Exxon made ‘breathtakingly’ accurate climate predictions in 1970s and 80s
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Now... the leadership folks who commissioned these predictions and then ignored them... That's another matter!
I don't think this is strictly true. Oil production is not fully fungible due to all kinds of issues including sanctions and production capacity.
But this is also a strawman - this isn't saying "we should shut them all down" or even begging that question.
At a minimum it's saying "there were people and companies who intentionally chose to mislead the public on a potentially existential issue - perhaps there should be some reckoning for that?"
I never said don't do anything.
What I believe is that we need to balance carbon elimination w/ carbon mitigation and not put all our eggs in the elimination basket.
We've got one chance to do this right.
Now we're faced with a range of unpalatable choices and a population fiercely divided about what to do.
Great job oil companies.
It would have been great to start doing something thirty years ago to avoid some of what’s happening now but we didn’t. Now we still have to do something or it will get even worse.
This is not a throw your arms in the air and wait for the end while screaming situation.
There is going to be a lot of complaints as choices keep getting removed and decisions forced upon us by the escalating crisis. If you are a freedom loving libertarian, you are not going to enjoy the next few decades. Which would be deliciously ironic if it wasn't such a monstrous tragedy.
What we are starting to meaningfully see, at least in Europe, is regulations which actually have teeth regarding where investments go and what companies can do regarding emissions and sustainability.
It means some things are going to either get more expensive or downright disappear but I wouldn’t call that a significant curb on freedom.
It’s more akin to not being able to use lead in plumbing than living under an authoritarian regime. Sure there will be less meat on the menu but, well, c’est la vie.
Blaming consumers buys into the big emitters disinformation campaigns. Its not our fault.
The big emitters need to be curbed hard and fast. Our governments so far have been unwilling, complicit or unable to do so.
Its going to require a mass, popular movement to shut down coal mining worldwide, to restrict air travel, to localise food production and reinvigorate ground based mass transit. Nobody can make that happen as individuals at the checkout.
European regulations are not oriented towards consumers nor are they “farting around”.
These are far reaching regulations on investments. They impact literally everything. It’s going to be hard to do something if you can’t get money to do it.
But these are not hard choices or libertarian hell. That’s just a bit more regulations.
Sure, mining coal won’t be profitable anymore, people won’t be able to buy diesel cars and both flying and meat will become more expensive. It’s definitely a shift in how people live and probably a downgrade in some aspect regarding quality of life. But it’s a relatively painless one.
Ok, you made me curious. What were they supposed to do? Stop drilling and selling oil? Ask the government for increased taxes to take care of externalities? Dismantle the corporation? Just resign and go find a job in a different industry?
Unethical people don't realize that there are countless ethical people who make the right choices every day.
The answer to your questions, is yes to all of them.
Isn't it weird how budget cuts and under-staffing[1] have nebulous attribution, or are seen as an unstoppable force of nature in whose face the embattled, heroic, under-resourced teachers and nurses must make their stand
1. Read 'profit-taking'
We should structure society so that the average person has agency at the workplace, and not just blindly abides by the decisions and orders of the board of directors.
If democracy were to expand to the workplace, perhaps we would be in a better position to avoid the situations that lead to the situation described by the OP.
You would believe that at some point in the past decades, with the multiple crisis caused by failure of leadership in the financial sector and with the numerous scandals in both auditing, energy production, manufacturing and shipping, people might have started to question if there might not be something fundamentally wrong with the way we do corporate governance and more generally how we have organised our society and economy. But apparently no, it’s really going to be denial up to and over the edge of the cliff.
I remember as a kid being fascinated by the idea that while decline was felt throughout the Roman Empire, something which once stood so powerful had then become powerless and was rendered unable by its own structure to restore what used to be and prevent what was to come. I kept wondering how it was even possible. Now I know.
The people in charge (in politics or business) are in charge due to the current system, so they have very little incentive to change it and have a lot of incentive to keep it as it is. Why doesn't Labour push for a fairer electoral system even though the current system is generally biased towards the Tories (and has for many decades)? Because when they are in power they are in power due to the current system.
This also works through to the middle class: if you're having a good life then you're having that due to the current system. Why change it? It's not a coincidence that people who are least established (the underclass, students, oppressed groups) tend to be the ones advocating for change, but they're also the worst positioned to actually enact such change.
So change happens through drastic events such revolutions, which brings their own risks and often don't change things for the better. You'd expect that people are familiar enough with history to pre-empt this, but it seems not. "Ah, I'm sure it'll work out in the end" seems to be the prevailing attitude. Maybe, or ... maybe not?
The poor know best there are no free meals. It's the rich elitist that can afford to virtue signal with ideas of dumb policies, because they aren't close to the edge of economical ruin if those policies go sideways. And they mostly go sideways.
