Smoke and Fumes: How the oil industry influenced the debate on climate change | Hacker News Reader

Smoke and Fumes: How the oil industry influenced the debate on climate change

smokeandfumes.org

122 pointspetekistler45 comments

Outrage is not the answer, if you live in OECD countries you have a massive footprint that rivals villages of developing countries. So do something about it. No, your pre-order of Model 3 that is going to come 3 years down the pike, does not put a dent in your carbon footprint. It is one small step, the roads your Tesla drives on needs petro-chemicals, so do those perfectly manicured french fries. Oil industry is greedy and entrenched, and do not expect some sort of Egalitarian enlightenment not from them, Nor from SV companies that colluded to screw their employees by forming a Cartel. Understand human nature, and it will help you trying to see the problems through caricatures and hopefully to work towards solution.

Here is the hard truth, We are a fossil fuel civilization. The problems are complex, we can green wash and eat some organic pop corn, but that does not help.

edit: there are some serious people trying to bring real solutions, I find Vaclav Smil, taking it to the next level of thinking instead of the constant greenwashing marketing campaigns.

I live in a flat that is suitable for living alone, I don't drive, I cycle everywhere except when I need to go really long distances in which case I use public transport.

I buy nearly all my food from the local market most of which comes from farms within a hundred miles, I minimise energy consumption, most of the furniture I buy is good second hand stuff, I rarely buy clothes and everything I do own would fit on a single 3ft rack in a closet (and does).

I recycle as much waste as I can, I don't have a garden so that restricts some options in terms of growing food/composting.

I take showers not baths.

My desktop is 5 years old with upgrades, my laptop is 3 years old, I've no current plans to replace either.

I don't do any of this for purely ecological reasons (though that's a nice benefit) but because I have everything I need to live comfortably and I don't put much premium on expensive possessions, I want to own stuff not be owned by stuff.

Not really sure how much more I can do given that I rent so major energy upgrades aren't really a possibility.

Help organize collective action to make it easier for many more people to make the choices you're able to make.

Yup; not to knock personal lifestyle changes, but your own personal impact is a drop in the ocean- you only start to make a true difference when you can spread them to many other people.

Of course, practicing what you preach can be a key step in spreading those changes.

Of all the harmful effects of oil, asphalt does not make the top of the list. Sure, it covers up soil, nothing grows on it, it causes flooding by not allowing water to infiltrate the soil, and so on.

But the stuff was put there on purpose and it mostly... sits there. As designed.

What about water bottles? Many of those are made of plastic from oil. Not all are recycled. Or most things made of plastic for that matter.

What about fertilizer? We are using dead dinosaurs to fertilize our crops.

The list goes on.

I'll say this, though: should we reduce our dependence on oil as fuel, we will buy ourselves a lot of time to fix the other issues.

Outrage is a tool that could do one useful thing - exclude a group of disingenuous people entirely from the discussion.

You have a powerful, organized group that have worked to obstruct discussion on the crucial topic of how to solve this problem for a while. Punishing them harshly would serve the important purpose of preventing their obstruction.

Figuring out how to deal with the climate change problem would be hard if everyone was negotiating in good faith. If we can exclude those who have polluted discussion entirely, so much the better.

And of course the power of individual choice to solve is minimal, rhetoric like "you can do something to stop global warming" is exactly ridiculous greenwashing. Broad state policy is needed. And said policy has to be formulated from enlightened self-interest - sure the solar industry is as self-serving as the oil industry but if we can use their self-interest, so much the better.

Edit: Suppose you had a company with ten divisions. The head of one division pursued a project that made the company a bunch of money but which that head knew would result in the company ultimately loosing even more. When that came to light, would not the sensible thing be to demote the head down to dog catcher and consult with everyone else how to change course? Does this kind of reasoning require that the other divisions head be saints or something? No.

I agree more with the original parent comment than I do with your position.

I rememebr the 1980s clearly, and how incensed people were then. I also rememebr that environmental damage was covered up, and that industry was suppressing or spreading FUD against science.

In the time since, it hasn't improved - and Kyoto, a band-aid over a gangrenous wound, has failed instead of getting stronger.

Studying human nature and working in larger more coordinated goods is pretty much the last Hail Mary option. Enlightened self interest is very clear - "let's see who survives till the end. I'm going to be its me."

