It's more than that, it was the willful misrepresentation of the truth. The oil companies didn't accidentally end up in this situation. They knew back in the 80s the effects that oil consumption would have on the ecosystem and they covered it up and actively pushed lies that prevented any kind of meaningful change.
Another framing: how many wind, solar, hydrothermal, etc. plants did we not build because their economic envelope was artificially dampened by investment and legislative preference for fossil fuels?
I'm not really sure what it is you are trying to defend here? I understand arguing that you can't guarantee a different approach would have led to better results, but in this situation it seems fairly clear that corporations being open and honest would be superior.
No, it wouldn’t change everything but you don’t need carbon emissions to be 100% to be useful. Every bit you reduce buys time to work on the harder parts of the economy.
Is anyone able to say with a straightface that they didn't know oil that oil is bad for the environment? I get that the oil companies have more blame than other people, but this argument of "the global population was fooled, nobody knew it was bad so we kept using oil, and those mean people at the oil company kept the information from us"... Everyone knows. The same way everyone knows most weird smelling chemicals aren't great for the environment either, but if we have a stained tshirt we'll use them.
We're all complicit, and while I agree some are more to blame than others, it's not necessary to pretend the rest of us are innocent.
we should ban lava too, have you seen the environmental damage it can do?
Have we not already? That seems like an oversight...
People aren't willing to sacrifice their lifestyle for the environment.
In France we (edu and ecology ministers iirc) tried to have only vegetarian meal one day per week in public schools. Agriculture ministers got very angry as well as a bunch of noisy parents. Legislator choose to abandon the project.
However, Sabine Hossenfelder recently made a post about that [0]. My understanding is that there was still a lot of uncertainty in the scientific community during the 80s, although around the 90s there was a movement by oil companies to downplay the impact of climate change.
With that being said, whether or not oil companies were aware back then doesn't mean they cannot still be held accountable in the present. And we definitely have evidence of oil companies engaging in bad faith since the turn of the millennium to obfuscate our understanding of climate science.
Fossil fuels provide a great benefit to one party but produce negative externalities to other parties (people in hurricane zones, people born into hot regions, people who live in the future). If it's worth it economically because the value is so great, then an optimal economic solution is to say "You can have this thing, but you are accountable for the damages it causes to other parties"
Once we start pricing in the costs of the side-effects of fossil-fuels, the tradeoffs will be more clear, and the market will create faster incentives toward the ideal tradeoff.
And don't get me wrong, I love my sports car and it's big thundering V8. But I also know the negative effects it has and I'm completely fine paying a higher price at the pump to offset that.
Every time I look it up, the results are so full of rhetoric and conflating I can't find an answer.
Most top line numbers count on priced externalities as a implicit subsidy. That's fine and well for some analyzes, but very different than Direct Cash subsidies or tax breaks
I thought the oil and gas industry famously got about $4B in subsidies per year, and about $20B to fossil fuel industries in general. Has that changed recently?
Is that a 20B check the federal government paid them? Is that 20B of tax deductions from carry forward losses that every company in the US gets? Is that 20B of carbon taxes that some analyst thinks would be fair, but there is no law requiring them to pay?
The IMF says things like this[1]:
>This includes $3 billion in explicit subsidies and $754 billion in implicit subsidies, which are costs like negative health impacts and environmental degradation that are borne by society at large rather than producers (i.e., negative externalities).
This link [2] goes a little more into what the "direct subsidies" are:
Intangible Drilling Costs Deduction - Not sure why this is a subsidy. Most business costs are tax deductible for other industries.
Clean Coal Investment and Nonconventional Fuels Tax Credits - These are incentives to decarbonize. I agree that they are subsidies in the traditional sense, but not subsidies to increase carbon production. Something like a 30% tax credit for money spent on upgrades that sequester >75% of the carbon emissions seems like a good thing.
https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-proposals-to-red...
https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subs...
> In the complaint, Puerto Rico says it expects to pay billions of dollars in the future to cope with catastrophes made worse by climate change — including storms like Hurricane Maria, which killed thousands of people in 2017 and triggered monthslong power outages.
On top of all that, climate change was going to happen. The idea that our climate was ever static and unchanging is silly, and only a child’s view is the history of the world would suggest otherwise. Did the early inhabitants of Austin Texas sue whatever they thought caused their premium glacier front property to drop in value over the last billions of years they receded?
The fact is that humanity is hooked on oil. IRS not going away. Not at least without billions of people suffering and dying. Oil has brought clean water across the world. It has allowed a technology boon by the way of its by products coating the majority of wires made, preventing horrific house fires from the days of paper wrapped wires.
Oil and its byproducts are engrained into humanity and its economical efficiency has been a blessing to humanity and every single last person on this planet has benefited.
I mean how many people thought you could build a bunch of casino's in the middle of a desert and think people would move there and it would grow into almost 3M people?
Companies like British Petroleum have used marketing to frame climate change as “consumers doing bad things” with their “carbon footprint”. So if that’s what your mind goes to first, that’s no coincidence.
It’s all about the money. Money buys media which buys narrative and mindshare.
The problem with these companies is the externalities of their actions are not priced in. For them, it's more a simple game of figuring out how to get the world to burn more oil.
This lawsuit may not have merit, but it does point to the need for trying to price in the impact on climate change with oil burning.
It's also common sense. Literally nothing stops first-world consumers from not buying stuff that requires emission of greenhouse gases except for their lifestyle preferences.
> It’s all about the money. Money buys media which buys narrative and mindshare.
Yep, you bought into the idea that you don't have to change your lifestyle because it is all fault of the big oil.
> Literally nothing stops first-world consumers from not buying stuff that requires emission of greenhouse gases except for their lifestyle preferences.
Literally nothing. Uh-huh as if we’re talking about buying a monster truck compared to a Volvo instead of the lifeblood of the whole modern (inefficient) supply chain.
> Yep, you bought into the idea that you don't have to change your lifestyle because it is all fault of the big oil.
Via what money?
One persons stunt is another's advocacy.
When do they get sued for fearmongering misleading and putting an industry fifty years behind where they’d be today?
Not doing so of course makes their product's price not reflect its true cost to produce, and distorts that same supply and demand.