When policies take money from the poor to give to the poorer, it just reduces social mobility further and creates dependence on the government.
By the way, all this climate religion hurts the weakest in society the most. They can't buy a Tesla or afford heating when "carbon taxed" or when renewable energies who rely on the weather (which we all knew is going to be unreliable) freeze and result in them freezing to death in winter.
Oh and by the way, it's also a scientific consensus that global warming is going to result in net lives saved because people die from cold much more than from warming. It's just a narrative you'll never hear. And because those dying from cold are usually the weaker parts of society. And those owning real estate close to the coast usually have much more money.
And there has never been a scientific consensus. Freeman Dyson, for example, which died in 2021, was the last remaining physicist from developing QED, a physicist I respect much more than the pop science scientists, thought the climate change religion is misguided and even called them religion.
You should be less certain about this: proposals going back decades had this working as a rebate mechanism — take the total collected, divide it by the number of citizens, and send them a check. The idea is that if you hit people with the cost up front they'll be incentivized to use less because they see the true cost of their decisions up front and if you use less energy you'll be getting free money from the people who use more.
It's also important to remember that in almost every country energy usage scales with income so this is less regressive than it might seem — poor people aren't commuting to work in Escalades or heating their 4,000 square foot houses to 75℉. See point number five here:
https://climate.mit.edu/posts/five-myths-about-carbon-pricin...
> And there has never been a scientific consensus.
There has been a consensus among qualified scientists since roughly 1980, and the predictions climate scientists were making that decade have held up quite well. For example, the first IPCC report from 1990 had estimates which were accurate:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec...
Similarly, Dr. James Hansen (director of NASA's Goddard Institute) testified before Congress based on his 1988 study predicting global warming and his numbers were very close to what we saw over the subsequent 3 decades:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...
If you believe that “ice age” talk was real, remember that the source of that was a couple of speculative papers which were never widely accepted and were refuted by the late 1970s. Here's what the National Academy of Sciences had to say in 1979:
> We believe, therefore, that the equilibrium surface global warming due to doubled CO2 will be in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C, with the most probable value near 3°C.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...
(Note that in both of the previous two cases there's a confound because some conservation efforts and especially the Montreal Protocol were effective enough to shift us to the lower end of those ranges. We do have the power to stop this.)
> Freeman Dyson, for example, which died in 2021, was the last remaining physicist from developing QED, a physicist I respect much more than the pop science scientists, thought the climate change religion is misguided and even called them religion.
Freeman Dyson was smart but he had no training or expertise in climate science — he even admitted that his position was largely emotional. Given that the people he was attacking made testable predictions which turned out to be correct, it's a regrettable tarnish on his legacy that he embarrassed himself acting unscientifically but it's hardly uncommon for famous elder scientists to start commenting well outside their area of expertise and expecting normal scientific standards not to apply to them.
> My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have. I think that’s what upsets me.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090608114821/http://www.e360.y...
That's the kind of thing you'd do if you wanted your grand children to grow up in a world as good as the one you enjoyed. Unfortunately, people who think like that usually tend not to make it to C-level positions. Y2K also reminds me that right now we'd probably be hearing a lot of people saying it was an expensive overreaction.
A business that is seeking profits over the continued existence of human life is clearly something that must be destroyed before it destroys us.
If you find out your product is bad for the environment, for people's health, etc. then you go and quietly do R&D on the solution. You know shit is going to hit the fan sooner or later so you get ahead of it. Then when it starts to become a PR problem you double down on the alternative you came up with and you start publicizing it. With any luck you'll be ahead of your competitors and able to transition to the new thing better and faster than they do. You don't really have to be a moral paragon to think this way, you certainly don't need to die on any hills, you just have to be smart enough to hedge your bets and think about where your profits may come from in 25 years, instead of just in the next 5. These are not resource strapped companies, they are companies that can afford to do generational R&D and whose executives lacked vision.
I am very conflicted of this. Do people just get good pay so they can be ignored/shut up?
When will those responsible be held accountable for helping to advance the destruction of climate and the immense loss of life and property that climate change has brought?
How can we explain to our children and grandchildren why we did nothing to hold them accountable?
[1] https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh...
You have sown the revolving door and now you reap its harvest.
Nobody will be held to account so long as the institutions that would be doing the holding have a massive overlap in relevant skills, subject matter and therefore, personnel (especially at the management levels where these sorts of decisions get made).
The described problem is much older than the Boomers period of political dominance. For some reason, Millenials seem to think that “Boomers” are “everyone who existed before the Millenials”.
-what people about to repeat history say
When it is no longer profitable to destroy the climate.
