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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

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

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