Study: Exxon mobil accurately predicted warming since 1970s | Hacker News Reader

Study: Exxon mobil accurately predicted warming since 1970s

voanews.com

109 pointsthrow0101c144 comments

Seems to be the study in question:

* https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063

See also the section entitled "What ExxonMobil knew versus what they said".

Next you're going to tell me recycling doesn't work and nuclear power is a good idea after all and we knew that the whole time as well.

It is almost as if the public discourse is dominated by loud simple minded people who sort themselves into tribes along arbitrary/self-serving lines and fiercely double down in the face of evidence.

I want to say that some public discourse was possibly seeded by foreign state actors in order to establish energy dominance.

"as if"

>It is almost as if the public discourse is dominated by loud simple minded people who sort themselves into tribes along arbitrary/self-serving lines and fiercely double down in the face of evidence.

It is exactly this

for a long (~7'500 word) expansion of that, cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34367615

> If one harbours anywhere in one’s mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible.

I blame the sound byte media and humans inability to act on long term problems. Climate change/global warming is real and can be very dangerous but it's hard to have a critical discuss about.

The problem with nuclear was never it "not working" but the extreme penalty for the once-a-decade safety failure. To the average voter, they look at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima and say "three strikes and you're out" - and they look at Fukushima and say, "if even the Japanese can't get nuclear to be safe, then Homer Simpson stands no chance." For every HNer shouting for nuclear, there's another million viewings of Simpsons episodes and 3.6 roentgen memes.

I know it's frustrating, but maybe just maybe society isn't so keen on 40 year [1], $500B cleanup jobs [2] and 1000 square mile areas becoming uninhabitable [3], and instead prefers diffuse damage (climate change, air quality, oil wars, etc). I'm not arguing either way, just observing.

HN: before you downvote, please ask yourself if you're hitting the button because this comment is false, or because you don't want it to be true.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=three+mile+island+cleanup

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=fukushima+cleanup+cost https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/chernobyl.pdf

[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=chernobyl+exclusion+zone

One problem with nuclear power is that it's often used in areas that are unsuitable for it. Most of the world doesn't have to deal with earthquakes and tsunamis quite as often as Japan does. Most countries would accept foreign aid after a disaster, unlike Japan and the USSR did after their disasters to save face.

People also stopped developing reactors when Chernobyl happened. Of course, the Chernobyl reactor was already an outdated reactor by the time it failed, but the problem is clearly visible in reactors that have been maintained and kept for prolonged lifetimes bexause of necessity (for medical supplies, for example).

I can imagine a future where renewable energy can serve most of the world's power demand, with nuclear reactors kept as a backup in case of prolonged bad weather draining the batteries/energy stores that keep the excess solar/wind energy.

People also several understate the damage traditional coal plants cause to their direct environment, which funnily enough includes excessive radioactive materials.

Switching away from nuclear because of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima feels similar to banning planes or skyscrapers after 9/11. Disasters happen and leave incredible death tolls, but they're not common in the slightest.

I'd reckon you're far more likely to get sick because of a coal plant leaking coal ash into the air you breathe or the water supply than being nearby enough to a meltdown to be affected.

Gas and oil plants suffer far fewer downsides, but they still incur a cost on the environment that some countries have decided to ignore. They use more fuel but require less cleanup if you don't consider complete carbon capture as a necessary cleanup step.

Some areas can't get nuclear power. I'd consider the entirety of Japan to be a terrible fit for such power plants because most of the country is either in a disaster zone (tsunamis or earthquakes) or has no access to cooling water. With little access to fossil fuel sources and a highly dense population Japan hasn't exactly had many alternatives for many years, so I understand why they went nuclear anyway, but I wouldn't build a new nuclear plant there now that wind and solar are cheap enough that the supplies need to be maintained artificially in some cases.

Areas like Tornado Alley and cities built on top of super vulcanos are also an obviously terrible fit for nuclear power, as are countries plagued by terrorism and corruption, and countries bordering hostile powers with no remorse for the population like Russia and China. However, in a safe country with a decent grid, you can build more safe nuclear reactors than you'll ever need in the places that do qualify.

Nuclear can work and it can work a whole lot better than fossil fuels can, but it's not a magical solution that you can just put down anywhere for cheap power like some advocates seem to claim it does. I believe the current anti-nuclear sentiment is largely fueled by unnecessary fear and the freeze on research and construction will have a self-fulfilling prophecy effect as old reactors won't be replaced with newer, more efficient ones, larger and larger percentages of nuclear reactors will be shut down and cost more and more as nobody is willing to invest in them, and more and more unmaintaind reactors will likely suffer accidents.

> nuclear reactors kept as a backup

AFAICT nuclear doesn't work that way, it's best for giving a constant output for years, rather than being able to be brought up and down.

It in fact does not work that way at all. Nuclear is the worst idea for an on demand power source. A dam is better.

