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Comment by Avalaxy | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for sueing companies like Exxon for misleading people and spreading lies, but I also find it weird that we're trying to blame the big oil companies like it's all their fault. After all, it is the consumers themselves who create a massive demand for (cheap) oil.

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This is an invalid argument, verging on non sequitor. High demand for a product does not legitimize fraud about the product, especially when that fraud increases demand. It is irrational to expect individuals to make the best ethical decisions for the larger group - this is why we have regulation on food, drugs, energy, etc.

I think the flaw in your argument is the assumption that the demand for fossil fuel is variable depending on anything Exxon has to say. I don’t see an Exxon ad and think “man I should buy an SUV”.

You wouldn’t blame an electric company on you buying electronic items, it’s the usefulness of the items themselves that drives the sales.

Demand is a function of many factors, including individual ethical concern and cost. Exxon has spent billions to reduce both of these effects - ethical concern is reduced because of the seed of doubt about climate change, and cost is reduced because of political contributions. Exxon is a great example of a firm successfully privatizing profit and socializing cost.

it's the usefulness of the item in relation to its cost and the cost to run it. an electric heater is quite useful, but also takes a lot of electricity. if the electric company promises that i'll spend less on electricity for heating than i would on gas, then that does make a difference.

so yes, if exxon would promise that the gas prices are so low that i can afford an SUV, then i might be persuaded.

This lawsuit is like two lieutenants on a sinking ship getting in a fight over whose fault it is that they got torpedoed. One of the two may be right, but none the less it's pointless and unproductive. There are more important things to do.

Unless of course the ship is sinking really slowly and one of them might get elected governor before the whole thing goes down.

I can imagine one difference with the lieutenants here is that nobody outside will ever know about said fight, given that the ship will sink.

In my analogy the intended implication was that getting people into life boats is more useful than fighting.

Okay, but the intended implication of my comment was that since this can actually send a message to others, it might actually cause others to be a bit more careful about how they proceed moving forward, which actually might very well help with help things moving forward.

Ok, but one of the "lieutenants" in your analogy is telling passengers that the ship's not sinking, and interfering with attempts to warn other ships about enemy torpedos.

In this case we could get huge sums of money to fix the sinking ship(climate change). So, I am not seeing how this analogy applies.

How much could we possibly get? Nothing proportional to the cost of a solution, certainly.

The reason the characters are lieutenants in my story is because this problem is bigger than them. You could take every penny the oil companies have and it would barely make a dent in the problem. This isn't a money problem it is a fundamental economic and industrial structure of society problem.

> You could take every penny the oil companies have and it would barely make a dent in the problem.

Citation needed. The top 10 oil companies [1] had a cumulative $2.5 trillion dollars in revenue in 2017. I'd say that'd go a long way in climate change R&D.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_oil_and_gas_co...

Value would go to zero the minute you announce confiscation or whatever we call it. And revenue is different from money in the bank or assets.

Revenue, not profit. Oil is very low margin. Oil companies makes about 7 cents per gallon of gasoline. That's a lot less than the amount of money that is collected from gasoline taxes.

https://www.forbes.com/2011/05/10/oil-company-earnings.html#...

So, nationalize oil sales revenue to fight to raise money to climate change. See any problem there?

Exxon's current market cap is something like 300 billion. It is worth that much because of future claims it has on profits from the extraction, refinement and sale of oil. If Exxon makes enough to recoup that... you'll have another 50ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere.

So no. You won't have a huge sum of money to fix the sinking ship. You'll be bailing water from one compartment and throwing it into another.

>This is an invalid argument, verging on non sequitor.

But it isn't. We cannot live without oil today. Oil is not like cigarettes. If every oil company decided to close shop tomorrow, every government in the world would step in and force them open.

There are cases where in principle we could remove oil uses (e.g. converting ICE to EVs), but there are thousands of products that require oil to make that have no obvious substitutes, from crayons to car tires, to shaving cream, to industrial lubricants, and so on. Airplanes, rockets, cargo ships, long-haul trucks cannot run on batteries, and require the energy density of oil to operate. Asphalt, the miracle road material, is essentially gravel and bitumen - a petroleum byproduct.

