I've chatted with a few folks who have spent their entire lives working in climate science while being employed by the oil industry. They're some of the most moderate, intelligent, considered people I've ever talked to. And most people hear "a climate scientist who works for an oil company" and assumes they're the worst sort - a profiteer or a liar or a complicit drone. They're not leadership - they don't get to decide what is to be done with their conclusions - but they're not all evil.
Now... the leadership folks who commissioned these predictions and then ignored them... That's another matter!
> Now... the leadership folks who commissioned these predictions and then ignored them... That's another matter!
Ok, you made me curious. What were they supposed to do? Stop drilling and selling oil? Ask the government for increased taxes to take care of externalities? Dismantle the corporation? Just resign and go find a job in a different industry?
You know how when school budgets are cut, underpaid teachers spend money out of their own pockets to ensure students get what is needed? Or nurses stay far past their shifts to ensure critical patients get the care they need?
Unethical people don't realize that there are countless ethical people who make the right choices every day.
The answer to your questions, is yes to all of them.
That's not exactly apples to apples, but you got me thinking about the leaders that cut school budgets and under-staff hospitals (while getting bonuses, no doubt). When it comes to ethics, it appears most organizations are bottom-heavy.
Isn't it weird how budget cuts and under-staffing[1] have nebulous attribution, or are seen as an unstoppable force of nature in whose face the embattled, heroic, under-resourced teachers and nurses must make their stand
I agree with the spirit of this take. Of course they should have.
We should structure society so that the average person has agency at the workplace, and not just blindly abides by the decisions and orders of the board of directors.
If democracy were to expand to the workplace, perhaps we would be in a better position to avoid the situations that lead to the situation described by the OP.
Not go out and publicly try to discredit work they know to be true? Start shifting their companies aggressively towards energy sources which will not kill us all decades earlier by using their insane benefits to invest in R&D? Anything which is not akin to sacrificing millions and handing a terrible situation to the next generation to make a quick buck? Have a soul?
Imagine an alternate history where the CEO of Exxon had gone to Carter and said we're in trouble, we need a space race to save the planet. We'll cooperate with the EPA & DOE if you can help us out with federal support pivoting our entire company behind a crash nuclear power plan rollout, large-scale biodiesel production, etc. A bit over half of the total CO2 emissions were produced in the current century so starting a couple decades earlier without lavishly funded opposition would have bought us a lot more runway to find alternatives and if it'd been successful we might have sat out the recent misadventures in the Middle East, too.
That's the kind of thing you'd do if you wanted your grand children to grow up in a world as good as the one you enjoyed. Unfortunately, people who think like that usually tend not to make it to C-level positions. Y2K also reminds me that right now we'd probably be hearing a lot of people saying it was an expensive overreaction.
You would believe that at some point in the past decades, with the multiple crisis caused by failure of leadership in the financial sector and with the numerous scandals in both auditing, energy production, manufacturing and shipping, people might have started to question if there might not be something fundamentally wrong with the way we do corporate governance and more generally how we have organised our society and economy. But apparently no, it’s really going to be denial up to and over the edge of the cliff.
I remember as a kid being fascinated by the idea that while decline was felt throughout the Roman Empire, something which once stood so powerful had then become powerless and was rendered unable by its own structure to restore what used to be and prevent what was to come. I kept wondering how it was even possible. Now I know.
Indeed, that was my point: it's not an isolated incident, but a pattern.
The people in charge (in politics or business) are in charge due to the current system, so they have very little incentive to change it and have a lot of incentive to keep it as it is. Why doesn't Labour push for a fairer electoral system even though the current system is generally biased towards the Tories (and has for many decades)? Because when they are in power they are in power due to the current system.
This also works through to the middle class: if you're having a good life then you're having that due to the current system. Why change it? It's not a coincidence that people who are least established (the underclass, students, oppressed groups) tend to be the ones advocating for change, but they're also the worst positioned to actually enact such change.
So change happens through drastic events such revolutions, which brings their own risks and often don't change things for the better. You'd expect that people are familiar enough with history to pre-empt this, but it seems not. "Ah, I'm sure it'll work out in the end" seems to be the prevailing attitude. Maybe, or ... maybe not?
At least in my country, the poor usually vote for conservative policy, and it's usually rich leftists trying to push communism and welfare while those receiving said welfare vote against them.
The poor know best there are no free meals. It's the rich elitist that can afford to virtue signal with ideas of dumb policies, because they aren't close to the edge of economical ruin if those policies go sideways. And they mostly go sideways.
