The scientists hired by big oil who predicted the climate crisis long ago
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I would say, everyone should listen to the environmental scientists.
i.e. people still need energy, and the renewable options have only very recently been viable for an individual to use, and only in some places, and often at great cost.
The objection to global warming isn't that it isn't real, it's that without fossil fuels most of us will die sooner than the worst case climate change effects ever will and so we have no choice.
Personally I have not heard this per se. Everyone I know who is opposed to climate science / energy policy changes is a wealthy person living in material excess, largely for social signaling purposes (e.g. buying more and larger houses and cars than they need for any practical purpose), and their denials are fed by right-wing propaganda and self-serving delusion.
Obviously we talk to different people but I've actually never heard anyone use this as a justification for our behavior. It's either non-acceptance of environment-scientific facts or acceptance.
> The objection to global warming isn't that it isn't real, it's that without fossil fuels most of us will die sooner than the worst case climate change effects ever will and so we have no choice.
The political debates I'm following, North America and Europe make me believe that actual climate change denial is very much a real thing. More so the more rural and/or the more dependent on the oil and gas industry you get.
There was a poll done recently that asked people about whether they though climate change was a problem, and also how much they would be willing to spend to help solve it:
"A strong majority of respondents said they were somewhat or very concerned about the issue of climate change. However, one of the most interesting follow-up questions was this: “How much of your own money would you be willing to personally spend each month to reduce the impact of climate change?”
The vast majority of voters were only willing to make very minimal financial sacrifices.
About 35 percent said they wouldn’t be willing to spend anything, with another 15 percent saying they’d only sacrifice $1-$10. Another 6 percent were willing to give up $11-$20, while 5 percent said they’d sacrifice $21-$30. In all, a whopping 75 percent of respondents were not willing to pay more than $50 a month."
-- https://fee.org/articles/new-poll-americans-aren-t-willing-t...
That doesn't sound at all like "non-acceptance of environment-scientific facts or acceptance". That sounds like people think it is real but have other priorities for their money, which is what the parent poster was saying (a bit histrionically).
Click on the "climate change" tag at the top of that story and have a glance at what stories they think are worth telling about climate change.
You can find other polls that find the same results:
People agree that climate change is an issue. Most of them are willing to pay taxes to do something about it. They're just not willing to pay very much.
You'll get a budget of maybe $10 a month per taxpayer if you want majority approval.
This is the same absurd tactic that is used against some kind of sane medical system. "It'll cost 10 Billion" say the headlines. We can't afford that say the pundits. The report says, continuing on with the status quo will cost 12 Billion, but somehow we can afford that?
My framing would be that if you look at the consensus opinion of scientists on the effects of climate change, it's going to cost a few percentage points of GDP by 2100 over what we would otherwise have. Which is nothing to get hysterical about, but it would be worth doing something about it to lessen the risks of worst case scenarios. That something would be a carbon tax with the proceeds used to scrub CO2 and to do similar actions to mitigate the effects of climate change.
But a carbon tax has a 0.0% chance of being enacted. It has no political support, and if it costs the public more than a few dollars a month, they vote no.
Carbon taxes or policies that are basically equivalent have already been used in a variety of political systems across the world in various contexts and have worked well and are popular. Usually, it becomes quickly obvious that simply not emitting the CO2 in the first place is the cheapest option.
The OP is claiming it's hardcore either accept climate change or not: "It's either non-acceptance of environment-scientific facts or acceptance".
I don't think that's true. If a pristine environment is something you could get for free who wouldn't want that? Serious question.
This is why I am sceptical that it is anything other than a fictional bogeyman to obfuscate rich climate change believers unwillingness to sacrifice luxuries, and poor climate change believers inability to live above absolute crushing poverty [without fossil fuels].
Wait, I misread that. You think no one is denying climate change, and that the alleged existence of climate change deniers is the hoax?
That's pretty advanced stuff.
No, that's usually the objection. There's a reason "climate denier" is a phrase.
I don't think anyone would mind a purely technical discussion of how to provide power, mitigate impact to the poor, etc. Instead you get claims the scientists are part of some global conspiracy.
I am fascinated by the people who claim, “well those scientists are just saying that for the money”. They plainly have no idea what the financial life of a research scientist is like.
Or how the basic problem is so simple physics, you'd have to bribe either a significant percentage of the population or actual laws physics to succeed in this conspiracy.