Perhaps backup was the wrong word, what I meant is more like "baseline". Renewables can be scaled up and down much easier than nuclear, so the nuclear power output should be about constant, with wind turbine being stopped to prevent overgeneration.

>Most countries would accept foreign aid after a disaster, unlike Japan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tomodachi

Renewables currently cannot power "the majority" of the power grid. We don't have the battery (or storage) tech to make it true so that the grid can be stable and reliable without blackouts all the time, and not all areas of the world have the wind/solar they need even we did have cheap dependable massive battery (or storage) structures. Sure it can be achieved in some places with hydro pumping but that certainly isn't true in 90% of the cases. If we want to nip climate change in the bud -now- nuclear is the only chance we have.

The simple problem is people massively overestimating how dangerous radiation actually is.

That land isn't uninhabitable and the vast vast majority of that clean up isn't cost effective on a $/life basis. You could invest that money in healthcare like breast cancer screening and get a much better return once you've done some basic cleanup of the most dangerous spots. But people insist on a clean up to a level almost as good as before rather than being homo economicus...

People hear "radiation" and are afraid, even though tire particulates are much more dangerous than living next to Three Mile Island at the time. The evacuation of towns near Fukishima was a mistake, killing far more people than would have died of radiation (check radiation map of Japan, plug in standard radiation cancer models then compare with deaths caused by the evacuation).

The simple problem is that nuclear is poor value compared to renewables. Even if you add the cost of storage and a smart grid - which are useful whatever your sources - the total costs of nuclear power are still insanely expensive. And the gap is widening, because renewables are getting cheaper and cheaper.

And unlike a nuclear power station, they don't take years to build.

[1] According to Lazard, the total costs of nuclear energy - including value writedowns caused by slow building - make it six to twelve times more expensive than utility scale solar. Wind and geo are even cheaper.

https://www.lazard.com/media/450773/lazards-levelized-cost-o...

That's because of a regulatory rachet causing ever increasing safety standards.

1970s reactors and regs were much less sane and didn't value a human life north of a billion dollars like modern ones do.

We get more intake of radiation from the burning of coal than we do from nuclear power stations. Coal burning causes far more cancer than nuclear reactors have done not to mention the immense damage of all the pollution in the air damaging lungs causing asthma and other respiratory conditions. The public isn't assessing the relative risks rationally.

I mostly agree. However:

> You could invest that money in healthcare like breast cancer screening and get a much better return once you've done some basic cleanup of the most dangerous spots.

(Breast) cancer screening doesn't actually work all that well.

Eg the US does a lot more colon cancer screening than the UK, and thus can claim that survival rates for colon cancer are much better in the US. However, if you look at how many people per million die from colon cancer each year, the rates in UK and US are almost the same.

Ie American screening discovers a lot more cancers that never become a problem, but doesn't actually help in aggregate.

You're not wrong and might I add that the problem with it was that nuclear was weaponized first

But at one point we'd need to start handling the failures and accidents with maturity and not with panicked reactions

Nuclear was weaponized first because it's easier to build a nuclear bomb than a nuclear reactor of a power plant size. Also that whole whacky WW2 thing, if Hitler would have won he would have turned russia and the UK into wastelands

Your link [1] says that the Three Mile Island cleanup was 14 years, not 40, and cost $1 billion.

I think you’ve counted to one strike against the ability of well-functioning societies to operate nuclear safely—-Fukushima—-because $1 billion is pretty negligible in comparison and Chernobyl was operated by a shambolic totalitarian state.

Technically true, but would you raise a family there? What would your extended family think? Would friends visit? If not, then that land is pretty much tainted and 40 years is generous - several generations maybe required...

If it's much cheaper than other land, I would consider.

I'm eating produce from Fukushima here in Singapore.

How do you know? I've never seen any produce that specifies the origin beyond the country.

In this case, I know because Fukushima ran an ad campaign here.

But in general, lots of specialty produce is sold with more specific region information beyond just the country. Especially the Japanese producers are really keen on that.

(For a related, but famous example, have a look at wine, especially Champagne which has to be from the Champagne wine region of France.)

Yeah, they do that in the framework of the "Appellation of origin". However we are not at the point yet where this applies to Fukushima :-) Anyway, interesting point about the ad campaign, and thanks for the info!

Everything you mentioned is a result of decades of unjustified paranoia and stigma building. There are much more dangerous things right outside your home and plenty currently inside it but no one has bothered to terrorize you about them so you don't care.

no argument !! But telling the mainstream that nuclear power is safe is like convincing them that MSG is safe.

Nobody would build a high income neighborhood there for a while but it’s probably not any worse than a low income area near a coal or gas plant

Even including the highest profile disasters, nuclear is still massively safer than most other forms of energy.

Yes, the diffuse damage is much higher.

Btw, there's another problem with nuclear: because of politicking and public opinion, it's very expensive and almost impossible to build new nuclear power plants.

Budget and schedule overruns are to be expected.

So capital costs are very high.

"Recycling doesn't work" is not true. Recycling of metals works great and is essential. Recycling of glass works well too. Recycling of paper even works.

