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Comment by di456 | Hacker News Reader

“We are confident that, once we show what the fossil fuel companies knew about global warming and when, and what they did to deny, delay and deceive the public, the jury will not let the fossil fuel companies get away with their reckless misconduct.”

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Oil companies also know that their products are critical to the production and distribution of food and a long list of other modern day necessities. Should they cease operation and let us starve ?

I think the argument here is that they shouldn’t deceive the public about the realities of their operations in order to raise or sustain their profits.

If the service is essential, the consumers of said goods can make their own decisions about how essential they are without all the smoke and mirrors.

"An inconvenient truth" and Greta Thunberg hardly had any effect in changing policy.

So don't tell me the lies of the oil companies had any effect on policy. Congress saw the conflict of interest, but didn't want to do anything that raise gas prices.

I don’t disagree with you, but I also don’t believe allowing or continuing to normalize deception of the general public is an acceptable status quo.

Congress and the public may decide what level of non-renewable energy sources is acceptable to them. But they should not need to do so while being burdened by deliberate campaigns to misinform them or muddy the waters.

you can’t definitively prove or disprove that. What you can prove is that oil companies actively deceived consumers about negative externalities associated with their product.

That's a brilliant excuse: Lie about the effects of emissions, lobby (and pay) Congress to not do anything about it (or change incentives to maybe use less gas rather than more) and then, when you are getting sued, just argue that the lying didn't affect policy, so it was perfectly fine.

Have you considered the possibility that Gore and Thunberg have had little success in changing policy because of things like the lies of oil companies?

Ya we didn't have food before oil...

I would normally take the effort to explain this but I don't think you'd get it.

We didn’t. Not at the scale seen in the 20th and 21st centuries. You could use every acre of land to produce food for humans using the best traditional farming techniques, and only feed 4 billion people. There literally wasn’t enough biomass and replenishing reactions. The other half would have to starve.

What feeds the world today? Fixed nitrogen fertilizers made out of the combination of air and fossil fuels.

If only we had never increased in population count that much. We would have spared the planet from many ecological disasters. A population of 4 billion sounds like a dream right now.

Are you really saying the universe would be better off without 4 billion people? Each with their own hopes, dreams, families, and hobbies. Whatever value you ascribe to nature only exists because we people are here to witness it. Doubling the number of people doubles the number of sentient beings bringing light and value to the world.

I seriously cannot fathom how someone could say that the world is better off if people didn't exist. What value system justifies that mass murder through erasure?

I agree with the value of people but would factor quality of life in. We’re currently projected to have something like a billion people seriously disrupted by climate change and all of us noticeably worse off which puts you in questions like how much human misery undercuts that.

Obviously the solution isn’t “kill 4B” and especially because the climate impacts and causes are very unevenly impacted - 300M Americans have generated more greenhouse gases than the billions in Africa or Asia who are being impacted first.

> I agree with the value of people but would factor quality of life in.

The median quality of life is the best it has ever been for humanity.

It’s equally true that the number of miserable people in the world is greater, too (lower percentage of a bigger number, but it’s not evenly distributed. If you’re a Bangladeshi farmer getting wiped out multiple years running due to climate change-amplified flooding, you probably aren’t comforted by the fact that even poor Americans can watch Tik Tok.

For the past couple of decades, at least, more people have been lifted out of poverty than have been added to it through population growth. So no, even by that metric things were worse off in the 70's or 80's than they are today.

Better off? Maybe. Probably. Murder or erasure? No.

Lets be a bit careful about putting words into other people's mouth or implying things. I intentionally phrased it that way, that it would have been nice to have avoided the current status in the first place.

I don't subscribe to the believe that more living humans equals better for the universe or even for the planet. Certainly not for the planet or other living beings on our planet.

I said murder through erasure, and I stand by that accurately describing what you wrote.

You are saying that the moral value of many/most human beings is a net negative. I don't know if you don't see, or if you choose to ignore the repugnant conclusions which must necessarily derive from this viewpoint.

