Gas prices are displayed at an Exxon gas station on July 05, 2022 in San Francisco, California.Justin Sullivan | Getty ImagesThe state of California on Friday filed one of the most significant cases against major oil companies for their role in perpetuating climate change.The 135-page legal complaint, filed through the office of California Attorney General Rob Bonta in San Francisco superior court, alleges that five big oil companies along with the American Petroleum Institute, a trade organization that represents them, orchestrated a decades-long disinformation campaign to hide the correlation between fossil fuel production and climate change.The state claims that this intentional cover-up has gone on since at least the 1970s and has delayed the public’s response to climate change, exacerbating extreme natural disasters and incurring tens of billions of dollars in recovery costs.The oil companies named as defendants are BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, and Shell. The s …