It does raise the question of, what are we blaming Exxon for?

Oil usage has an inherent societal cost. Exxon knew about the cost and suppressed that knowledge, much in the way big tobacco did.

If we had known, we may have not allowed them to externalize that societal cost so aggressively or required the cost be offset in some way (investments in carbon sinks to offset usage). This would have increased the price of oil, gas and coal, hurting their bottom line, but it would have made alternatives more economically viable sooner.

Anyway, the answer is lying. They lied about the dangers of their products and should be punished for that.

It's scapegoating, grandstanding and extortion - that's all it is. And you're abrogating your responsibility for your part in this when you use hundreds of petroleum-based products in your day-to-day life.

The oil companies had nothing to do with climate change action or inaction. They are providing a critical product that we can't do without even today, and we certainly could not do without when science started to come up with non-speculative evidence of human-caused climate change. US economy grounded to halt when Arab nations instituted oil embargo - with the outcome pushing Western governments to push oil companies to look for alternatives oil sources for national security reasons. You want to blame Exxon for that? As recent as this year, France experienced violent riots when gas prices rose. That's how important oil was and continues to be to the global economy. There was no need for Exxon to lie about anything.

>but it would have made alternatives more economically viable sooner.

LIKE WHAT? We have been looking for alternatives for decades. Chemistry and thermodynamics are a hard mistress. We have nothing, even today, with the energy density and portability of petroleum.

So I have no idea what you're talking about when you're creating a hypothetical world with your alternatives to oil or mitigations like 'carbon sinks' (which will never work) or whatever other mythical solution you come up with. There was no alternative to oil. There are no alternatives to oil today for the tens of thousands of products that require petroleum for manufacture. There is no alternative to oil today for global trade (airplanes, cargo ships, trucking).

By far (and it isn't even close) the biggest climate-change disaster was Western abandonment of nuclear energy in the 70s due to the FUD put out by environmental groups.

By the way, I don't see wind and solar companies proclaiming what a disaster those technologies are to the environment (from requirement of rare earth materials, to land-use and environment destruction after deployment, to lack of recyclability). Do you want to sue them to too?

Fossil fuels are not illegal. In fact USA has fought several wars and spent trillions of dollars to keep the flow going. So sue Exxon for a lot of other things, but not for producing fossil fuels.

EDIT: In fact people go nuts when gas prices approach $4 a gallon, which is maybe 2-3 times cheaper than in some European countries (when adjusting for income levels)

This argument often gets trotted out, but it's misleading. Imagine your grandparents were introduced to heroin and became addicted to it, and you built a society around celebrating and finding new ways to use heroin. Then your parents were hooked on heroin, and people may have found out that heroin actually isn't that good for you, but by this time, the heroin produces had amassed such wealth and power that they worked hard for 40 years to suppress and sow confusion around the science around.

Now you're born into a society of heroin consumers, and to some degree you're also addicted to it.

Is it the fault of the consumers that the world now runs on heroin? Especially considering that the heroin producers have known for 40 years, and have spent BILLIONS lying to the public and government?

Your argument neglects the fact that designing society around fossil fuels improved everyone’s lives exponentially and made the non-agrarian lifestyle not only possible but accessible to billions of people.

It’s not heroin, it’s more like some sort of intelligence drug with terrible side effects seen much later.

It’s a Faustian bargain we’ve all benefited from in innumerable ways.

The intent of the analogy is to make clear that consumers have little recourse over their "choice" to consume this material.

Lots can be said about the tradeoffs of industrial civilization. We now see that it is leading us to extinction.

It's like bacteria in a petri dish, for 50 years it accelerated our consumption of our limited resources and made the petri dish increasingly hostile to life within it.

We all know how the story of bacteria in a petri dish turns out.

This is a bizarre comparison. Petroleum was pulled out of the ground because was useful from day one. It is the backbone of the economy because it is useful. Pretending that petroleum is and has always been a vile, evil thing is poorly considered revisionist nonsense (typed into a petroleum plastic keyboard)

Without petroleum, the world today looks a lot more like 1930 than it does 2020.