It's recycling of plastic where it gets complicated. Some plastic recycling does work, but much does not. That's where the public has generally been mislead the most. The other place is that mant businesses that do home "recycling" service send what is picked up to a landfill or incinerator. This is straight up fraud and should be prosecuted.

But please let's not over simplify a complicatwd issue to the point of lying. Recycling does work and is essential in many cases.

Exactly, and recycling keeps excess materials out of landfills. Landfills are filling up and it is hard get approval and land for new ones.

Well, the lack of approval is a bureaucratic problem in some areas.

Otherwise, landfills filling up is a non-problem. Earth has enough space.

Anything that is injection moulded (basically all plastic) can only have 1/3 of its pellets from recycled sources and it then can't be recycled again. At the very best assuming the industries claims of recycling were actually met (which they aren't) at most you would get 1.33x uses out of a piece of plastic, that is it. Its not recycleable, its almost just one use.

I personally don't think there are too many issues with clean and reuse and indeed a lot of the shapes are standard and if we forced more standards we could probably reuse plastic 10+ times and vastly decrease our need for new plastic. That would require companies to make a cycle for their packaging however and they are really don't want to and so far no government has thought it might be a good idea to force them to.

Mostly agreed. However, isn't recycling of glass pretty pointless, as it doesn't really safe you energy compared to making fresh glass?

Metal recycling really is a bright spot!

It negates most of the cost of digging and transporting sand.

Glass can be reused also for other things like foam-glass insulation.

Yes. And you can also stick it in a landfill for a few hundred years until someone comes up with a better idea for how to use it.

>It is almost as if the public discourse is dominated by loud simple minded people who sort themselves into tribes along arbitrary/self-serving lines and fiercely double down in the face of evidence.

This is a nice way of looking at it. Another is those "simple minded voices" are likely being paid by the oil companies to spread the pro recycling and anti nuclear positions.

This is a nice way of looking at it. Another is that there is a sort-of "public consensus" and people are really trying to forbid anyone from (significantly) deviate from it.

And like any sort of large-scale consensus, it's dumb ("simple" if you like). Why? Because any sufficiently large group must accommodate below-average humans, and, well, those are below average. So such any large scale consensus cannot be very complicated, and cannot advocate for complex solutions.

For example, I prefer using something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_chaos to use very minimal resources to take control of weather, and the climate, and letting go of emission limits (at least for CO2). It doesn't require everyone to cooperate and will be a heck of a lot cheaper. This in turn protects a lot of mostly poorer people who don't really have that much to do with the problem, while remaining a realistic option. (or more bluntly: it's a realistic option that doesn't ask the poor to live in the cold)

Recycling works mostly fine in many countries other than the US. But of course reduce, reuse, repair should always have been the primary "re" words. It's just that those are less convenient and bad for business from the usual shortsighted perspective.

Recycling of plastic doesn't work very well, regardless of country.

Recycling of aluminum works really well. Recycling of paper works ok. Recycling of glass is pretty pointless (it doesn't really safe energy compared to make new glass, however re-using bottles via a deposit system works ok).

Yes, which is why eg. where I'm from (northern Europe) recycling plastic hasn't even been a thing until very recently, except for things such as PET bottles which have a deposit and which recycle very well. Improved automatic sorting machines have made plastic recycling more feasible, and providing a separate bin for plastics is now required for medium and high density residential properties. (It has been normal for decades to have separate bins for glass, metal, paper, and cardboard; in recent years bins for plastics and biodegradable waste have been introduced as well. There has never been just a single all-purpose "recyclables" bin.)

And yes, a lot of household plastic still isn't recyclable because there are just so many types of plastic, with so many different additives used. But it is also a case of "build it, and they will come"; new industrial uses for recycled plastics do pop up once the infrastructure for delivering high-enough-quality streams of raw materials is in place.

It's not just a question of sorting; it's also a question of contamination.

It works fine in the US too. We may not be as efficient as some hyper aware European countries but overall the US is doing fine, especially with non plastic stuff. The US has far far more land available for internment of waste than Europe. We could definitely do better but quit acting like we're a 3rd world country. I'm not saying we couldn't do better but all the doom and gloom about the US is friggin' tiring.

> dominated by loud simple

Writing this after simplified ideas in first paragraph sound strange.

https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/sustainability/environmenta...

No further questions, your honor.

>“#ExxonKnew” is a campaign orchestrated by activists and trial lawyers to misrepresent ExxonMobil’s position and research on climate change. For the past several years, activist organizations have sought to punish ExxonMobil for voicing its opinion on climate policy, even though the company supports policies to limit climate change.

The last part there is almost comical.

"Supports policies" is nothing tangible in itself. Exxon will do whatever makes them the most money possible.

If 'green energy' turns out to be that thing, they'll jump on it.

My parents have been trying to divest themselves of oil majors for some time. So they sell some CVX/SHEL/XOM/etc., and buy green energy replacements. Only to find out they've been playing whack-a-mole, because several months later, the green company has been acquired, and after the merger, my parents position once again has more CVX/SHEL/XOM/...

