ExxonMobil could be looking at a Big Tobacco-style showdown over climate change: ExxonMobil looks set to be embroiled in a legal case that could change the status of the fossil fuel industry in America. The attorney general of the US Virgin Islands Claude Walker issued a subpoena in March for nearly 40 years of climate change documents from Exxon, joining the US states of New York, California, and Massachusetts in a probe into the extent of the corporation’s knowledge of fossil fuel’s role in global warming while pushing an agenda denying climate change. Earlier this year, a coalition of 17 state attorneys general formed an alliance to press Exxon to reveal a decades long document trail which demonstrates that it had knowledge of the harmful effects of the fossil fuels. The company itself had quietly funded some of the first climate research as early as the 1970s, according to an investigation by InsideClimate News last year. The investigation revealed an email from Exxon’s former scientific advisor that seems to show that the Exxon was aware of climate change and adverse effects of carbon emissions as far back as 1981, seven years before the issue came into public focus. Exxon then quietly tucked away this knowledge and joined other energy giants and formed Global Climate Coalition in the 1980s to lobby Congress against early calls by climate change activists — and continued to fund powerful climate change detractor lobby groups, according to Vice: Motherboard.

U.S. officials are hoping to collect enough evidence to bring fraud charges against Exxon by asserting that it knowingly deceived the public on the effects of greenhouse gasses. The subpoena was expanded this week to include 100 academic institutions, free-market think tanks and conservative groups named in the Exxon Secrets website. For its part ExxonMobil is not going down without and fight and is using the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in favor of corporate personhood (corporations have the same rights as individuals) to claim that the subpoena violates its First Amendment rights to not participate in a national discussion on climate change. However this pans out, this could be a potentially titanic battle the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the trials that brought down Big Tobacco.