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Comment by ChurchillsLlama | Hacker News Reader

This is true, but my point is there weren't cost-effective alternatives at that time anyway so blaming climate disasters squarely on the shoulders of oil companies and not acknowledging the fact that demand fueled the value of oil doesn't make logical sense, even from an empirical perspective. Now, lawsuits for local disasters and oil spills do make sense.

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It does if you think that alternatives to fossil fuel would have become economical earlier, had the fossil fuel industry not intervened.

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 do agree with this. They stifled progress as much as they could but that only slows things down, and because we don't truly know what would have happened, it's not productive to play the blame game and say we'd have a spotless utopia if it weren't for the oil companies. Who knows, not enough people at that time may not have cared or maybe we would have the utopia we all want. It's all guesswork and at this point we need to spend our energy moving forward instead of focusing on the past.

Punishing major corporations at scale might help prevent the next multi-generational fuckup, and help pay for the energy and changes moving forward.

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.

Say they’d gone to Nixon like they were considering, or Carter a little later. The U.S. might have ended up like France with a massive nuclear investment _and_ stronger investment in renewable and efficiency wins - the solar panels Reagan removed from the White House weren’t anywhere near modern standard but there was a ton of interest in lowering pollution which was derailed in the name of increased profit margins during the 80s.

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.

The 'there weren't cost-effective alternatives at that time' as an excuse for at the very least inaction (morally condemnable) and at most criminal litigation-worthy propaganda, lies and damages, I find it, in all due respect, quite poor.

As an excuse on the part of the oil companies, I completely agree. But that point was directed at the supply/demand situation from the perspective of the world's consumers and not from the oil companies. So any effects emissions have had on the environment can't be placed squarely on the shoulders of the oil companies but the market (world population) as a whole.

How do you think you come around to having cost-effective alternatives? You need people actively working on them, and for that you need an incentive.

Oh no, well if there aren’t cost-effective alternatives for the corporation to slot into the profit opportunity then that’s that. Can’t blame the poor corporations who just wanted to make money, their God-given right after all.

It wasn't cost effective to save ourselves; Kurt Vonnegut was prophetic.

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