If that's actually the case, that sounds like a winning investment strategy: acquirers typically pay a premium.

Every round of whack-a-mole is a transfer of wealth from the oil companies to your parents. They should be happy!

Unless your motives are not entirely profit driven as per the comment you replied to.

Making the oil majors have less money is good in itself, from the point of view of the parents.

They can use the money to give to their favourite climate change charities.

"Proactively engaging on climate-related policy"

How true!

This paper generates an interesting research policy question: Why was Exxon able to create equal or better projections than the NASA?

More money in it

Can you quote a source?

Do I need to? It is entirely logical that Exxon would research the things that are either a threat to, or benefit to their future profits. The larger the potential, the more research.

but otherwise NASA could put more money into climate research and researchers have a more open enviroment. One liner explaination most of time arent very good and therefore my question.

You have no idea about NASA’s budget

NASA's budget is publicly available.

It's substantially smaller than Exxon Mobil's. (Plus, some of Exxon's budget went to casting doubt on others' research.)

Exxon Mobil does not exclusively put mony into climate research and it didnt do it very likely in the 70s.

NASA doesn't exclusively put money into climate research, either.

They might do more. Above explaination does not nail it, that is the point.

In the last few years they have dropped their recruiting significantly but ExxonMobil recruited Ph.D’s from the best universities for decades. Lots and lots of VERY smart people work there.

Unlike at NASA where they hire everyone?

NASA folk are more naive ivory tower types where as ExxonMobil are more practical, pessimistic types.

Doesn't apply to the JPL folks I've met throughout my life but for the rest I guess I have to take your word for it. I'm not sure if your comment was just a sarcastic joke though, in which case I completely missed it

my BIL started in geology but ended up with a Ph.D in biology. I tried to get him to goto work for ExxonMobile (or somewhere in oil/gas) but he said he wasn't interested in selling his soul. Now, after half a decade, he's still looking for a steady job and makes holsters and knife accessories and sells them online to make ends meet. On one hand, I admire his stubbornness but on the other hand, i wish he wasn't so stubborn.

> Why was Exxon able to create equal or better projections than the NASA?

Focus?

Climate change, and the elimination of the use of carbon fuels (oil), would potentially existential threat to Exxon, so they better know everything about it. NASA has a whole bunch of things to focus on in addition to climate.

it might be not the only factor but at least a clear distinction.

Just a gut feeling, but Exxon has way more skin in the game than NASA does from a financial point of view since this is an existential threat to their business. That being said, we've always all had skin in the game, we just didn't realize it.

They knew the real numbers and weren't having to guesss? What they were required to report to regulators missed the whole truth but internally they could accurately calculate the situation.

Last I checked, Exxon was in the business of selling oil not burning it.

Very little informational content in this article. 90% of it is structured around building up the case that "Exxon knew exactly how much warming would occur" but there is very little information about the models themselves that appear to be the key piece of evidence. The one sentence that does mention them says "From 63% to 83% of those projections fit strict standards for accuracy and generally predicted correctly that the globe would warm about .36 degree (.2 degree Celsius) a decade." So we have an uncertain number of projections that match the outcome to within whatever amount of error "strict standards for accuracy" means. If the number is on the low end of 63% and the error is loosey-goosey then I can see why Exxon would say that their models may not be reliable since they would be getting 37% of their predictions wrong and some amount of the "correct" predictions would be off as well. People love to talk about broken clocks, I think we should be talking about broken models.

I won't assume intent, but this structure is a textbook approach on how to distract from core issue.

Good thing I haven't read any textbooks then. Hunting for witches doesn't pay well, just so you know.

And Purdue Farma knew that Oxycontin was severely addicting.

And RJ Reynolds knew that cigarettes cause cancer.

And GM knew that tetraethyl lead was poisoning the planet.

And Meta/Facebook knows it is igniting racism, bigotry and even genocide all over the world.

And probably no one will be punished.

> research that Exxon funded that didn't just confirm what climate scientists were saying but used more than a dozen different computer models that forecast the coming warming with precision equal to or better than government and academic scientists

I didn't read the paper in question, but I think (just from this description) that this is a bit disingenuous. Exxon is no angel, but big companies fund thousands of researchers on thousands of grants, and I don't expect management to pay attention to everything that that comes out of that with equal priority.

Maybe there's some wishful thinking going on in management, some malfeasance, but "a study they funded shows they're doing bad things" is not something that surprising; thousands of studies come out every day alleging some wrongdoing by somebody or another, and we don't find out what's signal and what's noise until much later.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2805576-1982-Exxon-M...

This doesn't say anything about that company.

It says much, very much, about public institutions.

Only goes to show that "Climate controversy" only exists for people willing to throw their reputation on the trash for good amounts of money

Of course there are plenty of attention seekers willing to do just that

> - Of course there are plenty of clowns willing to do that

> + Of course there are plenty of attention seekers willing to do just that

Calling someone a clown/attention seeker makes it seem like it's some unavoidable trait.