The issues are pretty vast, and short of someone convincing the first world to give up fossil fuels, while simultaneously convincing the third world to give up their ambitions, - enlightened self interest only leads to more fuel being burned.

I bet that we will be resorting to terraforming before we tell people that they can't live a first world standard of living.

Do you have any practical suggestions or did you just want to poke fun at EV drivers?

BTW, Asphalt is 99% recycled (yes, even the binder). http://www.asphaltpavement.org/index.php?option=com_content&...

I am guilty of being that EV driver myself, but I meant Asphalt is a petro product.

edit: its more about pervasiveness of petro-chemicals we hardly acknowledge, all the while still building cities and subsections for Cars instead of humans.

Outrage is certainly not the answer. The problem is that this constant propaganda stops any kind of rational look at the situation in its tracks. The same was done with smoking for a long time, with drugs for a long time (things seem to improve though), health care in the US and other things. In my view that's the worst (and most evil) these people are doing: they kill rational dialog.

It's not that outrage is not the answer, it is that there is no "the answer." Becoming a renewable and sustainable civilization is not something that will happen in 30 years, and we would be lucky to be at 100% by 2100.

We need electric cars and grid level storage to be able to fully replace fossil fuels. To even get there we have to be realistic about energy needs. I don't like fracking but I accept it as a lesser evil to King coal. I wouldn't want to live next to a nuclear plant but I understand how impossible it will be to continue energy consumption growth - renewables aside - without significant investment in nuclear energy or a staggering growth in fossil fuel use. We cannot pretend that in one or even two generations we will be magically powered by the sun and the wind any more than we can make believe that the world has unlimited fossil fuel resources and that we can burn them without consequence for ever and ever.

Climate change and sustainability is the rare beast that can only be felled by a death of a thousand cuts.

The key document given in this article is the Robinson report of 1968. Looking at the excerpts given, this report made a prediction for CO2 level rise that can be tested: it predicted about 400 ppm by the year 2000 (from a value of about 320 in 1968). This was an overestimate: the actual level in 2000 (using the Mauna Loa measurements, which seem to be the key reference relied on in the report) was about 375.

This enables us to test a second prediction made by the report: the temperature increase caused by C02 level rise. The report gives a very wide range for this: 1.1 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on the humidity change. The usual baseline assumption about humidity is that relative humidity will remain constant, and the report notes that that assumption leads to the larger prediction--7 degrees F--for temperature rise by the year 2000. That is about 4 degrees Celsius.

Even if we correct for the actual CO2 level rise vs. predicted--about a 20% increase vs. 25% predicted--that still gives about a 3 degree Celsius predicted temperature rise by the year 2000, as compared to 1968. The actual rise was about 0.5 degrees Celsius.

The report does say that the estimating method it uses likely overestimates temperature rise; but it does not, as far as I can see, consider the possibility that it might overestimate temperature rise by so much. So as far as I can see, the oil industry's decision to treat this information as much more uncertain than its authors claimed was reasonable.

It seems that you're cherry-picking items in a deliberately deceptive way.

The CO2 level rise clearly must have been an estimate based on, "If we project current usage trends forward, here is how much fossil fuel gets burned. Here is what that does to CO2." That usage model would have been thrown off by the first OPEC price shock of the 1970s, which induced a lot of conservation efforts and resulted in significantly less emissions.

I'd be shocked if they had the basic "fossil fuel to CO2" relationship wrong. There is no way that they could have predicted the economic shocks that slowed consumption.

Now let's talk about their environmental model. They gave a range from about 1 F to 7 F. The actual rise is about 1 F. I'd call that a success! (And why did you switch between F and C? Was it just to make the actual rise seem smaller.)

Moving on, you argue for which model should apply, then argue that they got it wrong. Your behavior already doesn't make me trust you, but let's assume you are right. What mistake likely explains it?

My best guess is that they simply did a long-term steady state model for what temperature things would stabilize at. That is a relatively simple calculation, and would have been fairly accurate if the atmosphere were mostly separate from the ocean. However we've learned since that heat exchanges with the oceans are much larger than we knew. (I remember circa 1990 learning in fluid mechanics that there was a big question THEN about how much global warming would slow down.) So the long-term temperature picture in the model is relatively accurate, but we get there more slowly than predicted.

