The nation’s largest energy company successfully fended off claims Tuesday by New York that it misled investors for years in how it calculated the financial risks of climate change. The high-profile trial marked the culmination of a four-year-old probe under three top prosecutors in New York.

But Exxon is not yet in the clear. Congress too gridlocked to pass major climate legislation, other left-leaning cities and states have also turned to the courts to hold oil companies accountable for their role in climate change – and are making their cases on arguments different than those brought in New York.

“The New York suit was based on one specific alleged violation of a statute that is peculiar to New York,” said Michael Gerrard, a professor of environmental law at Columbia Law School. “That theory didn’t fly. But it has little bearing on the wide variety of other legal theories that are being deployed in climate change cases.”

New York Supreme Court Judge Barry Ostrager ruled that the state failed to show that the oil giant broke state securities laws when describing to shareholders how it analyzed the effect of future greenhouse gas regulations on the company’s bottom line, Steven Mufson and I reported.

During a 12-day trial this fall, the state tried to wield a powerful anti-fraud state law, called the Martin Act, that does not require prosecutors to prove that a company intended to deceive investors. The office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, tried to show the company lied to investors by keeping two sets of books – one public, one private – for estimating the cost of complying with future climate regulations.

But even with that relatively low bar, Ostrager found New York’s allegations “to be without merit” and the use of the state’s securities law to be a stretch. Ostrager found that Exxon had been transparent about the two different ways it calculated those costs and that New York had failed to show that “any reasonable investor” would have been misled.

Taking heed of that ruling is Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, a Democrat who brought a similar suit against Exxon in October. Her office, like New York, says Exxon misled with its use of so-called “proxy costs” for carbon.

But that is not the only claim Massachusetts is making. The state is also suing Exxon for misrepresenting the environmental benefits of some of its gasoline and motor oil products and for failing to disclose the risks of climate change caused by burning fossil fuels.

Chloe Gotsis, a spokeswoman for Healey’s office, said Massachusetts is not daunted by the ruling from New York since its claims relate to advertising, and not just cost estimates for complying with regulation.

“We will continue our work to hold the company accountable for its misrepresentations,” she said.

Andrew Logan, director of the oil and gas program at Ceres, a non-profit group of environmentalists and investors, said the emphasis on consumers and misinforming the general public in the Massachusetts case would avoid the need to find harm to a “reasonable investor.”

“These cases will get easier to prove unfortunately as climate change gets worse,” Logan said. “But if you wait long enough for damage to be obvious, you miss the opportunity to prevent it in the first place.”

Perhaps even more concerning to Exxon and other oil companies is the slew of other local governments seeking compensation from them for the damage rising temperatures have already wrought to drought-plagued farmers and beachfront businesses.

Prosecutors in Baltimore, Rhode Island, San Francisco and Oakland, as well as coalitions of communities in the mountains of Colorado and along the coast of California, have brought lawsuits in state court claiming various oil companies have created a “public nuisance” – a charge more typically brought against a noisy neighbor – for the heat-trapping pollution their products have put into the atmosphere.

Those cases are still winding their way through the court system, and there are still a number of hurdles litigants need to leap. Federal judges are still sorting out whether the claims should be heard at the state or federal level. Oil firms have sought to move the cases to the federal court system since the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of industry in a 2011 public nuisance suit.

But the ruling out of New York shouldn’t be one of those barriers, said David Bookbinder, chief counsel at the Niskanen Center, a think tank in Washington, since the public nuisance cases rely on a different set of laws.

“It has zero relevance to those cases,” said Bookbinder, who is representing the three local governments in Colorado in their suit against Exxon and Suncor Energy, a Canadian oil company.

Last year, Exxon gave $1 million to promote a plan to grant oil companies immunity from climate lawsuits in exchange for passing a tax on carbon emissions, though the group that came up with that plan, Americans for Carbon Dividends, recently backed away from the idea of shielding companies from court cases.

The U.S. oil major is considering the sale of its shale-gas holdings, along with its Kitimat liquefied natural gas project in Canada, according to a statement Tuesday. Chevron said it will keep its 2020 capital budget at $20 billion, the third consecutive year it hasn’t boosted spending.

The company’s actions come from a chief executive officer, Mike Wirth, whose mantra has been capital discipline. Wirth earlier this year earned $1 billion for the company by walking away from a bidding war for Anadarko Petroleum Corp. San Ramon, California-based Chevron is the best performer among the five Western oil majors this year, but it has faced mounting costs at its Tengiz project in Kazakhstan.

“The Appalachia writedown should be baked in, but the others are incrementally negative” for the stock, said Muhammed Ghulam, a Houston-based analyst at Raymond James & Associates. “I would expect most companies to have to write down gas assets this year.”

Chevron follows Schlumberger and Repsol in ascribing a lower value to their assets at a time when the growing adoption of cleaner energy stokes speculation that demand for fossil fuels may peak in a few years, while supplies keep rising. The oil-services giant posted a $12.7 billion writedown in October, while the Spanish producer took $5.3 billion off its balance sheet last week.

The gas glut is particularly pronounced in North America where shale production is flooding local markets. Wirth said his decision to walk away from certain gas assets illustrates the company’s discipline in protecting shareholder funds.

“The best use of our capital is investing in our most advantaged assets,” Wirth said in the statement. “With capital discipline and a conservative outlook comes the responsibility to make the tough choices necessary to deliver higher cash returns to our shareholders over the long term.”

Wirth has made crude production from the Permian Basin a centerpiece of his global strategy, with a budget of $4 billion for the shale play next year. The giant Tengiz joint venture in the Caspian Sea, whose total cost has surged to about $45 billion, will receive $3.75 billion from Chevron in 2020.

