Exxon Mobil Corp. is suing California over state laws the company says violate its First Amendment rights by forcing it "to serve as a mouthpiece" for ideas it disagrees with, including that large companies are uniquely responsible for climate change.

Exxon is challenging two laws that were signed into law in October 2023 as part of the state Legislature's climate accountability package. The company says it has publicly disclosed its greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related business risks in the past, but the way California demands it be done now is unconstitutional.

"The statutes compel ExxonMobil to trumpet California's preferred message even though ExxonMobil believes the speech is misleading and misguided," the company said in a complaint filed Friday in California federal court. "But the Constitution does not permit a state to use speech mandates to turn private parties into 'instruments for fostering public adherence to an ideological point of view [they find] unacceptable.'"

S.B. 253 mandates that public and private companies doing business in California with annual gross revenues above $1 billion disclose greenhouse gas emissions. And S.B. 261 requires that companies operating in the state with annual gross revenues over $500 million disclose climate-related financial risks and their mitigation tactics.

But Exxon argues that such content-based speech regulations are "presumptively unconstitutional" and subject to strict scrutiny under the First Amendment. The regulations may be justified only if the government proves that they "are narrowly tailored to serve compelling state interests," the company said.

"To comply with S.B. 253, ExxonMobil will have to produce greenhouse gas emissions reports based on a framework … that ExxonMobil has consistently criticized as misleading and counterproductive," the company said.

It said the California Air Resources Board's regulations' focus on absolute emissions "penalizes larger, carbon-efficient companies and incentivizes them to focus on reducing supply rather than emissions efficiency, while double- or triple-counting many emissions using unverifiable methodologies that obscure more than they illuminate."

"S.B. 261 likewise requires ExxonMobil to recast its descriptions of business risk using a state-prescribed framework that ExxonMobil believes is fundamentally unsuitable for mandatory reporting," the company said.

And it argued that the two laws are "suspect" because they compel speech only by companies above a certain annual revenue threshold.

Christine Lee, a spokesperson for the California Department of Justice, on Monday cricitized Exxon's lawsuit.

"These laws are about transparency," Lee said in a statement. "ExxonMobil might want to continue keeping the public in the dark, but we're ready to litigate vigorously in court to ensure the public's access to these important facts."

CARB declined to comment Monday.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Farm Bureau Federation, Western Growers Association and other business groups are suing the Golden State over its climate disclosure laws in a separate case and are currently appealing a federal judge's decision to reject their bid for a preliminary injunction that would block implementation of the statutes while they challenge them.

Exxon is represented by Jonathan P. Schneller, Dawn Sestito and Lauren Kaplan of O'Melveny & Myers LLP.

Counsel information for CARB was not available Monday.

The case is Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Lauren Sanchez et al., number 2:25-at-01462 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.