This is the kind of detail of our system that we COULD NOT have predicted with 1960s science. They knew that they were overestimated and knew that they would be right in the end, but had no way to know how long it would take to get there.

From this reply it is clear that the GP read, at least, the portions of the Robinson paper excerpted in the article. Unfortunately, the particular critiques that you have made indicate that you have not read them.

For example, the switch from F to C is because the underlying paper is written using F, as that was the style of the time; but the GP presented in C as that is the current preferred unit.

Robinson admits that the model is crude, as he was using an older model of Moller (from 1964), and that he expected that more sophisticated models would improve forecast accuracy. Nonetheless, the numbers presented in the paper are reflected accurately in the GP's post, including uncertainty ranges, and the comparisons seen valid at a glance.

In this case, the GP is not cherry-picking, at least not in the usual sense, as they are using the "cherry-picked" portions of the paper to produce verifiable predictions.

Admitting that early models of climate change make some inaccurate predictions does not necessarily undermine the correctness of the directionality, especially as newer research has come to light, but it does present a less sinister explanation as to why the results were not taken as seriously modern observers feel they should have been.

The article had failed to load for me, so I was basing what I said on what was excerpted and what I read elsewhere.

That said, now that I find it, it is easy to dig in for details. Moller's model from 1964 can be read in http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JZ068i013p03877/a... and says up front that a 1% increase in cloudiness is sufficient to counteract the warming effects of 30 ppm in CO2. I'm sure it leaves out ocean heat sink effects. According to https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_chapt... it seems that cloudiness HAS increased several percent. Which means that the top end of the projection (which the GP thinks it the right model) would have been the wrong projection to use.

From whence did the GP draw the incorrect claim that humidity has remained the same? Shouldn't he have done the same Google searches that I just did and come to the same conclusion??

> I'd be shocked if they had the basic "fossil fuel to CO2" relationship wrong.

I would too, and I wasn't claiming that they did. The CO2 rise prediction in the Robinson 1968 paper was actually reasonable; but the fact remains that to compare their temperature prediction with what actually happened, we have to first adjust it based on what actually happened with CO2 compared to what they predicted.

> They gave a range from about 1 F to 7 F. The actual rise is about 1 F. I'd call that a success!

They gave a range based on different assumptions about how humidity would change. Their prediction of 1 F was based on no change in absolute humidity--i.e., the same absolute water vapor content in the air despite a rise in temperature. That corresponds to a significant reduction in relative humidity, which clearly did not occur. In fact, the actual data on relative humidity change suggests, if anything, a slight increase in RH from 1968 to 2000. The Robinson 1968 paper prediction corresponding to that assumption is 7 F, as I said. So their prediction was not a success.

> why did you switch between F and C?

Current temperature projections, such as the IPCC reports, routinely use C, so that's what most recent figures are quoted in, including the data on temperature rise over the late 20th century. Feel free to convert back to F if you're more comfortable with that.

> the top end of the projection (which the GP thinks it the right model)

I didn't say I personally thought it was the "right" model; I said it's the model that appears to be most consistent with the position taken by the Robinson 1968 paper. Remember that the topic of discussion here is not how the climate actually changed from 1968 to 2000; the topic is whether the oil companies, in 1968, were remiss in not accepting the predictions made in the Robinson 1968 paper and acting accordingly--since that's the argument the article is making.

> From whence did the GP draw the incorrect claim that humidity has remained the same?

I said the usual assumption in making climate predictions is that relative humidity remains constant. (The data seems to bear out this assumption, as I noted above; but I don't see any data on RH in the excerpts of the Robinson 1968 paper.) Relative humidity is not the same as "cloudiness", so I don't see how your findings say anything about how, if at all, RH actually changed from 1968 to 2000.

Also, the Robinson 1968 paper, as far as I can tell from the excerpts, does not mention "cloudiness". This might simply be because that paper misunderstood Moller's model. But in any case, that would mean the Robinson 1968 paper did not take into account an additional factor that would clearly reduce the predicted temperature rise based on a given CO2 rise. So if you are correct that the actual increase in cloudiness was significant in reducing the temperature rise over the last half century, you are agreeing with me that the Robinson 1968 paper was overpredicting temperature rise, and therefore the oil companies, in 1968, were not remiss in treating that paper as they did.

