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Comment by immibis | Hacker News Reader

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I would not do the same. But realistically, if I were Exxon's CEO in that situation, I'd rapidly be replaced with someone who would make that choice.

Would you? If you knew your actions would kill a billion people, you’d still do it for $1T?

Recent political events have proven that if I wouldn't, someone else would do it anyway, and then I'd have the disadvantage of not being them. The world is significantly more atomized than I'd like; you can either play the game that everyone else is playing, or forfeit by default.

> You or I would do the same.

Just because you lack morals you shouldn't assume everyone else does too.

With that dichotomy, I'd set the dollars on fire — unless someone convinced me that doing so would kill even more people.

Money is a tool for organising labour and resources, I don't see it as a goal in itself, only a means to other ends.

Well that's an interesting hypothetical but what they actually did was more like reducing GDP by a trillion and murder a billion people.

You appear to be justifying the deaths due to it making financial sense overall, when it didn't. A small group profited at the expense of everyone else, even if you ignore the deaths.

Can’t tell if this is satire but I most certainly would not, and I would hope that society would hold someone responsible for doing that.

No. No I wouldn't.

Only if you're a sociopath. But I also don't buy the framing that oil companies are murdering people when they're providing the energy society needs. Fossil fuels have largely powered the modern world. That doesn't excuse covering up the science and the need to transition either. But there's tradeoffs and nuance to all this. Was solar and battery technology good enough in the 70s and 80s to start transitioning then? Would the public have accepted a nuclear transition?

For that matter, are there climate models predicting deaths on the order of 1 billion? Do they even make such predictions?

> That doesn't excuse covering up the science and the need to transition either

That's what we're calling sociopathic behavior. Not drilling oil and gas.

I'd call the socipathic behavior trading a billion lives for a trillion dollars, but that's just something the parent came up with. What's the actual tradeoff, what sort of transition could have happened by now, to what extent was the rest of the scientific community aware of greenhouse gases, would a lot more nuclear power plants being built have been seen as better by the public?

> trading a billion lives for a trillion dollars

Which they did by covering up the problem.

> what sort of transition could have happened by now

More renewables and batteries, more electric vehicles, more public transit, high-speed rail, cheaper and safer nuclear.

They did? I missed the part where a billion people are dead. Last I checked, the population is still going up. I asked if there were any climate models making such a prediction.

> At least 3.3 billion people, about 40% of the world population, now fall into the most serious category of "highly vulnerable", with the worst effects in the developing world.[35] If emissions continue on their current path, Africa will lose 30% of its maize cultivation territory and 50% of its land cultivated for beans. One billion people face flooding due to sea level rise.[34] Climate change, together with other factors, also increases the risk of infectious diseases outbreaks like the COVID-19 pandemic. The report also cites evidence that China will pay the highest financial cost if the temperature continue to rise. The impacts will include food insecurity, water scarcity, flooding, especially in coastal areas where most of the population lives due to higher than average sea level rise, and more powerful cyclones. At some point part of the country may face wet-bulb temperatures higher than humans and other mammals can tolerate more than six hours

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Sixth_Assessment_Report#I...

Plus however many lives could be lost due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_migration

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