Let us not remove agency from them. Let us not confuse ill-intent with foolishness. At some point there must be some form of world climate trials reckoning.

It seems like a pretty straightforward fraud. At the very least civil liability should be a question of how much, not if.

I watched a long lecture by someone who had worked in academia for a long time, and his conclusions were that they cannot accept things that is incompatible with their world view. The classic example is someone who works in oil is not capable of accepting what the consequences are. They may accept that plastic is bad, or that smoke pollutes, although sometimes not even that.

Talk to an old biker and he may swear that CO2 is good for you.

Have you ever seen someone get defensive at the mere mention of a topic? Eg. that the planet is over-populated and that reducing the population is one of the best things we can do to save ourselves? Well, some immediately enter solution-mode and they talk as if you are arguing for gas chambers (or something equally idiotic).

It's quite draining to talk to people when you know their worldview does not allow a conversation about something. But it's also important to understand how it happens, and that you cannot do anything. Now I wish I could find that lecture, but I couldn't. Finding these gems amidst all the junk on the Internet is a challenge.

They accept it but it's hard to objectively tell me why I should care about future generations.

I do care, but I can't think of any objective reasons to care. Only romantic reasons about humanity, descendents, future generations, etc. It gets philosophical.

cf https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel... tl;dr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_on_Nationalism#Content

Reducing population is not a workable idea.

The people saying it may not think they're calling for gas chambers. But thats just because they are ignorant.

If you want to do the sums, just assume no one is ever born ever again and plot out the population for the next 100 years. Note that half the planet's population is under the mean age of 30. Life expectancy is above 80 if you exclude death in childbirth (which we just abolished in this thought experiment).

Unless you actively start killing people it's not going down fast enough to make any difference in the timescale we have for climate change.

And if you do want to start killing people, you'd get the most bang per buck by starting in America, then other rich Western nations. So I'd be very careful about putting this meme out there in case you find yourself on the wrong end of it.

> Have you ever seen someone get defensive at the mere mention of a topic?

i certainly witnessed that here during the depths of the pandemic questioning the reward and talking about the consequences of lockdowns! I think you'll find the same level of defensiveness all over the spectrum of climate change. People really want what they hold dearly to be true.

That’s an accomplishment that climate alarmists can’t claim.

Government scientists have told me we were 10 years from mass death and deprivation for those same 50 years.

Its so dumb that everyone is looking for someone else to blame, except themselves. Just to live in the Western world you're creating CO2 every day. Exxon might have known something but would it make a difference? We all know now about global warming but there are hundreds of coal stations being built right now.

> Exxon might have known something but would it make a difference?

They did more than know; while knowing, they pretended not to, and cast doubt on research confirming what they internally knew.

If I make knowingly false representations to sell something, that's generally considered fraud.

So the « …and yet you live in society » meme ? You don’t see how a company responsible for one of the most potent use case of global warming, knowing about this for 50 years and hiding the truth is more responsible than the average joe just trying to live by ?

> We all know now about global warming but there are hundreds of coal stations being built right now.

There are still people denying it, they are literally funded by companies like Exxon, and this is one of the biggest impediments to stopping climate change.

So, yeah, if Exxon had just announced their results 50 years ago rather than spending tons of money denying them it would have made a huge difference.

> There are still people denying it,

Only a few crackpots

> and this is one of the biggest impediments to stopping climate change.

No I dont believe this at all.

> Only a few crackpots

That's overly dismissive. They might be crackpots, but they're sometimes powerful crackpots. Like US Senators: https://www.cnn.com/2015/02/26/politics/james-inhofe-snowbal...

His last day in the senate was last week.

Do you think he's the only legislator with these views?

do you think there is a majority of legislators with these views? There might still be some around but they are crackpots. Stop looking for scapegoats.

I believe the majority of the Republican Party has espoused these views - evolving slightly from "climate change doesn't exist" to "it's not a big deal" to "it's not humans" to "we can't do anything to fix it".

The personal carbon footprint was also a public relations invention of fossil companies. The whole point is to blame individuals for the systems they were dependent on that created by extractive industry in order to make some people fabulously rich, and to forestall changes in law and culture that would upend those business models.

I strongly disagree here. How are individuals not to blame if they refuse to bear the costs for all the negative externalities they cause?

We still live in a democracy, and have known about climate change for over 40 years- the central problem is just that people are (still) NOT willing to pay the price to avoid/mitigate emissions.

Because the options are plentiful, like just taxing CO2 emissions and imports, throwing massive funds at low-CO2 energy sources + storage, but taxpayers are simply unwilling- blaming corporations and politicians NOW is the absolute height of hypocrisy.

The point of the personal carbon footprint was to convince people that they could individually make the world less bad by making choices within the existing system and didn't need to change anything (hence that paying for it was unnecessary). It's an influence tactic. I do not think it's hypocrisy to say this.