That's not what the argument is saying. We obviously didn't know the ill effects of the product when it first came out (think original Coke with cocaine).

Yes, it may have given us some material benefits, but now it is clear that it is hurtling the human race towards extinction (and likely much life on earth with it).

I suggest you are misreading the argument.

Which makes heroin a terrible analogy because it doesn't match up with the argument, except insomuch as it flatters the poster's sense of the evil Exxon as a 'pusher' of an evil product.

I don't follow. The burning of fossil fuels is risking human extinction. Sure, I can now fly from New York to Shanghai. But evidence increasing points that civilization and possibly humanity won't survive this benefit.

This has been known by Exxon for ~40 years, and they have worked to suppress and sow disinformation.

Can you elaborate? The response seems incoherent.

14% of global emissions is from all transportation. It's a poor example.

Most of it comes from electricity production, industry, and agriculture. I guess flying an airplane is an easy target. But it really shows the actual motives when someone holds it up as an example if how we're destroying the planet.

Worth noting: petroleum has been around for millenia: http://www.dnr.louisiana.gov/assets/TAD/education/BGBB/2/anc...

It has often been said that burning something as incredibly useful as oil is silly. And plastic is and will remain a core component of modern technology for a very long time. Of course with abundant energy we will make plastic from C02 in future, not oil. If civilisation survives the interesting times ahead.

If you assume society is democratic, however, then knowing the facts matters - even if you end up behaving the same way. It's never a good thing to have a whole set of pressure groups funded by an industry trying to sow doubts about the long-term effects of that industry in contradiction of the facts.

There's a whole lot of unaddressed middle between "give up all oil and make the world look like 1930" and "wilfully hide the truth in order to give us 2020 tech."

How about, "As a democracy, have a debate about long-term problems with a core part of society in reasonable time to address them?

I bet you are thinking of things like furnaces, cars, planes, ships, etc.

But are you thinking about bottles, bags, flooring, roofing, insulation, clothes, etc?

The amount of products with oil uselessly baked in without concern to the environmental impact is incredible. Plastics have many great alternatives.

A defense of oil based on it's usefulness is not an excuse for the current state of oil usage. Stop it.

It’s not just consumers, it’s the entire fabric of modern society.

The machinery that makes everything in modern life work runs on fossil fuels, and up until recently there wasn’t another viable option. Even so, with limitations on batteries it’s debatable how viable our options are now. Moving massive payloads takes exponentially more energy than a moving a single driver. Society is built on moving things.

Every part of the building you are in now, every piece of food you eat got there via fossil fuels.

Like it or not we’re stuck with fossil fuels for the foreseeable future unless the entire fabric of society changes, and I’m not putting my money on that.

We have modern nuclear technology that can replace all coal plants in a decade if we decide to do that.

But we wont.

The "but we won't" insights are spiteful and not that insightful. Here's another one: we could go back to pre-industrial lifestyles.

Not without a large depopulation event of some kind.

The natural nitrogen cycle can optimistically support 4B people. That means 3.5B people need to die for that to even become a workable solution. But but magic tech will save us all ! We have magic tech today, we don't use it.

> 3.5B need to die.

Well more actually, unless noone is born in that time, if you want to be glum about it.

I hadn't even heard about the nitrogen cycle. Thanks!

And oil company lobbyist fear-mongering is at least part of the reason we won’t make that switch.

I don't think they could be replaced that fast with nuclear. According to Bill Gates at a speech he gave @ ARPA-E, the limitation of mass nuclear right now is the number of heavy forges left in the world.

I think you could scale up a mixture of solar-PV, wind + some nuclear that fast however, because the manufacturing needs are not as bad.

No, not likely. Over all, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald, the environmental and human rights organization. The new plants would expand the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent.

You aren't educating anyone on this forum with this perspective.

They are not being blamed for fossil fuel demand. They are being accused of fraud.

I have a massive demand for cheap sandwiches but that doesn't make it OK for Subway to commit crimes in order to supply me with cheap sandwiches.

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