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Comment by itsoktocry | Hacker News Reader

I'm Canadian. Went to school in Edmonton. Visited the oil sands a few times. It's amazing, in both a "good" and "bad" sense.

But the climate change discourse is so poisoned, and scientific research so politicized, I find this hard to believe. 63 times? It's a headline meant to grab attention. It's simply not possible this is the case without anyone ever noticing prior, or massive liability issues. Blame the companies, of course. But how could the government be so inept to allow it? It's extraordinary. To the point I can't even be bothered to look at the paper, since I have to assume they are measuring something completely different.

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You, yourself have just said that the discourse is politicized and poisoned.

It's not 63x more than estimated, or thought, or calculated. It's not an error somewhere in the process to calculate it. It is 63x worse than reported by an industry that has routinely lied about their impact on the climate. It is very, very possible.

>It is 63x worse than reported by an industry that has routinely lied about their impact on the climate. It is very, very possible.

It's possible, but not plausible, to me.

You can talk about those "evil oil companies", but this is 2024. It's hard to imagine them under-reporting so drastically, again, to me. What is there to gain? If this is real, it's going to be the end of them.

Counterpoint: what if it would not be the end of them and they know it. What would they be willing to do then?

It's just them lying for PR. It's not something which has consequences.

> "evil oil companies", but this is 2024

Same companies, and often same people. They can keep the climate change denial going as long as they're making money from it.

Why would this be the end of them, specifically? What exactly is going to happen?

“I can’t imagine why anyone would tell big lies for big bags of money”

Unfortunately our current government tends to lie about these sorts of things too. I'm not sure who to believe...

> But the climate change discourse is so poisoned, and scientific research so politicized

Only because the people profiting from fossil fuels completely lie and deny facts to make it "politicized".

No different than when young Earth creationists claimed that evolution or astronomy were "politicized" and demanded that schools "teach the controversy" or put warning stickers on biology textbooks to say that the science doesn't align to Biblical creation stories.

The rhetoric to deny climate change constantly moves the goal posts. First it's not real, then it's real but not human caused, then it's human caused but too late to change, then it's not too late to change but the proposed solutions are too expensive, then the solutions are reasonable but involve too much government intervention, etc.

The discourse isn't poisoned and the research isn't politicized. It's a fact, and pretending it's "politicized" is just the latest angle the fossil fuel profiteers are using in their propaganda campaign.

So your faith in the competence of government oversight is what primarily prevents you from believing this piece of research is correct? That's an unusual stance for HN. :-) Both the companies and the government obviously have a financial/economic interest in not finding this out, if it's true. I find it pretty easy to believe, and I am a fairly pro-govt lefty type.

Even the government (federal) didn't trust these numbers. Provincial government is heavily biased towards supporting anything related to fossil fuels and their political leadership deny climate change as often as possible.

>Provincial government is heavily biased towards supporting anything related to fossil fuels and their political leadership deny climate change as often as possible.

Fighting against stupid climate change policies isn't "denying climate change". Policies like, I don't know, clamping down on our oil extraction and pipelines locally, and instead buying the resources from adversarial countries.

Are you able to point to legislation from the current Alberta government that does the following - one - accept that climate change is happening and worsening, and two - that the Alberta oil sands are making the problem worse?

>So your faith in the competence of government oversight is what primarily prevents you from believing this piece of research is correct? That's an unusual stance for HN. :-)

Yeah, it feels strange!

But the numbers are just too drastically different that it's impossible for me to reconcile.

The government in Alberta is heavily supported by private industry.

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