We need to start taxing big oil and seek restitution for their crimes against the world. Billions of dollars need to be injected into solutions migrating away from fossil fuels and its various derivatives (ie, plastics).
Producers need to be held responsible for their role in bringing this world closer to the brink of destruction.
The first counterargument to this will be "sure just as soon as you give back all the things you have benefited from as a result of cheap energy and cheap plastics."
I ride my bicycle or walk for as many trips as possible, and take public transit. I don't own a car, instead I rent one when I absolutely have to. I buy/use as little single-use plastic as possible, I compost and sort whatever trash I do end up with. I've significantly reduced my meat intake and buy in-season groceries as much as possible. I buy second-hand whenever possible and keep things running for as long as possible. I repair everything I can, and only replace things whens they are irreparably broken. My desktop and laptop are both ~10 years old and still going strong. I live in a small apartment, I don't have AC, and I put on a hoodie rather than turning up the heat in winter. I use water-saving taps and shower heads, I use the shorter wash cycles on my washing machine and I line-dry all my clothes. The list goes on and on, you get the point. I try quite hard to reduce my own footprint.
Sure, I could move to an off-grid cabin in the woods, but I'm not sure my footprint would actually be smaller from doing that.
There is only so much consumers can do, when our entire economy is built upon the exploitation of natural resources and an almost complete disregard for negative externalities.
Doing the best you realistically can as an individual is good and fine, but what we really need is harsh regulation of industry heavyweights, in order to force them to do better, as they have clearly proven to have no such motivation by themselves.
Breaking out of that pattern is borderline impossible. All because corporations only care about profit.
Research into environmental impacts has been held back (and still is!) by corporate interests, because it's "bad for business" if consumers are too well informed.
How can you make informed choices, when the information is censored and held back?
Plus, "vote with your wallet" only works on a small scale. Regulation of gross polluters is what's actually needed to make real change.
We both agreed that history will look back and see these companies being responsible for the destruction of humanity. I really hope that's not the case, however seems to be the course we're headed. Especially with the amount of people that _still_ think it's just not real or not a problem due to the years of "PR" (propaganda).
Probably falling into the same mechanics of radicalization/conversion you have seen before with Middle-eastern groups and more recently with far-right groups.
There are already environmental extremists, they're quite a small fringe so far.
History is predicated on at least a rough continuity of records. If the rupture of that continuity of records is bad enough, the concept of history ceases to exist. All we're left with is hunter gathers stumbling across the ruins of ancient 'cities of the gods'.
So even the catharsis of imagining certain individuals or groups being vilified for eternity might be denied us.
As the old saying goes 'History is written by the victors'. If we all lose then we also lose history.
The way investors and financial institutions are salivating over the revenues from transition and sustainable finance, I'd say it will be expensive for most us but it won't lack financing to do things.
Apportioning blame isn't even particularly useful compared to just fixing the problem.
It's one thing to provide a product honestly. It's another to provide a product dishonestly. This entire post is about the dishonesty, so just forgetting about that dishonesty and not addressing is seems odd.
Why would executives put themselves at risk for nothing? Why would they spend so much money for nothing? Why lie if the lie doesn't benefit them?
The truth is that these disinformation campaigns to this day are killing our transition away from fossil fuels. They have spawned a political movement that is far more extreme than the publicly stated opinions of the fossil fuel companies.
One prime example of this disinformation campaign is repeated by you:
> let's not even get started on the ecological footprint of batteries.
This myth that batteries are somehow worse than fuel is exactly the type of disinformation that fossil fuel companies manufacture and that others spread, seemingly willingly, because of their tribal politics motivations. You don't know the footprint of batteries for electrical cars. It's certainly no worse than what we use to make the rest of a car. I've spent hours combing the web for concrete ecological impacts. The only concrete thing anybody talks about are not ecological, but social. Indigenous people in South America not getting compensated for their land. Cobalt mining from artisanal, unaccounted mines using child labor. But the ecological footprint is a tiny shadow of all the steel, copper, etc. that goes into al the rest of society.
Have you heard of open-pit mines? I would call the ecological damage of that much higher than a comparable oil drilling site.
I have nothing against electric vehicles, or progress away from CO2 emitters. But EVs are a half-backed solution.
