierra Club Senior attorney Joshua Smith said in a statement, "Trump's SEC is determined to leave the public in the dark and has ignored repeated inquiries about the status of this information."

The Securities and Exchange Commission declined to comment.

The Sierra Club says in its lawsuit that the SEC, after initially communicating with the environmental group that the request was in the public interest and granting the Sierra Club a filing fee waiver, later said it had to reclassify the FOIA request under a more complex treatment given the number of documents to review and that meant it could not even begin to process the request for three years.

The SEC revised its estimate of responsive documents three times in all, according to the lawsuit — from 2,000 emails containing about two pages per email (i.e., 4,000 pages), to 9,852 pages, and then to over 200,000 pages.

The Sierra Club alleges that the SEC, "has demonstrated a pattern and practice of failing to comply with FOIA requests by improperly using 'complex track' determinations to shield itself from complying with lawful requests, and thereby to undermine the purpose of the Act."