It is funny how you try to doctor your "erasure" thingy into what I wrote. It still doesn't fit.

If for you the only possible conclusion is, that we have to fix it after the fact by applying some erasure, then that conclusion is on you, not on me. I find the conclusion from "net negative" -> "must erase now!" premature at best. To imply or state, that I voted for any "erasure" is plain wrong.

I personally would rather go about it like this: "Shit happened. We were collectively very stupid. What can we do now, so that in the future we don't make it any worse?"

Though I'm not supporting oil companies, this is very wrong. Without oil (or vehicles in general), the manpower required to produce same amount of food will increase multiple times, and food won't travel much from the place where it grows, limiting the distance that people can reside.

So yes it's a necessity but as other have said, oil companies can keep operating without lying about climate effect though they'll get less profit as impact.

There were tens of millions of bison freely roaming America before we absolutely purposefully decimated them all. They existed "without oil". Grazing, pooping, making some of the most fertile soil in the entire world.

Maybe if we had built a society around respecting, honoring, and preserving an incredible evolutionary product we'd be just fine.

We wouldn't. This is a straight up math calculation. If we dedicated all arable land in the entire world to optimal food production using traditional agricultural techniques (the stuff which doesn't involve fossil fuel products), we'd only be able to generate less than 1000 calories per person. The world would starve.

Respect and honor doesn't magic food into existence.

Ya we had ~8bn people before oil

We certainly didn't have food for 8'000'000'000+ people before oil.

No but they should at least not do buybacks and pay dividends, before cleaning up the mess that their production & product causes. This way an even competition field would form. Oil drilling is not a ludicrous business if you consider the actual costs for production (aka capturing carbon, decommissioning rigs, cleaning up production sites).

Then surely you must blame investors?

Let's say Shell suspended all dividends indefinitely. What would your advice to your pension fund be? Sell Shell and buy BP? Would Shell's ability to function exist if they became a non-profit and a share price of 0?

Does Saudia-Arabia pay for the clean-up of say Australia? Does the US pay for the clean-up of Uraguay? Does the explorer, producer or consumer bear the clean-up responsibility?

Investors do whatever is optimal for them. The duty of the market regulators is to ensure an even playing field, so that the investors are not deceived about the profitability of businesses.

Thankfully the US has a lot of say in the global oil supply and demand market. We already have rules & taxes in place for all the producers and importers of oil in the US (aka they need to buy certificates for blending renewable fuels mostly from US produced corn).

So yes, it is feasible, it is done already.

The word “critical” used in this sentence suggests there is no way to produce or distribute food or other commodities without fossil fuels, which is plainly, obviously false.

To produce and distribute food for the world’s population without fossil fuels, would not be practical.

Should we halt all space exploration and aviation until neither require fossil fuels?

Perhaps someday in the future it would be, and we should work towards it, but note that oil bootstrapped a lot of modern way of life.

If it’s plainly false you’ll have no trouble explaining how, plainly. How do we feed the worlds population without fossil fuel produced fertilisers and fossil fuel distribution

By that logic everything that has any positive externality at all would be legal. The plaintiffs specifically argue that the companies behaved recklessly motivated by profit seeking. They actively misled the public about a negative externality associated with their product. That is basically the same argument that plaintiffs made against tobacco companies. Cigarettes were legal, they brought satisfaction to consumers, but the producers actively misled their customers about negative side effects in a reckless manner.

> By that logic everything that has any positive externality at all would be legal.

It sounds like you’re arguing that products made by oil companies should be outlawed? So no more petroleum and petroleum products?

Or am I misconstruing the implication of your argument?

Cigarettes are still legal and oil should remain so but the price of oil should include its cost to society, not only profit maximization considerations.

The argument should be that these externalities get priced into oil to help with climate change effects and transitioning to clean energy. The analog I think are cigarettes and how we have taxed them out of existence

Sadly, the solution we adopted for cigarettes, namely letting them still profit by poisoning the children of the developing world, won't work for climate change as we share the same atmosphere with them.

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