My goal in bringing it up is to note to whoever is reading it that you have better options than just eating Impossible burgers or paying some huckster for a paper that says someone in the Amazon didn't cut down a tree every time you fly on a plane. You can demand that the system change, that you have better options. That probably means that Exxon should stop existing. If you're worried about it costing you more now, it might, but it probably won't in the long run.

Talking about personal carbon footprints gets in the way of the narrative that fossil fuel companies were the main beneficaries of the fossil fuel era and they were the ones who'd lose out if fossil fuels weren't available, that much is true. The trouble is, the "personal carbon footprint" narrative is much closer to the truth than the "fossil fuel companies benefit" narrative. I actually had a look at some of the leaked internal documents and even internally they couldn't figure out a way to meet consumer energy demand without fossil fuels on the timescales needed if global warming was as bad as forecast - renewables would take about as long to be in widespread use as they ended up taking in the real world, and the only feasible alternative was nuclear which ran headlong into a bunch of difficulties in reality. (I also read the press release by the showboating US prosecutor characterising this as proof they secretly knew the world needed to switch to renewables much sooner in order to prevent global warming.)

Is Western CO2 worse than Eastern CO2 somehow?

"Thus, even if solar or nuclear technologies were to be considered viable alternatives, they would not really displace fossil fuel energy for next 40 to 50 years, and CO2 growth would have to be estimated based on realistic market displacement of the fossil fuel technologies." [0]

40-50 years from 1982 starts about now. So tell me, would it make a difference if we have started 40 years ago? Or should we wait another 40 since "everyone in western world is creating CO2 anyway"?

[0] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2805576-1982-Exxon-M... page 24

So some company figured out that their business has negative externalities and then they tried their best that nobody else figures this out and does anything against it so that the profits keep rolling in? Morally bad, sure, unexpected, no. So what is even the point of this? Do we want to say that it would have been the job of Exxon to minimize climate change? As an excuse for government inaction because Exxon tricked them? Do we just want to put a number on how morally bad Exxon is? I am seriously confused what the point of this is.

NOTE: I read the following post [1] which has a duplicate link to this post.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34366666

We have a term for "outright lying about a product to improve sales"; it's "fraud".

This.

I'm sorry you're "confused". Some times I get confused with morals and legals don't align, but that's not even the case here.

Let me just accept that they actually did something illegal, fine, they are not only morally wrong but also legally. And now? Do we make them pay a huge fine and climate change is averted? This seems pure distraction to me. Make some unpopular but impactful policy decisions that actually help to improve the situation instead of pointing fingers and changing nothing.

> Do we make them pay a huge fine and climate change is averted?

We should make them pay a huge fine even if the damage they did can't be reversed. Perhaps especially if.

How much green house gases did Exxon actually release? They produced a lot of oil and gas which comes with some emissions, but you know who actually released the majority of green house gases, you and me. And the industry, but even them really only on our behalves because we wanted them to make stuff for us. So should we not better fine ourselves?

> How much green house gases did Exxon actually release?

Plenty, and to Godwin a little, Hitler didn't personally kill any Jews.

> you know who actually released the majority of green house gases, you and me

And Exxon deliberately took steps to reduce the amount of useful information available to make those decisions.

I am not saying Exxon did not do bad things, but truth is, consumers are the ones that drove the demand. Even if you make Exxon shut down today, nothing will change, someone will come and fill the gap if the consumer behavior does not change.

Holding someone accountable as per the law seems like a distraction to you? Ok, I guess you don't agree with one of the fundamental organizing principles of our society then. Lets just agree to disagree and you can go live in a cave.

You are missing my point. I am not saying you should not hold them accountable, I am saying we have a more important problem. We should focus on minimizing the fallout of climate change instead of getting us distracted with a blame game and figuring out the appropriate punishments.

> I am not saying you should not hold them accountable

You did imply exactly that.

> Do we make them pay a huge fine and climate change is averted? This seems pure distraction to me.

If holding them accountable is a distraction, that implies we shouldn't be doing it.

So yeah, you did kind of say it.

I don't really care about fines. I think the people in charge at that time should be investigated, their internal communication, coordination, and fraud should be exposed, and then they should be put in jail for fraud, if they're still alive. You call this a distraction. I call it making a point.

Exxon is hardly 'some company' but I actually don't really understand what your confusion is. This just shows that oil companies knew climate change was real, being caused by their actions, and was serious, decades ago, and so is yet another nail in the coffin of climate denial. It is not a necessary one since the same science was also done outside of oil companies, but it shows how messed up the profit motive is when it comes to protecting future civilisation from the worst of climate change.

What if this is news? We know that they were modeling this for a long time. We know that goals of companies are not always well aligned with what is best for mankind. This is my confusion, I don't see what this really adds to the discussion.

Corporations don't get a magical exemption from being responsible for harm.

Smoking, asbestos, lead in petrol, and opiates have all been punished with huge payouts. [1]

Climate catastrophe is no different.

