If proven, this should be harshly punishable under existing aiding and abetting laws.
On the underlying matter of oil companies being responsible for climate change… the law and the morality is far less clear. We are essentially all complicit.
On the underlying matter of oil companies being responsible for climate change… the law and the morality is far less clear. We are essentially all complicit.
With statements like these it’s important to take into account proportionality and scale.
Whereas a member of the public may have been aware of climate change after James Hanson’s congressional testimony in 1988, ExxonMobil had its own climate research division in the ‘70s and knew about the dangers of climate change at-least ten years prior [1]. They sat on these findings and in the ‘90s actively engaged in PR and misinformation campaigns to delay action on climate change. They have been incredibly successful at this and the US has no policies to limit fossil gas extraction or burning.
The public at large have known for centuries that burning fossil fuels creates locally systemically significant pollution, and we do it anyway. We have known for decades now that it creates globally systemically significant pollution, and still we burn it anyway.
A few thousand greedy, profiteering, unscrupulous oil bosses would not have gotten away with doing it had there not been a few billion consumers paying them to do it. At some point, the blame must also be treated as systemic.
What happens in the scenario where Exxon is found guilty and given the corporate death penalty that some have asked for? Their assets would be confiscated and passed to some new owner. The government maybe? Whoever gets them, will they shut them down? No, they’ll keep those wells pumping, under some new brand name, because the demand for oil is systemic.
If Exxon is culpable for paying a hacker to commit a crime on their behalf, then the population at large are culpable of paying Exxon to pump oil on our behalf.
They should pay, they knew what they were selling and were misleading people now we are in a critical situation because of their actions. Individuals can do only so much and most of the people don't even really grasp and understand the implications of their actions, but gets appalled when they do...
You can turn the problem in all directions, the manipulation of public opinion to freeze any attempt at reversing climate change is actually a crime against humanity...
They did the opposite of that, in fact, and continue to do. So I have no sympathy for any oil companies if they ever face any punishment. A vanishingly unlikely prospect by the way.
Not to mention a bunch of the biggest oil companies are already government owned:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_oil_and_gas_co...
top companies in the list are Sinopec, China National Petroleum Corporation, and Saudi Aramco, all state owned.
I think there's two important points you made that I'd like to address:
1. Failures to apply meaningful penalties / punishment to transnational corporations
2. Individual culpability for oil consumption
To start, I think it's worth looking at how punishments for corporate wrongdoings might look in a brighter world. Not having faith in the system is _completely_ understandable, and I think it can be easy to forget what it is we _do_ want after being shown what we _don't_ want over and over.
Off-the-cuff, I envision something like the forced closure and seizure of all Exxon assets by the federal government. These assets could be sold off to pay for the settlements of the multiple class-action lawsuits against Exxon focused on public health and environmental wrongdoing[1][2]. I'd love to see criminal charges for those at the top
There are past examples of companies doing wrong and being forced to close "with prejudice", or not being allowed to restructure into another entity with a different name. A famous example is the forced closure of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI)[3]. Another is Purdue Pharmaceuticals, which was restructured into a public beneficiary trust that would administer payouts to "opioid creditors" or people who suffered from the opioid epidemic[4]. And hearteningly, there are also examples of executives facing jail time. Enron[5] is the most famous example, and though there are critiques that it wasn't far enough, Skilling was a fall guy, etc., it serves as a good reminder that even within our system today, there is already precedent. Theranos is another example of criminal proceedings against executives[6].
All this is to emphasize that though pessimism is understandable, optimism can help us push the system in the right direction, and doesn't have to mean having all the answers.
Now we can look at individual culpability.
I wanted to look at this point second because I think it becomes more approachable once we've seen what widespread change can look like. I don't have citations, or evidence to bring here. Just my own experience. I find it much easier to start taking personal responsibility when I know that there is some effort being made to offer me a mode of life where I don't induce second order demand for oil (i.e. I need to buy groceries, those groceries may come packaged in plastic). I find it much easier to take a freezing half-mile walk to the store when I see the companies inducing oil demand many orders of magnitude beyond what I'll ever use or need begin to face consequences.
[1] https://www.legaldive.com/news/816m-exxonmobil-verdict-is-la...
[2] https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/2022/12/02/muni...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_Credit_and_Commerce_In...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purdue_Pharma#Bankruptcy
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal#Enron
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos#Civil_and_criminal_pr...
There are org charts and paper trails for these corporations. Corporations aren't mechanical automatons. They are made of people that make decisions. Unfortunately, they are rich and influential people.
Between statute of limitations, limited liability corporations, fall guys, unlimited resourced lawyers, and a fundamentally corrupt judiciary when it comes to corporations, there's no justice for the legal immortal invincible personhoods that are corporations.
It is nuts that physical reality is subordinate to the law and even worse, the selective enforcement thereof, but that is the nature of this peculiar filter. What will probably kill humanity? Bureaucracy.
Thanks, that's my TED talk.
Empty statement that shirks responsibility when some are complicit orders of magnitudes more than others. Even among those not directly involved in fossil fuel industries. This matters. In Nazi Germany, someone working at a screw factory, some of whose screws ended up in military devices, was also complicit. Yet the morality is clear - they weren't sent to Nuremberg whereas others were, for good reason. Even though the war would have been near impossible with no screws available.
Exxon also isn't a person, but the same would apply if you'd have said e.g. the Exxon CEO.
For people buying oil products, again there's orders of magnitudes of difference. Even the average person in Sierra Leone has bought an oil product at some point. I'm sure he's bought magnitudes less than I have though, and I have bought magnitudes less than others again. All of this does place us on different parts of the spectrum and is not to be hand-waved away.
By all means punish the people who ordered the actual, specific hacking crimes highlighted in this thread, but trying to pin climate change on oil companies ignores the fact that the orders come from civilization at large.
I don't think anyone is arguing that economy-wide changes aren't needed, nor did anyone ever propose that if only we took down IG Farben, WW2 would've ended.
Correct relative blame assignment is still very important, as the Farben CEO to Nuremberg and the screw factory worker should be rehabilitated regardless of having played a minor (yet still essential) role.
Convenient how the elements of the offenses in the "existing laws" are such that it's trivial for any non-idiot to structure things so their conduct can't be proven to meet them, eh? Sort of like Al Capone.