And EVs might even be net-negative for climate change. What do you think mining equipment runs on? A shit-ton of diesel. The largest cost of a gold mine is energy - diesel. I just think the mental gymnastics people use to justify the smaller ecological impact EVs is ridiculous. Heck, I even own a Tesla.
You have a huge bias against EVs, you call them a "half-baked solution" without any qualifications. This is a very subjective judgement that is contradicted by the large number of EVs that are replacing every day usage for people, for commuting and road trips and every aspect of life that requires a vehicle.
It's beyond ridiculous to claim that EVs be a net negative for climate change. Even the fossil fuel PR machine isn't so bold to make such ridiculous counterfactua claims. At least the people paid to lie for fossil fuel companies say that it takes until many tens of thousand is miles until an EV makes up is carbon impact, but even that is a bald-faces lie.
So I'm short, you are manufacturing ridiculous claims, without any substance, that force people to deal with extra BS and counter your lies in the public sphere. Your comments here are a drain on the discussion, fact free accusations without any merit that you are using to naysay EVs and simultaneously out of the other side of your mouth say that you have nothing against them and even own one.
This is classic FUD from the old days. If you are not paid for your efforts, you are underselling yourself. Spreading such misinformation earns many people a paycheck.
It’s widely known the environmental impact of EVs. If you want to make a real difference, look elsewhere.
If I am mistaken, please point out the statistic, or any concrete real world damage that is worse than the alternative.
We punish the corrupt in order to make the decision to be corrupt in future more expensive for the people considering it. A culture of total impunity doesn't help with "the problem."
If you drink water from a corrupt company, by all means try to get the corruption fixed but don't blame them that we live in a water based society.
They also actively lie about oil usage effects on environment, and lobby governments to not only to allow them to continue destruction, but also give them subsidies for it.
If the demand was irresponsible, then someone has failed to act in addition to the suppliers who are essentially just looking to capitalise on an opportunity in a socio-economic system where to succeed is to capitalise on any legal, available opportunity.
Governing bodies have known for decades that the consumption of fossil fuels was both unsustainable and detrimental to the health of the environment.
And yet no consequential action has been taken, for a number of understandable, yet ultimately wrong reasons.
Governments will argue that the technology wasn't there yet to make a transition away from fossil fuels, but money could have been invested to ensure that it was there.
Skip to today, one may retort that the technology is here now, and when governments are reticent and continue to drag their heels — that is perhaps when shadier motivations behind executive inaction emerge.
I do not speak as an environmentalist by any means, my net contributions to encouraging social change in this regard are practically zero, I've never made the effort.
But over the years I have been alive I have seen this problem growing and the debate becoming increasingly protracted and increasingly unhelpful.
The time for debate, inquiry and questions of accountability is not now, as this process will simply result in the burial of the actual problem facing our species and, realistically, very little punitive action against the most significant culprits.
Indeed, what point is there in trying to point the finger at suppliers meeting demands and governments seeking to remain in government by giving people what they want? It's a problem to which the solution is political suicide that any subsequent regime can likely overturn.
Like financial crises, no one supports change until the proverbial shit hits the fan. This is partially because the general population do not understand the nature or severity of the problem, the timescale, or even believe the problem exists. I would argue that this is not accidental — lots of powerful institutions and people have undoubtedly had a hand in making sure the populace do not understand or take an active interest in problems like environmental and financial crises.
This is because the existence and power of these institutions and people would be threatened by a shift in the status quo.
The time for decisive action was at least a decade ago, but there's no harm in starting now — it just means that the transition to alternative energy sources must be more abrupt and more investment must be allocated to remedial technologies that can work towards undoing at least some portion of the damage we have done to our biosphere.
Let historians and the next generations worry about whose fault it was. It is more important to secure for the next generation a sustainable and habitable future, than it is to look back at past hubris and wonder where it went wrong.
If you want to change it, you need to change the economic incentives of the all the actors involved. This includes straightforward measures that are already exist but need to be tuned up, like forcing them to recognize the negative externalities they introduce through operation more directly (carbon tax).
Of course, to the extent those actors have tried to downplay or mislead the general public as to the extent of those negative externalities, they have full culpability I'm happy to condemn them for that. But let's not pretend they are immoral for simply existing.
I assert that we can produce plastics without conducting massive deception campaigns that threaten the very future of our economy, the survival of many cities and states, and mass migration across the globe to adapt to new climate.
It is convenient to blame the oil companies, but the fault lies in all of us who live in a democracy but did not prioritize regulating carbon emissions.