Put more succinctly, they deserve blame because they chose lies when confronted with an inconvenient truth.
Tangentially, while some vehicles presumably have worse mileage than a comparably-sized vehicle from the 1980s, fuel efficiency has significantly increased since 2005 (after a small decrease from 1985-2005) while supporting continuously increasing power and weight [0]:
In the two decades prior to 2004, technology innovation and market trends generally resulted in increased vehicle power and weight (due to increasing vehicle size and content) while average new vehicle fuel economy steadily decreased and CO2 emissions correspondingly increased. Since model year 2004, the combination of technology innovation and market trends have resulted in average new vehicle fuel economy increasing 32%, horsepower increasing 20%, and weight increasing 4%.
[0] https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-...
There's a challenge here: people have been encouraged to buy larger vehicles. A small car will have better mileage now but the kind of vehicle the average person is commuting to work in now is much larger than it was three decades ago. I would argue that this is in part due to the successful campaign which fossil fuel companies funded to reverse conservation wins of the late 70s & early 80s. It wasn't just them but they had a significant role in shaping the political and social discourse (e.g. promoting gas guzzling as a macho thing).
While not a perfect representation of purchases, I believe the EPA chart (Fig. ES-3) I referred to shows the average of all for-sale models for a given year, so this should capture the increasing preference for larger vehicles. Indeed, the horsepower and curb weight are shown as significant increases, even while fuel efficiency is improving (≥2005). It looks to me like the average fuel efficiency passed the 1985 peak (presumably driven by the 1970s oil crises) around 2007.
Clearly two decades of decreasing efficiency was not ideal, but I posit it may be the 1985-2005 period which you are mostly remembering. Going by the chart there was a fast shift to smaller and 'weaker' cars for highly increased efficiency 1970-1975, after which there was a slow continuous increase of power and weight - first occasioning a slow but relatively small decline in efficiency (compared to the 1970-1975 increase), but then changing to increasing efficiency as that became a more important factor for consumers.
Relatedly, while I am certainly not the target audience for the kind of advertisements that may encourage people to purchase more oil-based products, I cannot recall seeing any automotive advertising that wasn't clearly produced by a specific vehicle manufacturer. It sounds like you are suggesting 2nd and 3rd tier advertising by fuel companies for reversing the 1970-1975 reduction in consumption, but I'm not familiar with that space - I would appreciate it if you could direct me to any resources you have about that.
You're right — what I was thinking about wasn't that the Exxon was running ads saying you should buy an F-350 for your grocery shopping but the more subtle long-term stuff: pouring millions of dollars into funding the people who say climate change is a hoax (meaning fewer people feel guilty about 10mpg), turning that into a litmus test for politicians so the same people in office are also receptive to continuing exemptions from pollution laws, etc. The blame is wider than them I think it's important to separate out unknowing mistakes from deliberate attempts to delay action after you know there's a problem.
There's also an interesting split here: until about a decade ago, the interests of the oil and car companies were perfectly aligned. Now that EVs are popular, however, that's diverging and I'm curious what the political realignment will look like — Ford won't be backing transit or high-density housing but they'd be totally cool running ads about how their latest Mustang can be powered by American wind farms.
Consumers say government should do something or that businesses should change their ways. Businesses say what they're doing is legal and merely catering to consumer demand. Government says businesses should "self-regulate" or consumers should choose different.
You see this pretty much everywhere, from climate change to those ridiculous SUVs that are a danger to everyone to basic animal welfare in food production, etc.
People knew about this before you were born and decided their best interests were more important and they acted in wilful disregard for your life and the lives of everyone on this planet. They weren't ignorant. No facts were hidden from them that they could be forgiven for being misinformed. They knew with certainty what the science was revealing and spent money to discredit the science, cut funding to their own researchers, bought politicians, funded PR campaigns, and continued building their fossil fuel empires.
Everything Carl Sagan said in that address has come to pass. It's wild to watch.
People wouldn’t know if coal power plants disappeared tomorrow, replaced by any other form of electricity
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/215790/coal-miningemploy...
[2] https://en.as.com/en/2022/03/29/latest_news/1648510535_73079...
> We could cut them each a $1M check for the trouble, which is about 10 years worth of coal subsidies[2].
Maybe if they were offered that deal for real, they'd take it. But without such a deal, can you really blame those workers for not wanting their careers erased in America of all places? Their families would become destitute and there would be little sympathy for them. Instead of a buyout, they'd receive little but 'learn to code' jeers. They'd be told they're expected to move away from the communities they've live in for generations, leave their families behind and scatter with the winds. I know this doesn't seem like a big deal to a forum full of rootless cosmopolitan tech workers who often live thousands of miles away from where they came from, myself included, but people don't often wish this sort of radical uncertainty and instability on themselves and their own families. So of course they elect politicians who advocate for their interests. If you think this is about politicians duping coal workers, you've got it backwards. The tail doesn't wag the dog.