When policies take money from the poor to give to the poorer, it just reduces social mobility further and creates dependence on the government.
By the way, all this climate religion hurts the weakest in society the most. They can't buy a Tesla or afford heating when "carbon taxed" or when renewable energies who rely on the weather (which we all knew is going to be unreliable) freeze and result in them freezing to death in winter.
Oh and by the way, it's also a scientific consensus that global warming is going to result in net lives saved because people die from cold much more than from warming. It's just a narrative you'll never hear. And because those dying from cold are usually the weaker parts of society. And those owning real estate close to the coast usually have much more money.
And there has never been a scientific consensus. Freeman Dyson, for example, which died in 2021, was the last remaining physicist from developing QED, a physicist I respect much more than the pop science scientists, thought the climate change religion is misguided and even called them religion.
You should be less certain about this: proposals going back decades had this working as a rebate mechanism — take the total collected, divide it by the number of citizens, and send them a check. The idea is that if you hit people with the cost up front they'll be incentivized to use less because they see the true cost of their decisions up front and if you use less energy you'll be getting free money from the people who use more.
It's also important to remember that in almost every country energy usage scales with income so this is less regressive than it might seem — poor people aren't commuting to work in Escalades or heating their 4,000 square foot houses to 75℉. See point number five here:
> And there has never been a scientific consensus.
There has been a consensus among qualified scientists since roughly 1980, and the predictions climate scientists were making that decade have held up quite well. For example, the first IPCC report from 1990 had estimates which were accurate:
Similarly, Dr. James Hansen (director of NASA's Goddard Institute) testified before Congress based on his 1988 study predicting global warming and his numbers were very close to what we saw over the subsequent 3 decades:
If you believe that “ice age” talk was real, remember that the source of that was a couple of speculative papers which were never widely accepted and were refuted by the late 1970s. Here's what the National Academy of Sciences had to say in 1979:
> We believe, therefore, that the equilibrium surface global warming due to doubled CO2 will be in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C, with the most probable value near 3°C.
(Note that in both of the previous two cases there's a confound because some conservation efforts and especially the Montreal Protocol were effective enough to shift us to the lower end of those ranges. We do have the power to stop this.)
> Freeman Dyson, for example, which died in 2021, was the last remaining physicist from developing QED, a physicist I respect much more than the pop science scientists, thought the climate change religion is misguided and even called them religion.
Freeman Dyson was smart but he had no training or expertise in climate science — he even admitted that his position was largely emotional. Given that the people he was attacking made testable predictions which turned out to be correct, it's a regrettable tarnish on his legacy that he embarrassed himself acting unscientifically but it's hardly uncommon for famous elder scientists to start commenting well outside their area of expertise and expecting normal scientific standards not to apply to them.
> My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have. I think that’s what upsets me.
I mean the answer here is actually pretty simple and it doesn't require leadership to be ethical, just to take a long-term view.
If you find out your product is bad for the environment, for people's health, etc. then you go and quietly do R&D on the solution. You know shit is going to hit the fan sooner or later so you get ahead of it. Then when it starts to become a PR problem you double down on the alternative you came up with and you start publicizing it. With any luck you'll be ahead of your competitors and able to transition to the new thing better and faster than they do. You don't really have to be a moral paragon to think this way, you certainly don't need to die on any hills, you just have to be smart enough to hedge your bets and think about where your profits may come from in 25 years, instead of just in the next 5. These are not resource strapped companies, they are companies that can afford to do generational R&D and whose executives lacked vision.
Yes what were they supposed to do with the information that their business would end up cooking the earth??? If only I could think of something, but i can’t. So let’s just fund denialism if it all instead.
Well stop funding anti-(climate)-science disinformation campaigns would be a good start. Many of the current state of divisive politics and the incredible rise of conspiracy theories can be traced to the campaigns funded by big tobacco and big oil.
Then what's the point of working at a place that for decades won't ever listen to what you have to say?
Isn't that frustrating? Especially as an intelligent person who might care about the research you're doing.
I am very conflicted of this. Do people just get good pay so they can be ignored/shut up?
International oil companies are a small piece of the production pie. Even if they all shut down it's the state oil companies that do the bulk of the production.
OK well then, we'd better not do anything about it! <s/>
I don't think this is strictly true. Oil production is not fully fungible due to all kinds of issues including sanctions and production capacity.
But this is also a strawman - this isn't saying "we should shut them all down" or even begging that question.
At a minimum it's saying "there were people and companies who intentionally chose to mislead the public on a potentially existential issue - perhaps there should be some reckoning for that?"