“Tengiz project overruns raised questions about Chevron’s commitment to capital discipline, but plans to shelve or divest Appalachia and Kitimat LNG show the company will target returns over resources,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Fernando Valle wrote in a note.

U.S. natural gas futures prices have slumped this year amid a supply glut, and are now averaging about $2.54 per million British thermal units. If it finishes the year at that level, it’ll be the lowest average price since 1999.

The move to write down Appalachian gas is likely to put pressure on other producers in the region to do the same. Newly built gas export terminals along the U.S. Gulf Coast have so far failed to absorb the excess supply.

Chevron held more than 750,000 net acres in the Marcellus and Utica shale formations, which stretch from West Virginia to Pennsylvania and Ohio, according to a 2017 fact sheet on its website. The writedown also encompasses the Big Foot oil platform in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, which began producing last year.

Telefonica’s German unit, which operates the country’s second-largest wireless network, picked Huawei and Finland’s Nokia to take an equal role supplying its fifth-generation mobile phone network upgrade, the company said in a statement Wednesday. The deal is subject to the firms getting certified by German authorities, it said.

The announcement is a boon to Huawei after Deutsche Telekom AG said last week it has stopped ordering new 5G equipment because of political uncertainty over Chinese suppliers. Huawei has repeatedly denied allegations its equipment could be used for espionage.

There’s one caveat, though. The German government is currently drawing up security guidelines for the country’s 5G network expansion, in a move that’s expected to require certification of equipment, including antennas.

Hawks in the intelligence community would like to tighten the rules in a way that would block Huawei. Chancellor Angela Merkel has said in the past she doesn’t want to bar the Chinese firm as long as it abides by certain security standards. It isn’t yet clear what requirements will ultimately be put in place, so it may be too early for Huawei to declare victory in Germany.

The deal with both firms to supply the less-sensitive radio access network “will be subject to the successful safety certification of the technology and the companies,” Telefonica Deutschland Holding said in the statement. The company “is taking into account the ongoing political process of establishing these security guidelines without delaying the start of the 5G expansion.”

Telefonica Deutschland hasn’t yet selected a supplier to upgrade the more-sensitive core network — the ‘brain’ that houses control functions — and won’t do so until next year, Chief Executive Officer Markus Haas said on a call with reporters.

The company’s shares fell 2.1% at 11:24 a.m. in Frankfurt. Its strategy update, presented to investors in London this morning, indicated it would cut its 2019 dividend to 17 euro cents a share from 27 euro cents.

Telefonica Deutschland is targeting sales growth of at least 5% through 2022 and is seeking to improve its profit margin during that period. The company is confident it can win more customers in rural areas and add fixed-line clients as well as corporate customers that install 5G in their factories, Haas said on the call.

The company, known as Aramco and frequently dubbed the “crown jewel” of Saudi Arabia, was partially privatized as part of a campaign by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to wean the kingdom off its dependence on oil.

Since becoming the heir to the crown in 2017, Mohammed has emphasized the importance of economic diversification in the conservative kingdom. Global fears regarding climate change and worries about the use of fossil fuels has played a part in Saudi Arabia selling a stake in Aramco, which was the world’s most profitable company last year, followed by Apple and Industrial & Commercial Bank of China.

Last week’s IPO stood at $1.7 trillion, making Aramco the most valuable listed company in the world, but fell short of the $2 trillion valuation aimed for by Mohammed. The company floated 1.5 percent of its stake on the Riyadh stock exchange, or Tadawul.

Initially priced at 32 riyals ($8.53), shares rose the maximum 10 percent to 35.2 riyals on Wednesday, giving Aramco a market value of around $1.88 trillion, Reuters reported, surpassing Apple who made history when it became the first $1 trillion publicly traded company.

More than 80 percent of the stake sale was bought by Saudi buyers, Reuters reported, following lukewarm interest from international investors. Saudi Arabia was shunned by some financial institutions for a brief period of time following the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul as a result of his criticism of Mohammed.

Wichai Bunyu, AOT senior executive vice president/Business Development and Marketing, said today that only King Power had submitted a price since the bid was called.

The Mall Group, which had picked up the term of reference earlier, did not participate.

AOT asked King Power to present details of the bid on December 13 and will open its bid letter on December 16. The bid winner is obliged to guarantee a minimum revenue sharing of 20 per cent of total revenue with AOT.

In a related matter, AOT is selling term of reference document for the bids to operate duty free pick-up counter service at Don Mueang Airport and Suvarnabhumi Airport under concessions

King Power group and Bangkok Airways Public Company Limited have picked up the document.

AOT will stop selling the TOR on December 13, after which bidders must submit their bidding prices on January 17 next year.

He will hold management responsibility for the bank’s business strategic direction and support across nine divisions under Krungsri’s Corporate Strategy and Planning Group, namely Corporate Planning, Business Transformation, Customer Experience Management, Corporate Branding and Marketing, Finance and Risk Project Management, Business Process Planning and Management, Research, Central Administration, and Environmental, Social and Governance.

“Khun Pairote has solid management experience and deep technical strength that will surely contribute to the bank’s strategy in advancing to the next level,” said Seiichiro Akita, Krungsri president and CEO.

“His accomplishments at Krungsri Auto have helped Krungsri’s ‘Think Digital First’ and financial inclusion strategies come to fruition, while driving the Bank towards its ambition to be a top-tier financial group in Thailand.”

Prior to this appointment, Pairote was Head of Krungsri Auto Group. He brings with him 24 years of experience in consumer finance and management at Krungsri Auto, GE Capital Auto Lease and GE Money Thailand.