I'm not a "rootless cosmopolitan tech worker," I'm one of the only cousins in my family who isn't blue-collar or in deep poverty. I don't expect this to be painless, but we need to get off of coal for the good of the species.
I don't think the coal workers are being duped. I know that they're in a really tough spot. I think that the coal (and more generally fossil-fuel) executives are lobbying politicians hard, with complete disregard for the long-term impact that we've known very clearly for _decades_ now. Follow the money: politicians and executives are raking it in, and the small population of front-line workers' lives depend on it. Blame the politicians, blame the executives, who make their decisions for personal benefit at great cost to humanity.
Quitting tobacco, as a person, is hard in part because of withdrawal symptoms. The analog for quitting coal, as a nation, is that an industry needs to die. We need good policies to take care of the people whose jobs are impacted, but we techies are in large part responsible for automating away entire industries -- way more than 40k jobs -- and who's there to take care of _those_ workers?
40k people at $60k a year is $2.4 billion/year, which is a tiny fraction of the annual $4.8 trillion federal budget. You can structure parts of this in different ways outside of a blanket cheque, such as ways to incentivize starting businesses, credits for free education, or whatnot. It's still a lot of money, but the benefits are probably worth it, IMO. If $24 billion/year in student loan forgiveness is possible then I don't see why this isn't.
Politically it's a non-starter so I don't expect anything like this will happen. The GOP seems more concerned with simplistic "culture war" chest-beating and the Dems don't seem overly concerned with the plight of the working class and have their own style of simplistic culture war chest-beating (albeit less egregious).
Otherwise they wouldn't have dared. If the public supported measures against them that are proportional to their threat, they would never have done these things.
Instead we basically have a species, that is the equivalent of a homeless drug addict on the tenderloin, soiling its own future. A good start would be to honestly communicate this as the starting point of every debate. Then evaluate what can be done, without retardations setting in, in the range of the limitations.
How much of the day can be used, without withdrawl syndroms.
How can delusions be crafted into something that moves the species forward towards a reasonable goal?
What has to go, even if it hurts temporary and the "other hand" wants to prevent it?
As in, is it okay, to call for a first strike policy on someone who wants to assasinate you in 3 generations? Can terrarism against terrorism be legit as self-defense? https://www.amazon.de/How-Blow-Up-Pipeline-Learning/dp/18397...
If the action would make them a hero, are there reasons they shouldn't do it anyway?
Common reply to the latter is that people may be misguided in what constitutes a heroic selfless action and shouldn't take matters into their own hands. This philosophical debate is as old as time itself.
https://pandodaily.com/2015/06/30/tobacco-industry-will-kill...
Climate change actually has the same. There's a bunch of stats and a bunch of "yeah but what if" things that have been dealt with over the years.
Philosophers can be dangerous creatures (if unwittingly), perhaps some of the most dangerous. It's incredible how you can draw a straight line from many of the most destructive political narratives (across the spectrum) to reasonable seeming scholarly papers and debates.
There's a near universal consensus today regarding the horrible, unacceptable presumptions behind Social Darwinism and related theories from the turn of the 20th century. Mid-century philosophers, particularly structuralists and post-structuralists, led the charge in attacking those earlier theories. (By first identifying the underlying cultural presumptions, and then "deconstructing" them.) And yet you can draw a straight line from, say, Putin's whataboutism and ethnoreligious rhetoric--not to mention all the culture war narratives (from both the left and right)--straight to those philosophical ideas and debates--i.e. structuralism, post-structuralism, etc. I mean, Putin's rhetoric has always existed in some form, but those and other philosophical schools absolutely supercharged the rhetoric and its intellectual resilience. If there is no objective truth, and if even older moral pillars of Western philosophy, like the exaltation of individual dignity, can be just as illegitimate as any other principle, then Putin supporters can argue the legitimacy of his viewpoint and it would be dishonest to outright reject absolutely everything about it. (There are obvious and time-tested counterarguments, but they're in tension with favored moral norms in the West, such as victim culture. The left birthed victim culture, linking moral worth to membership of a persecuted minority, but the right has embraced it for all its worth.)
This whole picture some will read as an invitation to skepticism. «Science» does not exist in a vacuum - as this very submission re-shows.
I get the second part. But what's the utility of the first over a fine? Are you suggesting nationalizing Exxon? Or liquidating it?
What would Exxon be able to do once all of its resources have been repurposed? The company would be effectively dissolved even if not explicitly dissolved.
It's actually a bit odd that when we invented corporations we didn't have some sort of catastrophe mechanism in there just to shake hands up now and again.