[1] The payouts could have been bigger - much bigger. But the principle stands.

Exxon did not cause climate change, consumers consuming the oil they extracted did. And as far as I know we were not forced to consume that oil, were we? Did they try to mislead people about the consequences so that they are less likely to reduce their oil consumption, sure. But it is ridiculousness to suggest that if only Exxon had not tried to mislead us, then we would have been aware of the consequences, stopped using oil, and climate change would have been averted.

It doesn't add anything new to those who are already aware that Exxon conducted these studies, and have the expectation that this is normal behavior to work around when dealing with businesses, small or large.

Not everyone holds knowledge of this (say, people who may have recently started reading Hacker News), and not everyone would come to the conclusion that this is just something to accept and move on.

For instance, shareholders are suing Exxon for not being made aware of this.

Putting a number on how morally bad an entity is has a lot of merit when it's a so close to the paperclip maximizer thought experiment that horrifies tech people, on how an artificial entity devoid of conventional morals could fulfill its objectives in a way that destroys the world. Turns out that, as science fiction often does, it's an exploration of worries pertaining modern society in a fantastic setting... though the authors may not have realized it this time around.

https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer

This serves as a pretty damned good cautionary tale, this breaks most scales of "morally bad" behavior that can be expected of companies.

For me, this is interesting because Exxon have subsequently funded think tanks and other methods of contesting climate science, resulting in people believing that "the science isn't settled" and mocking those who would work against AGW as "alarmists".

For example, the Heartland Institute.

Now it would seem that people who may have been trying to restrict action against AGW (in good faith), may have been fooled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartland_Institute

> So what is even the point of this? Do we want to say that it would have been the job of Exxon to minimize climate change?

Others have pointed out the obvious things, but I'll point out something maybe not so obvious. Corporations are legal fictions we created to benefit society. There is precedent establishing that they have a legal obligation to serve their shareholder' interests, but what if those interests conflict with national or society-wide interests? That legal fiction is no longer serving us but acting to our collective detriment.

I'm not aware of any precedent that balances these competing interests, but I hope someone can bring a suit with standing to create some precedent here, because these sorts of incentives are what drives a lot unethical, psychotic corporate behaviour.

That is the job of politics and the state, isn't it? They define and enforce the rules which will or will not make the goals of companies aligned with those of the society. And it is the people that decide - ideally - who is in charge and what policies they create.

Maybe in the typical case where downstream effects are unclear, but if a company is considering a direction where the obligation is clear as day, like that it could lead to the eventual destruction of that society as with climate change, I'm pretty sure we could skip that step and require corporations to factor that kind of thing into their calculations.

We're programmers here right? We want systems with direct feedback loops, preferably as short as possible, to achieve some objective as efficiently as possible. Routing back through the government for cases of clear fault doesn't add anything except unnecessary overhead and obfuscation.

I understand there can be murky lines here, but it's clear that a legal obligation to only consider immediate shareholder value is a little too unbalanced given the original objectives behind establishing corporations.

Before you can try to achieve an objective, you need one. So here the trouble already starts, different people have different objectives and some are contradictory. Not even everyone will agree that avoiding human extinction is a desirable goal. So we need some policy to resolve conflicts and weigh objectives. And people have to agree on this policy. If they don't we need some policy that everyone agrees with to find a policy that we then use. And this might repeat for some number of levels until we arrive at something that is accepted by all or at least most. And then you need the mechanisms to learn peoples objectives, and mechanisms to enforce policies, and mechanisms to avoid exploitations of policies, ...

When you are saying, we could just skip those steps, that is essentially just some kind of dictatorship - no judgment implied - you pick some policy to save the planet and declare that is what we do now. All, who agree with your objectives, have a good chance of seeing a better outcome than if we just used our gigantic machinery, but others might judge the outcome as worse as they have different objectives. And who decides when we can bypass the normal machinery? Would we not need a policy for that?

It always seems so tempting and easy, just do the right thing, but upon closer inspection, often the right thing is just what you think, the right thing is.

No, you're trying to muddy waters that are objectively clear. It is objectively clear that Exxon knew that their activity was causing climate change. It is objectively clear that climate change, if left unchecked, would lead to the destruction of society and in the most extreme cases, the extinction of humanity. If they didn't know that, why did they start a 50 year campaign to discredit such claims?

If a corporation was considering a direction where they knew this would be the case ahead of time, there is no conflict or disagreement possible that this direction should not be taken, even if it would decrease shareholder value. Calling the notion that corporations should be obliged to consider whether their activities would lead to the destruction of society a dictatorship is frankly ridiculous.

If a corporation becomes aware of the destructiveness of their activities after they're already entrenched in the economy, then they should have a legal obligation to report this fact to regulators immediately, regardless of its impact on shareholder value. Any obfuscation or delay should be met with severe punitive measures, up to an including dissolution of the corporation and nationalization of its assets.

That would properly realign corporate incentives with transparency and working to benefit society, at least in these extreme cases.