If you doubt that it is our fault, look at the recent Swiss referendum that failed:
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/swiss-voters-decide-pest...
It was a referendum in a well educated, first world nation, in 2021 and they could not muster the willpower to solve the problem.
The problem is not the oil and gas companies, it is all of us.
Not nearly as much as there is for energy
Be the first, and give up all modern medicine, modern technology, plastics, etc. Nothing wrong with innovating out of fossil fuels, but you just seem to be pointing blame.
Everything carries a fossil fuel burden with it, the change cannot come from individuals.
#thinsilverlining
From an ecological standpoint, I'd tend to agree.
Without them, we'd still have a sub-one billion human population, the pollution level of the 18th C., plus you probably couldn't type that comment without winding up the computer first.
With most of the easy EROI gone, you do have to wonder how humanity can crawl back up from it's next collapse.
It reminds me of a Matt Damon quote from Syriana [1].
To a certain extent, that’s all of us. We are squandering one of the greatest resources to accelerate technology because it’s been so relatively easy to pull energy from the earth that we’ve been lulled into complacency.
I sometimes wonder if our level of technological advancement would even be possible without fossil fuels. If not, and we don’t actively invest in means away from it, I also wonder if that advancement is just a flash-in-the-pan on the geological time scale.
I don't. I'd say that fossil fuels were absolutely required.
Admittedly there was a ramp-up due to water-powered manufacturing and steam engines run by throwing in chunks of wood.
Even at the pre-industrial level, the environmental load has been high. Mediterranean goat deserts, death of large Pleistocene animals in the Americas, whale hunting. You could still have nuclear power, microelectronics, solar energy in a world with a whole lot less human meat roaming around on it.
Anti-contraceptionists are almost worse than climate change deniers.
They have filled our biosphere with carcinogens and endocrine disrupters for profit. It’s about more than just energy consumption, we need to eliminate the entire petrochemical industry.
Walk around your neighborhood and ask who would vote for the person that takes away their quarter acre lots, detached single family homes, F150s and SUVs, and tropical vacations.
The effects of O & G industry have been widely known for decades, despite any attempt by O & G to obfuscate it or hide it. At this point, it is reasonable to assume the population of the developed world has decided that they might as well enjoy today today, and let tomorrow deal with tomorrow.
It is also a classic prisoner’s dilemma on the global scale, so I expect no change going forward other than miraculous advancements in technology that let us have our cake and eat it too.
Not to mention the massive advertising and marketing machine manipulating us for centuries into desiring the products of the oil and gas industry.
In the last part of the 20th century, Shell had multiple research programs into alternative energy. These were all axed under pressure from the shareholders.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/business/exxon-board-clea...
On the other hand fossil fuels are what fuel all of the growth and production of our modern world. Sadly the power they accumulated was not used responsibly, but then it rarely is.
Entire states livelihoods basically depended on said conglomerate for some time, even if it was an honestly fairly shitty livelihood. Like... you know how Utah is basically a Mormon/religion state? Well, the O&G industry is just about an all encompassing religion for some other states. Decades of time, generations of families, and billions of corporate dollars went into brainwashing these people into thinking O&G could do no wrong and anybody who said otherwise was effectively trying to take their religion from them.
It is likely that nothing is going to change this any time soon. Psychology on a mass scale is insane. Just look at the Texas recycling campaigns.
People love gas powered planes and cars, and they love plastic even more. They choose to buy these things, and without them oil companies wouldn’t be profitable.
like what? bringing us efficient and cheap fertilizers to stop world hunger? allowing for wide use of polymers? enabling modern drugs? lifting up our whole civilization from the steam age into the information age?
If that isn't a crime, what is?
2020: 65 million
2100: 65 million
Population of DR Congo 1891: 8.23 million
2020: 90 million (about 8 million rely on food aid to survive)
2100: 362 million
Europe and the West can feed themselves without cheap fertilizer, they have done so for 200 years (about the time since the last major famine in France).
Cheap fertilizer is just leading to unsustainable population explosions in the developing world, where the reproduction strategies of men (these are patriachal societies where women lack consistent access to education, contraception, abortion) will inevitably push the ecosystem to its limits.
We are essentially in violation of the Prime Directive in terms of the free food, goods, technology we are giving some of these countries.
Ehh, I have more a nuanced view than that.