I think society would find ways to become more resilient if we lived with possible corporate sudden death.
You're guaranteeing either consolidation in an already oligopolistic sector, or a recession from the output drop caused by an inexperienced operator learning to scale to a major.
> we didn't have some sort of catastrophe mechanism
We do. They're fines and license revocations. Companies that can't afford their fines go bankrupt. Government gets cash; the stakeholders' clean up the mess. "Corporate death penalty" and related talking points are almost all about dismissing talk about bigger fines.
The real challenge is how to regulate the death rate.
If it was the people vs Exxon with private judges in private courts (judges which compete with one another on who's the best, not government officials with a comfy chair and a guaranteed lifetime of administering "justice"), it would be way harder to corrupt.
That's why we need to decentralise our government power.
Perhaps that's something along the lines of turning them into highly-regulated public utilities. The big thing I'd focus on is basically real auditing & accountability: serious environmental assessments with full public disclosure, a blanket ban on political involvement so you avoid the case we have currently where someone [not inaccurately] thinks it's cheaper to give lobbyists $10M to avoid regulation which will cost them $100M, and criminal liability for anyone who knowingly tries to hide information or mislead the public.
If you go check who actually delayed nuclear deployment you will discover it was environmentalists.
I agree about the research, but that's unrelated to the point I was making.
This isn't about what occurred then, it's about the time and opportunity cost of inaction that was fostered by rubbishing climate science and hiding the research.
The only thing that matters for actual deployment is how much the energy source costs. Nuclear power costs were dramatically increased due to unnecessary fear.
For example solar power needs inverters - but those didn't work well back then. It just so happens to right now technology has finally reached the point that alternate power actually is cheap enough to deploy.
So we are deploying it.
All the "climate talk" is doing nothing, what actually matters is the money.
Similarly, the few countries who have massively built out nuclear power (ie, France) did so because of deliberate government policy, not because their free-market economies were chasing the cheapest source of kilowatts.
Of course many of them imply a change in behavior and some of them imply a decrease in what's traditionally referred to as living standards.
All the wonderful carbon free schemes ignore the fact that these state owned oil companies hold trillions in oil wealth in reserves. How do you get these states (e.g. Putin/Russia) to walk away from that money?
This is why we need to think about mitigation strategies a lot harder.
We, as a society, chose not to do either of those things. We made that decision during a time when it might have made a huge difference to our lives today. This decision was largely influenced by the actions of US non-state-owned oil companies, who were instrumental in preventing such policy decisions via lobbying, withholding evidence, and deliberate strategies to muddy the debate by funding climate denial PR. I’m sure the state-owned oil companies of Venezuela and the USSR/Russia deserve some blame as well for pumping and selling the oil (mostly to the West where our economies burned it), but I think pinning the blame right here in the US is pretty accurate.
PS This is the second or third company in this thread that tries to blame the deeply unethical actions of these oil companies on “foreign state-owned oil companies” and it’s such a specific and bizarre defense that I tend to wonder if some Exxon-funded PR office has been pushing that line.
For Big Oil to start campaigning against their own product?
We have legislative bodies that we literally elect and pay to do this job.
Let’s stop the hypocrisy and look ourselves in the mirror.
https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/recips.php?ind=E01&cy...
2010 was the first election I was eligible to vote in, and in the past decade+ I (and many others) have not voted for pro-oil/coal/fracking/etc candidates. Yet we're the ones that are (and will continue to) live with the consequences of Big Oil's actions from decades ago.
The genuine reason is that citizens are not willing to internalize the costs of their pollution and change their habits. Cheap gas, big cars, big houses, cheap Big Macs, cheap plane tickets is what the people vote for. Big Oil just supplies the juice.
Please explain.
We don't expect murderers to turn themselves in, we pay police forces to find them. But it's not hypocritical to call murderers evil, and it's not unreasonable to expect that people should not murder.
IMO, it's less "all those other bad people are enjoying running fossil fuel companies" than it is "all of us people are enjoying the benefits of fossil fuel burning".
(I daily an EV; I don't pretend that makes me any better than the average American, which is to say I am substantially worse than the average Earthling.)
It's not about burning fossil fuels, it's about misinforming the public about the long-term dangers of your product. If I sell you a delicious candy while secretly knowing it will give you cancer in 10 years, I don't get to say "well you enjoyed the candy didn't you?" once I'm caught out.
Are they blameless? Nope. Are they solely (or even primarily) to blame? Also nope.
How are consumers complicit? By wanting nice things?
But that's inconvenient, so consumers keep demanding oil and then act shocked and tut-tut when oil companies provide it.