First paragraph, all true or at least reasonable.

This is not true, you presuppose that people want to avoid the destruction of society or extinction of humans at some point in the future. Many - probably most - people would not want society to collapse or humans to go extinct during their lifetime, or that of their children or grandchildren, but the further those events are in the future, the more likely many are to prefer some gain now over some loss far in the future that does not affect them personally.

You have decided for you that those catastrophic future costs have to be avoided and that you are willing to incur some cost for that now, but that does not make it true for everyone. Your position is essentially that your utility function is more reasonable than that of people preferring to make some money now over decreasing the probability or severity of some future event and therefore everyone should adopt or be forced to adopt your utility function.

If they accurately predicted the state of the 2020s climate in the 1970s, the government scientists should be embarrassed.

The positive outcomes of using fossil fuels for generating energy have vastly outweighed the negatives, and will continue to do so.

I acknowledge that my opinion depends on a definition of "positive" that reflects my belief that we should make life better for humans.

Well I imagine you will lead a successful coup in your country to become a dictator and instate the wildly unpopular measures that will make life better for the human climate refugees, all those people displaced by faltering agricultural output, infrastructure damage and the resulting civil conflict as droughts become longer and weather phenomena more destructive, or temperatures render their places of living outright uninhabitable.

Not on the table? Then maybe you should reconsider what that belief entails.

You're projecting. I have no desire to govern other people or in any way restrict their ability to do what they think is best for themselves. That's what climate alarmists do.

Deaths from natural disasters have been dramatically decreasing for decades. The number of people we can feed on less land has been increasing for decades. The ability of humans to move resources from one place to another has been increasing for centuries. Some people choose to live in warm and dry places rather than cold and damp places.

You discount the ability of the planet to respond to feedback and achieve balance, and the ability of humans to adapt. You don't even need international cabals of authoritarian collectivists to live a happy life.

Would you prefer to keep them outside your borders or let them in if push comes to shove, and poor countries can't adapt?

Or is suddenly "they are poor but happy" an acceptable imagined outcome for you, despite your belief that fossil fuels will keep ushering this era of prosperity so using them is morally the right choice?

Did it really hurt their business tho? It seems that pushing climate change only improved their profit margins with artificial scarcity.

I'm not sure people are correctly analyzing their interests here. Renewables are still unreliable in winter, most of the oil is used in transportation and the power grid is just decades away from supporting electric cars.

Minewhile they get to enact cartel style output limiting and competition suppression in the name of climate change. I'll also note that the narrative only truly took off when they started getting pressure from shale oil competition, not the literally 40 years beforehand that they had good margins.

All in all I believe that the timing and actions are in their advantage.

If serious action against climate change would have started in the 1970s, back when we could prevent the massive problems that we'll have live with in the 2050s and beyond, Exxon Mobil would have been out of business by now (or at least, would have had to pivot to some other industry).

Also, oil producers have been coordinating and doing cartel-style output limitting since forever, this is not some new thing or some environmental purpose - OPEC exists exactly for this purpose.

If wasn't for you and those and the meddling anti nuclear protesters... - Scooby-Doo

While, yes, anti-nuclear protestors bear a lot of the blame, what makes you think the parent was one?

OPEC is an alliance of state-owned oil producers in the Middle East, and their influence on global oil prices were seriously curtailed when the US started producing more oil - if attempts by global warming activists to limit oil production in the democratic developed world were more successful that'd really help give them back power. Also, there's not really an OPEC analog for natural gas but the ESG movement seems to have had similar effects in practice.

I reckon the comment you're replying to is exactly right - people have been mislead about their interests and the effects of specific policies on them. Specifically, the media has pushed for fossil fuel production to be cut back without first tackling the need for it and told people that the reason governments won't do this is because it'll hurt big oil's profits, and then when this had the opposite effect that it was the result of corporate profiteering, and that any claims to the contrary were just big oil propaganda. People bought this because it fit into their existing view of the world and all their friends did. Of course, this couldn't possibly work as advertised because it'd require consumers and the industries supplying them to burn fossil fuel that's not actually available. The whole reason prices go up and consumers can afford less is because the fossil fuel demand at previous levels of consumption can no longer be supplied.

It's like mortgage, the existence of mortgages hurts the home buyers and increases the price of homes. You have to compete with other people willing to enslave themselves with long mortgages to buy the house.

But approach a simple minded person and he'll say, "how can you get a house without mortgages"?

People are so quite bad at understanding the interests behind actions and instead buy the misleading narrative that pushes them to do the complete opposite.

Everyone's predicting the weather is going to become more chaotic yet the conclusion is that somehow we should rely on it to produce energy. Want to guess what would happen when that backfires? Oil makes a comeback and these people take a huge unearned profit.

I think any solution to climate change that involves relying on the climate is absolutely bonkers. It's ridiculous. You have leaders flying jets and having coast line houses lecturing you about climate. Watch what they do not what they say. Words lie but actions betray thoughts.

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