Not divulging their internal research cannot be a crime because industries conduct private research for all kinds of competitive reasons. But the funding of false propaganda campaigns that they know are the opposite of their research should definitely be illegal, probably under fraud legislation I think. The problem is you can't find out that their propaganda campaigns are knowingly false because the research is secret. Though, as with the tobacco industry, the research does seem to leak out eventually, but it can take decades after all the original criminals are dead.

> When do we hold someone responsible for a harm? What if the harm is climate change?

We all burned oil in our cars. We didn't make an effort to carpool because it wasn't convenient. Skipped days riding our bike to work because it's too cold, etc.

To me holding the blame entirely on the oil industry is akin to persecuting prostitutes for sex crime.

It's all about power. Prostitutes do not have power. They do not buy the government. They do not run ad campaigns saying that fidelity is a hoax.

The oil industry has a lot of power. They even have their own party in american politics, the GOP or Grand Oil Party.

That wouldn't accomplish anything; it would just free up more fossil fuels to be applied to marginal uses by people with far less restraint: "Hippies don't like oil? More for me!"

This is a collective action problem; if we don't collectively limit or penalize the emissions, we're just leaving grass on the commons for someone else to graze.

With that said, cutting back can prepare you for the time when collective limits or taxes are in place. It can also signal your own belief in the seriousness of the problem. But individually refusing to overgraze the commons cannot be blamed for commons going barren; the refusal to implement real limits, however, can.

And no, subsidies for more efficient grazing aren't "limits"; they make it worse.

Did you deliberately obfuscate, falsify documents, spend millions on misleading advertising, attempt to buy off critics or fund massive lobbying of law makers to make legislation become more favourable to yourself and increase your profitability?

Combining the two, would still have done this:

"We didn't make an effort to carpool because it wasn't convenient."

if the oil companies had not done this:

"deliberately obfuscate, falsify documents, spend millions on misleading advertising, attempt to buy off critics or fund massive lobbying of law makers"

If you think the answer is obviously yes, then also please think about the dramatic turn in smoking statistics since it was revealed that the cigarette companies were acting in the same manner.

Um. I'm having difficulty parsing your question. Are you saying we wouldn't have behaved in the way we did if petrol companies didn't do all those dreadful things?

There are certainly a lot of 'not's in the statements, so I apologize for the confusion. I was trying to keep the previous comments pure.

At a basic level:

Would we have taken the same actions, if the oil industry had not taken the same actions?

If someone thinks the answer the question is, 'obviously yes', then I'm suggesting they look at the results of the revelations of the same actions by the tobacco industry.

If someone thinks anything else, I'm not making any specific statement.

I think something else, because I don't think that individual human choice is the only driver of society, and modern human civilization.

This is precisely the role of policy and governance - we don't use CFCs for example, and we move towards more progressive emissions norms around the world every year.

lots of people would be tremendously happy to wait for tomorrow to make a difficult moral choice, even if it was obviously immoral.

And then there's additional fallout. The improvement and evolution FUD. A series of catchy rhetorical arguments, has given birth to "deniers", and the amazingly made expertise itself toxic.

And with the web, this malaise spreads over the English speaking web and infect other countries, forums and communities.

So, yes - as a society we would have taken different decisions and at a different time scale.

Ah. I thought that might be what you were saying - thanks for clarifying :-)

I don't believe we would have taken the same actions, or at the very least we would have modified our behaviour at lot sooner.

how about we start considering every single corporation above certain size/revenue not as an altruistic setup but rather ruthless gain-at-almost-all-costs oriented businesses and deal with them accordingly. and it would be their responsibility to prove state and public otherwise. something along presumed guilty until proven innocent.

I know, naive and with many holes, but imagine it for a moment...

Even if you took all the oil industry executives and board members and brutally murdered them on live television, leaving their corpses to hang from trees by their disemboweled entrails, it would not change anything. Others would take their place, doing the same thing. We all enable this by creating the demand.

Yeah, that's a pretty inappropriate reaction!

Is the industry or us evil? most of us have big suv's that we drive alone and the only thing we care about oil is the price.

Some will look worried, chat on forums about these stuff but continue to do nothing because "there is nothing we can do".

I don't think your assertions are correct. This article[0] is a bit old (2015), but it puts the number of SUVs on the road at 35%. There absolutely are things you can do, though obviously you, personally, aren't going to solve the problem. For example, skipping meat one day a week can have pretty substantial affects on emissions[1]. Or you can get involved with a group that is organizing around climate change.