I really don't understand your point and your smug judgements on consumers. Do you consume no oil products? Or are you just saying that you knew all along oil is bad so you're better than the 'naive masses'?
I'm not shocked that oil companies provide oil, I'm shocked that many people don't want to take any action even when it comes out that the oil companies baldly lied about their role in climate change.
I'm also baffled that some people want to shift the blame away from the oil companies.
I don't get confused or pretend that oil companies go to great lengths to provide oil to the world because they're evil. They do it because people (you and me and billions of others) demand it and benefit from it.
We can't reap the benefits and avoid the blame for our choices. (I mean, we obviously can, but that doesn't actually result in any change, so if you want to feel better but not actually change anything, have at it...)
If I pay taxes I help subsidize fossil fuels. If I get an EV its manufacturer burned fossil fuels to create it and ship it to me.
Tell me who I can vote for to change this. Tell me how I can eat without using fossil fuels. Tell me how I can work without using fossil fuels. Tell me what choices I can make so that I am not to blame.
There is no such choice. I literally cannot avoid fossil fuels.
Maybe if we could all agree that the fault is indeed with fossil fuel companies, who not only provide oil but also lobby the government to prevent us from moving away from it. Maybe then, we could have the actual change you are clearly so invested in.
Must the oil companies both continue to reliably supply oil and ensure that society obsoletes them? There are order of magnitude 20 million people working in oil, gas, and coal. Perhaps they could continue to focus on supplying society with these necessary resources and the other 7.85 billion people on the planet could take up the responsibility to migrate society off of those fuels rather than making those same 20 million people have to do both jobs?
Obviously this question deserves more thorough and qualified treatment than I could give, but it doesn't seem outlandish to expect that the corporation should lose some 'rights' much like people do when they face consequences for crimes.
I would want the executives in this case to face personal consequences, like jail time, and I would want to e.g., prevent oil companies from lobbying, or nationalize them, or something to similar effect.
> the other 7.85 billion people on the planet could take up the responsibility
Something I haven't been able to communicate to you this thread, despite my best efforts, is that taking that responsibility is impossible when fossil fuel companies have mountains of money and power. Fossil fuel companies are worth more to elected representatives than constituents, and they have a vested interest in promoting fossil fuels in all sectors of society. They aren't meekly and reluctantly providing oil to us nasty consumers, they do their best to create and grow markets for their products. They are already doing 2 jobs: supply oil and ensure society doesn't obsolete them.
You speak as if people have always known fossil fuels cause climate change and simply like to act against their best interests, or that climate change is in our best interests. In my opinion, neither is true, and given that Exxon actively suppressed their own research on the matter, I think they would agree with me.
The knowledge of CO2 (and water vapor) acting as an insulating blanket and having a warming effect on the planet was known years before the very first oil well was drilled and over a dozen years before Standard Oil (which eventually became Exxon and later ExxonMobil) was even founded.
https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/#:~:text=Eunice%20Foote
It was also well known before Standard Oil's founding that oil is a hydrocarbon and that the complete combustion of hydrocarbons emits primarily CO2 and H2O.
Portraying Exxon of 100 years later as being the sole possessors of secret knowledge of the existence of atmospheric warming is grossly inaccurate IMO.
You're telling me people in power in 1923 knew that human oil consumption was causing climate change that would be detrimental to human life? If you asked Congress today many wouldn't agree with you, and I'm sure some of them sincerely believe there's no problem. Do you think voters knew back then? If this was common knowledge, why did Exxon have to suppress anything?
From the OP:
> Exxon knew of the dangers of global heating from at least the 1970s, with other oil industry bodies knowing of the risk even earlier, from around the 1950s. They forcefully and successfully mobilized against the science to stymie any action to reduce fossil fuel use.
My original argument was that this is evil and every individual in charge of suppressing this information and continuing to advocate for fossil fuel use deserves punishment. Do you agree? Because throughout this conversation what I've understood from your comments is that you think they did nothing wrong because people consume oil.
Based on everything I know, I vehemently disagree. We don't punish "evil"; we punish law-breaking; this is a very good thing for individuals and companies in a free society to be able to rely upon.
We have a justice system based on laws, not (directly*) on morality. This is important, especially given the propensity for morality to vary per person and to shift and evolve in its interpretation and for similar actions by different people, or similar actions by the same people at different times, to be morally judged differently.
If it was legal for Exxon to not share their proprietary knowledge (that there was no legal obligation for them to publish their knowledge), there's no legal basis for punishment. I believe that's the exact situation that we're in, which is why there are outrage articles published (moral judgments) but not indictments (prelude to legal judgments).
I believe that's responsive to your major point.
On your more minor point:
> You're telling me people in power in 1923 knew that human oil consumption was causing climate change that would be detrimental to human life?
