Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Oil companies have been suppressing climate change research for decades to keep cooking the earth for profits. Is that not corruption? I suppose if you are economically exposed to these gains, don’t believe in climate change, and/or won’t be here for the bad times from this, the facts may not matter to your mental model. The facts remain that climate change is real and oil companies are doing their best to extract every bit of profit they can until we’re off of oil, regardless of the negative trajectories and outcomes from this.

https://www.ucs.org/resources/decades-deceit

View on HN

Oil companies have a definite history of punching people and then suing them for running into their fist. But I should also point out that Greenpeace is the kind of shitty activist company that also does those kind of tactics, so an oil company suing Greenpeace leaves my priors as "I don't know which side is more likely right in this scenario."

> I don't know which side is more likely right in this scenario.

What are the motives? Follow the money? Who profits most might give an indication of who is more likely wrong.

Don’t underestimate the capacity of feelers to be wrong for free.

You know, it's possible for these oil companies to have done all this bad stuff, and for Greenpeace to be a pretty shitty organization. And for the person to have a different mindset than all the strawman assumptions you just made.

Oil companies have done worse than that, but we're not talking about them right now we're talking about Trial Monitors Dot Org, the real authoritative source on this trial that has done literally nothing else.

Oil companies haven't done a damn thing. We are the cause of global warming. Every time we pump gas into our car, buy anything that came from far away, or use any technology dependent on oil. Blaming oil companies is childish garbage people do to avoid recognizing their personal share of the responsibility.

You know the carbon footprint concept was literally created by BP marketing, to place the blame for climate change on society, and distract from all the evil stuff they did to promote more fossil fuel consumption and sabotage climate science.

The Climate Town channel on Youtube has lots of video's on this, such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J9LOqiXdpE

The blame is 100% on society, so BP is correct to place it there. If we wanted to reduce our CO2 output to near zero we could do that easily. But it turns out that we would rather have all of our modern conveniences, so this is 100% our fault. Blaming it on oil companies is like a murderer blaming Smith and Wesson.

You’re sadly making this a simpler issue than it actually is. There are countless industries that have used immoral tactics to make more money. That includes tobacco companies (lying about health benefits & consequences to smoking), gambling companies (misleading people about how much money they can expect to make), and, of course, oil companies (lying about how harmful gas is to the environment).

Using gas is not actually necessary to have all our modern conveniences. In fact, it is fucking stupid to rely on continuous resource extraction, deleting our fuel supply to create energy, when we can get it continuously for free from the environment with a minor up-front investment.

It is not 100% our fault. This is only like blaming it on Smith & Wesson if Smith & Wesson had created “pacifist guns” that allegedly solved societal violence, or if Smith & Wesson spent huge amounts of money trying to convince people that guns are not actually dangerous objects.

Blaming oil companies for the extremely well documented history of suppression of research and action into the impact of climate change is not childish.

It is childish to think that anything would have been different if this research was released.

Exactly. I mean look what happened when we worked out CFCs were destroying the ozone layer through rigorous scientific research and public disclosure.

Yes, and cigarettes, asbestos, lead in gasoline, and a few others, too. Clearly there is a place for education and coordinated action among the common people.

Those were a lot easier to swap out. Oil is the foundation of modern society, CFCs were far from.

You are literally avoiding the topic (Greenpeace intentionally created a misleading authoritative-looking entity) to say "Oil bad! Boo oil companies!".

The facts remain that Greenpeace did in fact attempt to slander (legal definition) the big oil corp.

Maybe you support "win at all costs" in this fight, but don't pretend one side is pure and honest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com