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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

I worked in the oil & gas industry about a decade ago. I recall a conversation with our CEO directly talking about renewables and the environment. He said, very clearly, that this entire industry is about money, and they will do whatever makes them the most money. If renewable ever paid more than oil, they'd go there. But direct from his mouth - it is 100% about money.

If anyone doubts that they are greed-driven, just ask. They don't hide it.

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I’m not sure how that CEOs response differs from <insertanyindustryhere>. It is a rare case that you see a CEO decide that some other metric is more important than making money.

It doesn't. It's a CEO's fiduciary duty to act in shareholders best interests.

EDIT: HN, you're really getting juvenile. Save downvotes for low quality comments, not 100% factual comments that you simply don't like.

'best interests' can include priorities other than money.

No, they can't. This isn't my opinion. This is opinion of the US legal system.

While the pendulum goes back and forth on this issue, and in past decades, it did lean towards profits, I'm not aware of any regulatory enforcement of business decisions to maximize profits. Quite the contrary, almost all large businesses make charitable donations, which is the legal basis dating back to a 1956 NJ Supreme Court decision to support the legal rights to put social good above corporate profits.

Even if that were not the case, we have recently swung to the other end of the pendulum, with corporate governance groups making an explicit change to work towards more than just profits a couple years ago -- https://fortune.com/longform/business-roundtable-ceos-corpor...

No, that's not so; you're under a (common) misapprehension: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17529520

The question is about long term interests versus short term. having an excellent qtr when you company falls off a cliff at the end of the year would probably be considered not looking out for share holder's best interest.

Sure? All of these evil companies have had many, many good quarters (decades worth...which is pretty long term) and now have tens of billions of quarterly profits at their disposal to invest in wherever the next decades of demand will be.

Isn't that just capitalism? Replace "oil & gas" with any other for profit organizations and the same would be true, no?. E.g. if being privacy focused could make Facebook even more money than what they're doing now, they'd do it, etc.

> Isn't that just capitalism?

Soviet Russia was into oil production just as much as anyone else. The simple truth is that oil is very useful and the externalities are easy to ignore. The blame game is not useful for this situation.

> If anyone doubts that they are greed-driven, just ask. They don't hide it.

They have a legal obligation to pursue profits for shareholders. This is their fiduciary duty.

And they are like this because their consumers are like this. If people weren't so "greedy" demanding hydrocarbons at rock bottom prices, and instead wanted to pay a premium for solar powered EVs, well then hell believe me they would pursue those businesses.

But the demand isn't there. Consumers are too greedy. Consumers don't want to change their behavior.

EDIT: Downvotes, but no replies. Really HN, we just downvote people we disagree with? How about tossing your hat in the ring.

The downvotes are because you are parroting a common misconception. There is no 'duty' (legal or otherwise) for a company to pursue producing profits for shareholders.

They have to act in the interest of the shareholders, which could mean all sorts of things other than producing profit. That could include things like "not paying huge amounts of money on lobbying and advertising campaigns to spread misinformation about renewable energy and try to cast doubt on climate change for decades while they knew it was real"...

Do they also have a legal obligation to lie and fund disinformation?

Complete strawman. I never said this.

Oil companies/execs should be held accountable for misdeeds.

But that is a tiny fraction of the problem facing us. Let's say they came out decades ago and said "hey, there's probably going to be some repercussions for using our products" ... do you really think that would have changed anything?

We know right now what needs to be done. And yet Biden is running around pleading with OPEC to increase production to bring gasoline prices down. Why? Because people want cheap hydrocarbons, no matter how many downvotes you throw at me.

> Let's say they came out decades ago and said "hey, there's probably going to be some repercussions for using our products" ... do you really think that would have changed anything?

Yes. Big oil's lies and disinformation seeded the denialism that took hold in the Republican party decades ago.

Fine. What would that have changed? You can blame denialism all you want but a much more powerful motive is economic. For most of their history, fossil fuels have been the cheapest source of energy.

It's not as if I see half of the US (Democrats) driving EVs, installing solar on their roofs, eating plant based diets, etc. Blaming Republican denial is just dishonest.

I think Exxon et al saying climate change is real and their own internal research confirms it would have changed policy. Better policies could have meant batteries, nuclear, solar, wind, etc could all have been cheaper faster. It could have meant a carbon border tax which would have hamstrung a lot of US manufacturing going to China. The negotiations between Obama and Lindsey Graham for a carbon price might have succeeded.

There's a whole "What if?" where the innovation and beginnings of a post-denial GOP could have happened earlier.

Of course this is absurd because consumers have no access to information about the emissions that factor into their products, and various corporations work very hard to prevent this kind of transparency (including misleading people on the calculus a la TFA).

Not only that, but most consumers don't concretely understand the implications of "climate change" because most people can't summon a dozen climate researchers to do a study and communicate the results (indeed, in most places the actual studies are paywalled). And here too, corporations are deeply invested in making sure people believe that climate change is just a myth or that the implications aren't as severe as the science leads us to believe.

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