I believe that that knowledge was available within the body of scientific knowledge, based on the evidence I provided above. I can't prove one way or the other, therefore will not surmise, what "people in power" nor voters did or didn't know, on average, in 1923.
* Our laws are loosely based upon on our morality, but there's a critically important level of indirection and specificity that precludes persecution of people based on an implied moral proscription rather than a codified legal proscription.
Not really, because while I am talking about how things ought to be, you are talking about how things are. Once again my point: this was evil and the people responsible deserve punishment. Saying they did nothing illegal is irrelevant since, as you say, laws and morality are not equivalent. If you don't believe evil should be punished, then you believe old laws should never change and new ones shouldn't be created. As you say, morality changes, so then why would laws remain unchangeable? How can we ever codify moral standards when people get more upset at outrage than at the immoral act?
There's no legal culpability in this case, but if society follows your lead there wouldn't be legal culpability in any future cases either. Next time an article reveals Johnson & Johnson has been knowingly putting poison in its baby powder or something like that, will you once more argue against the outrage and claim there's no legal culpability and the consumers could have been testing their baby powder, so really it's their fault?
> available within the body of scientific knowledge, based on the evidence I provided
Not really, the evidence you provided only said people knew CO2 could heat the world, but nothing about its effects on mankind (which Exxon did know about, per the previous leaks). And as you admit, you can't know if any voter or policy-maker actually knew. So how are we responsible for allowing Exxon's actions again?
I'm finished with this discussion, your nihilism is exhausting.
The key is not to villainize fossil fuels, but to recognize their benefits and costs and decide collectively via policy what tradeoffs we’re willing to make.
Think about how privileged you are in life that you can even consider not depending on fossil fuels. Hysterical takes like yours come across completely naive and uninformed.
> recognize their benefits and costs and decide collectively via policy what tradeoffs we’re willing to make
How can we do that when fossil fuel companies lie about the benefits and costs? How can we do that when they bribe politicians for favorable legislation? You are the naive one, and not particularly well-informed given you did not even read the article.
It may feel cathartic to lash out at perceived “evil” entities but you accomplish nothing that way. Some prefer perception of justice to actual results though, so to each their own.
I think you’d find a world without fossil fuels has quite a bit more misery than the one we have today. Green transition needs to be well thought out and planned for, not taken lightly
Indeed, tell that to the politicians who made their energy policy decisions based on conversations with oil lobbies.
I feel no catharsis from commenting, and I don't pretend that bad press is 'justice'. Justice would be prison time for the people in charge that suppressed this information. I have no way of working toward this vision of society other than bitching to politicians and peers about every individual company's moral fuck ups.
What actual results are you working towards? What is your version of justice in this case?
When people talk about corporations and morality, I am reminded about the quip about Larry Ellison:
> You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower.
Think of a corporation like a function called `makeMoney`, which takes inputs like costs, advantages, benefits, and so on. Morality is not an input parameter at all, so why do people expect that it would be taken into account? If one wants morality to be taken into account, it should be explicitly done so, via some sort of input parameter, like legislation. Otherwise, don't expect anything to change.
Do people expect it or do they merely want to change things such that it is an input parameter?
Just because sociopaths are allowed to run rampant and fuck up everything for the rest of us doesn't mean we have to like it and it certainly doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing something about it.
Legislation can be bought.
Corporations do not act but for the behest of their controllers and decision makers, who clearly should take morality into account. Larry Ellison is not a lawnmower, he is a person who is responsible for the decisions he makes and how those decisions effect those around him. Larry Ellison CAN hate you, Larry Ellison COULD give a shit about you. He chooses not to. He deserves the negative repercussions from decisions he makes. It is simply inane to demand that every aspect of morality must be legislated before corporate owners and decision makers should include it as a factor. It is only the security afforded to them by the rest of the population permitting them to continue operating that allows them to operate as they do.
Frankly, your point is far less insightful than you think.
Like it not, my comment is how corporations work. We've tried letting them have in-built morality, but guess what, it didn't work before, and it doesn't work now.
> who clearly should take morality into account.
"Clearly?" Why? How is it clear at all? If there are no consequences or benefits for doing so (and indeed, a highly beneficial outcome by not doing so), why should they?
> he is a person who is responsible for the decisions he makes and how those decisions effect those around him
You're viewing this from your own moral viewpoint. Imagine, what if Ellison simply doesn't give a shit at all about how his decisions affect those around him, what would you do then? At some point, if corporations or other entities aren't following the rules we set out informally as a society, then yes, you must formally and explicitly lay out the rules you want them to follow. Otherwise, stuff like in TFA will happen, and will continue to happen.
That same moral compass which without they would not be able to function or operate?