[0] - http://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2016/01/usa-suv-crossover-marke... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestock's_Long_Shadow

Words are cheap. Actions are not. That is why you see a lot of talking but no doing.

Easily solved -- let's all stop using petrochemicals of all kinds.

That would devastate the global economy.

Using petrochemicals has already devastated the global economy. We will spend trillions to attempt to fix the damage that has already been caused, when exactly $0 is what we should have to spend. We are causing a mass extinction event on the planet and will never be able to undo all the physical damage done. We will spend a huge amount of the world's money, resources and time to do our best to fix it, and all that is wasted because it could have been used to move forward sustainably rather than make a few people obscenely rich at the expense of most life on Earth.

Your basic premise is not terribly convincing. The earth, and humanity, are in no serious danger of collapse. The measurable advantages our species has because of our industrialization seem far more tangible and have far more weight than your emotions, no matter how stridently expressed.

I understand how difficult it is to hate people who have things (your unrelated parting shot at the "obscenely rich" is rather telling) and also want to express that hatred in a morally defensible way, but I don't think hyperbolic lies are as useful as you want them to be.

> The earth, and humanity, are in no serious danger of collapse.

Many species on Earth are indeed in very serious danger of extinction due to human-caused climate change. Here is a paper in Nature discussing this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14712274

> The measurable advantages our species has because of our industrialization seem far more tangible and have far more weight than your emotions, no matter how stridently expressed.

I disagree with this. We could have industrialized and gained those measurable advantages without causing all of this destruction. That's what this HN link is about: why did we do this? Partly because the rich and wealthy people controlled the public's understanding of the risks in a way that would keep their money flowing at the detriment of our health.

> your unrelated parting shot at the "obscenely rich" is rather telling

How is this unrelated? The pursuit of wealth and the greed of the oil executives is directly related to this disaster. I do not "hate people that have things". I have lots of things. I do, however, hate people who are so greedy as to pollute our planet and cause runaway global greenhouse effects purely for their own gain.

> We will spend a huge amount of the world's money, resources and time to do our best to fix it, and all that is wasted because it could have been used to move forward sustainably rather than make a few people obscenely rich at the expense of most life on Earth.

You and I wouldn't be here if it weren't for petrochemicals. It didn't just make a few people rich, it made modern life possible.

It might have been done without making a few people obscenely rich, though. That could have had the added benefit of less tooth-and-nail resistance.

Then there is a massive problem with the global economy. Perhaps we should be trying to find ways of moving away from petroleum as a fuel?

There's no economy on a dead planet

Multiple renewable energy sources in combination, like solar and wind are a viable alternative. Also bringing down the Oil cartel OPEC, and having real market prices on oil would make the alternatives more viable.

lets start with basics shall we, how do you produce steel with out "coke"?

The harder problem to solve is social, I think. The planet is literally unable to support 7 billion people living a USA/Western Europe lifestyle. Who's going to be the one to tell all the people in developing economies, "Sorry, but you can't have those things that we have."

> Who's going to be the one to tell all the people in developing economies, "Sorry, but you can't have those things that we have."

Who is going to be so brave to tell poor third world countries they cannot have nice things? We do all the time, by complicity in geopolitics which consist in things such as propping up dictators elsewhere so "our" corporations can get bigger slices of pies and resources rather than the local population. Not to mention war. So who is going to tell the actual centers of power that this can not be tolerated any longer? That is the real question IMO.

The problem is taking out resources and exploiting people at a level that cannot be sustained; not that others want to do it too, but that anyone does.

I mean, what is "a Western lifestyle"? For me it's stuff like basic sanitation, freedom of speech, high literacy rates, having medicine and clothes and shelter. Living and letting live, and last but not least work, preferably meaningful. Yes, some prosperity is a requirement to even have the possibility of those things. But buying new things all the time, ordering screws individually at Amazon, and throwing away a lot of plastic, those things and others seem not strictly needed to me.

We need the scientific method, human rights and rule of law, not so much a constant stream of trinkets. People should be free to strive for trinkets, sure, but without too much pollution (which is essentially a way of restricting the freedom of others; indirectly, but very powerfully). As many things in life, it's not really a complex issue, it's not wanting to step on the toes of powerful people or peers that makes it complicated and contorted I think.

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