The internal combustion engine clearly cleaned up cities and improved public health. Almost nothing we do today would be possible without a history of fossil fuels and and fossil derived products (hydrocarbon plastics, fertilizers etc).
So I give them that and they are quite welcome to it.
I don’t even blame them for wanting to expand the use of their product.
The problem is they were the scaffolding on which we built a modern economy/society, and instead of dismantling the scaffolding we have allowed it to continue, and even encouraged it to metastasize.
The fact that they knew there was a problem and covered it up rather than addressing it should be considered criminal, as it should have been with the tobacco companies. But that’s now how society functions, unfortunately.
But to call it “the worst”… I don’t know. The East India Company and Big Slavery were unalloyed evil. The oil revolution is a mixed evil.
Cities would have become even cleaner, much faster, if not for that industry.
Do you mean proactively somehow (as with GM and some trollycars)? I find that hard to believe and would love to learn more.
If you mean their very existence reduced incentives, well ok, but that’s simply path dependency and is the way life works.
There were other pressures on battery improvement (portability: schlepping a heavy box of protons around is a lot of work!) so I have a hard time blaming the oil and gas industry for that. But as I said I’d like to learn more, if that were the case.
It is futile to bring a prosecution for everyday production and consumption of fossil products, because the defendant list would include everybody, but there is a specific, small group of actors who have knowingly poisoned attempts at collective action and are intentionally blocking the path towards a better world, and those people absolutely can be put on trial.
So while I'd like these companies to also fess up and be accountable for their role, nothing will change until we have a government who understands they've been complicit (and that includes a citizenry who will not vote for action on these issues). This is literally the function of government -- to make sure we have harvests year round, clean water, sanitation and clean air. And they have failed us the world over on this task.
> "Carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry's burning of coal and oil - more than half of it during the last generation - may have changed the atmosphere's composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the world by about one degree Fahrenheit." (Can We Survive Technology?, Fortune magazine 1955)
I'm surprised this doesn't seem to have been taken particularly seriously back then even by government scientists.
> Editor’s Note: This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change. Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by George Steinmetz. With support from the Pulitzer Center, this two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/clim...
HN discussion:
I strongly belive that change has to come from people.
Reduce your consumtion of everything. Become minimalist and encourage others to be.
Just imagine what western life style for everyone is gonna do to the planet
No, it won't work. For every tonne of fuel that you save, someone less scrupulous will burn it for their own benefit.
We’re hopefully shifting away from fossil fuels for vehicles, but in the grand scheme of things I think everyone agrees it’s not going to be enough.
Just think of how we continue to encourage and glorify consumerism, disposables, and trivialities. These all contribute to the problem!
We often belabor that entire industries, parties, and regions are getting in the way; yet there’s no sense of shared sacrifice.
That is, it’s a “do as I say” and not “do as we do”, whoch never goes over well.
So even without the O&G lobbying I strongly believe climate change endeavors would be extremely steep battles.
The alternative, of course, is a Stalinist-style re-engineering and that way is…well, a way of desperation.
As the article points out, at that time, they missed data that we now have. So how certain they were about their predictions, and how did alternative scenarios compare? If we are only talking about science, it does not really matter. The important thing is that we know better today.
However, the context here is that people want to hold "big oil" accountable. This is not science anymore, it is a trial. And personally, I don't really like the idea. I mean, oil companies followed the law, and they didn't hide their activities. They only downplayed the research results that they paid for, but what do you expect? They don't pay researchers to destroy their business. No need to bring out the past, tax them for what they are doing now.
That's not a very accurate representation of what was going on. The ones predicting cooling agreed with the ones predicting warming on the effect increasing greenhouse gases would have (warming).
The difference was that the ones predicting cooling assumed that the growth in particulate matter pollution would continue to outpace the growth in greenhouse gases, and so the cooling effect from particulates would be stronger than the warming effect from the greenhouse gases.
Starting around the '70s much of the world made a major effort to get particulates under control and the particulates levels went way down.
It's basically like benzo addiction for the entire Earth. You take it initially to band aid your ills. You get addicted to the fix it provides. The fix is so good that you accept the bad effects. You become dependent on it to the point where quitting becomes deadly.
"The idea is simple: spray a bunch of particles into the stratosphere, and they will cool the planet by reflecting some of the Sun’s rays back into space."
Literally the plot of the Matrix.