>Like it not, my comment is how corporations work. We've tried letting them have in-built morality, but guess what, it didn't work before, and it doesn't work now.
Except it isn't, they rely on the morality of their WORKERS to achieve their objectives. You simply believe that leaders and decision makers get a free pass on ignoring morality while anyone without sufficient power must behave morally lest they be punished. How does boot polish taste?
And I refer you to my first sentence in my reply.
> How does boot polish taste?
I see, this is how I can tell you are not asking in good faith. Goodbye, new account made just 13 days ago.
>"Clearly?" Why? How is it clear at all? If there are no consequences or benefits for doing so (and indeed, a highly beneficial outcome by not doing so), why should they?
Quite obviously implies that corporations are justified in optimizing for their own benefit without factoring morality.
The anecdote provided about Larry Ellison has the same implication.
The parent saying an approximation of "I'm just explaining how the world works" is not only incorrect, patronizing and overly general but also implies that corporations are just a force of nature rather than a group of people who should be held responsible for the immorality of their decisions.
Yeah, tough choice.
Would we be here if not for modernization and fossil fuels? If we stopped in the 60s, would other nations have done the same? Or would they have advanced to dominance?
Fossil fuels are not the only form of energy. We could have put decades of technological effort into wind and solar and battery and waves and all the other options. We'd be so much further forward than we are today. Instead the industry just lobbied and lied.
(Yes, nuclear existed. But only in some countries, and it could only cover some parts of energy usage).
Yes, fossil fuels do seem to be an unavoidable evil on the path to technological advancement.
However, the point is: There were no viable alternatives for the last 50 years because the fossil fuel industry did everything in their power to cover up the impending disaster and instead focused all efforts on lobbying to maintain their profits.
Imagine if Exxon had made their findings public in 1973 and had instead lobbied for renewables and moving away from fossil fuels. We'd be 50 years ahead of our current energy technology. We'd have a lot more options for generation and storage with a lot more density.
The "recent advancements" are only recent because we've pissed the last 50 years against the wall so some asshole billionaires could afford more yachts.
"What if someone else just kept polluting" isn't an argument. Fighting climate change is becoming a political necessity. The world has almost internationally eradicated many undesirable things like mass slavery and chemical weapons. These are also political necessities to run a successful country.
In another 100 years, the idea of a country mass-burning fossil fuels will be akin to adding a Swastika to their national flag while adopting foreign policy of black slavery. Sure, they can try it, but it would be very politically and financially unpopular, and if they get too forceful then some superpower will interfere and stop them.
We could be 50 years closer to that goal. But we aren't. And that's due to the fossil fuel industry's intentional deception of the entire world.
Jimmy Carter had solar panels put on the roof of the White House. Ronald Reagan had them removed.
Hypothetical that makes me want to cry for all the wasted time and cumulative life years:
What if Reagan had kept them instead, even promoting a nascent American PV industry in the 80s?
I know people who prioritize ethics & morality tend not to get promoted too high, but that doesn't mean we should blanket forgive decision makers at oil companies for sweeping such a huge problem under the rug for as long as possible. The positive example of what to do instead would be to communicate the issue as soon as possible, not cover it up, and then pivot into the work of moving away from fossil fuel dependence.
Yes!
Surely we all have a responsibility to our own _species_. If you're making something that you discover harms the species then you should change course. This company would have massive head start and could own the inevitable future of green energy if they took action then
Laws are like the immune system for humanity, this is exactly the scenario it makes sense for laws to prevent
Interesting idea, would be to ban them from owing properties or living in those places. If you nail the escape hatch shut, survival instincts might even set in.
>Let’s stop the hypocrisy and look ourselves in the mirror.
[Modern electoral] Democracy doesn't really work that way. About 2/3 of people vote in the general election. Around 1/5 vote in the primaries. Maybe 1% actually sign petitions to put candidates in the primaries.
"We the people" only directly influence the last step of the process, in so doing contributing about one bit of information per candidate in a two-party system. Public perception and conversation is a key mediator between the public and everything else about the candidates who ultimately run for office. This kind of "outrage" is not contrary to the democratic process; it is an essential part of the process.
For-profit corporations—and really any kind of for-profit organization—should be made illegal. Through our legislative bodies.
It’s that or extinction.
How about since they saw it coming to start investing in the transition to be ahead of the curve?
What baffles me is that these people knew and presumably had children or grandchildren, presumably breathed the same air and had the same houses in areas prone to wildfires, etc. and yet they didn’t take actions that would have been in their own interests other than financial.
Another feature of this class was being shown The Greening of Planet Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greening_of_Planet_Earth
Let's all comment about how bad OTHER people are for letting us be so shitty to show how moral we are in theory while continuing inexcusable and intentional behaviour in practice.