I suspect we had one chance to do it right, but the organised and widespread suppression and misinformation campaigns of these companies basically made that impossible.
Now we're faced with a range of unpalatable choices and a population fiercely divided about what to do.
This is a common but erroneous thinking. Man influenced climate change is an ongoing process.
It would have been great to start doing something thirty years ago to avoid some of what’s happening now but we didn’t. Now we still have to do something or it will get even worse.
This is not a throw your arms in the air and wait for the end while screaming situation.
Not advocating throwing my hands in the air, but the deliberate delay has narrowed our choices at a rate faster than technology has come to the rescue.
There is going to be a lot of complaints as choices keep getting removed and decisions forced upon us by the escalating crisis. If you are a freedom loving libertarian, you are not going to enjoy the next few decades. Which would be deliciously ironic if it wasn't such a monstrous tragedy.
What we are starting to meaningfully see, at least in Europe, is regulations which actually have teeth regarding where investments go and what companies can do regarding emissions and sustainability.
It means some things are going to either get more expensive or downright disappear but I wouldn’t call that a significant curb on freedom.
It’s more akin to not being able to use lead in plumbing than living under an authoritarian regime. Sure there will be less meat on the menu but, well, c’est la vie.
Hard disagree. We are well beyond the point where farting around on the edges of consumer behaviour can ever make a dent in reversing climate change.
Blaming consumers buys into the big emitters disinformation campaigns. Its not our fault.
The big emitters need to be curbed hard and fast. Our governments so far have been unwilling, complicit or unable to do so.
Its going to require a mass, popular movement to shut down coal mining worldwide, to restrict air travel, to localise food production and reinvigorate ground based mass transit. Nobody can make that happen as individuals at the checkout.
European regulations are not oriented towards consumers nor are they “farting around”.
These are far reaching regulations on investments. They impact literally everything. It’s going to be hard to do something if you can’t get money to do it.
But these are not hard choices or libertarian hell. That’s just a bit more regulations.
Sure, mining coal won’t be profitable anymore, people won’t be able to buy diesel cars and both flying and meat will become more expensive. It’s definitely a shift in how people live and probably a downgrade in some aspect regarding quality of life. But it’s a relatively painless one.
Surprise, surprise. And yet, Big Oil continued to launch campaigns designed to deflect responsibility from companies and governments away to individual consumers, like BP's "carbon footprint" [1].
When will those responsible be held accountable for helping to advance the destruction of climate and the immense loss of life and property that climate change has brought?
How can we explain to our children and grandchildren why we did nothing to hold them accountable?
> When will those responsible be held accountable for helping to advance the destruction of climate and the immense loss of life and property that climate change has brought?
When it is no longer profitable to destroy the climate.
Everyone deflects responsibility to everyone else.
Consumers say government should do something or that businesses should change their ways. Businesses say what they're doing is legal and merely catering to consumer demand. Government says businesses should "self-regulate" or consumers should choose different.
You see this pretty much everywhere, from climate change to those ridiculous SUVs that are a danger to everyone to basic animal welfare in food production, etc.
They never will be held responsible because the public does not support doing so. It only supports working inside the existing system of law, which has not and will not hold them accountable. Anything outside of this system is deemed morally unacceptable.
You have sown the revolving door and now you reap its harvest.
Nobody will be held to account so long as the institutions that would be doing the holding have a massive overlap in relevant skills, subject matter and therefore, personnel (especially at the management levels where these sorts of decisions get made).
"You"? I was born in 1991, my generation certainly didn't invent that crap, that was all during the reign of the Boomers - who, to add insult to injury, keep occupying positions of power instead of resigning and retiring to let those rise who will actually have to live on this wreck of a planet the next fifty to seventy years (assuming no major war gets us all killed).
"The people of the past were stupid, this time we have modern knowledge, modern ideology, modern science, there is no way we will make the same mistakes as prior generations."
> I was born in 1991, my generation certainly didn’t invent that crap, that was all during the reign of the Boomers
The described problem is much older than the Boomers period of political dominance. For some reason, Millenials seem to think that “Boomers” are “everyone who existed before the Millenials”.
Yet these companies aren't the ones actually burning the oil, are they? They merely sell the product which others then burn. How can you hold only them responsible but excuse the parties further downstream?
Because those aren't unrelated: it'd be one thing if they just sold oil, but they're behind campaigns deceiving the public about the true cost of using it and encouraging additional consumption. People today are buying new trucks and SUVs which get worse mileage than the 1980s did in part because there's been this well-funded anti-science propaganda campaign and many efforts to hide the true costs.
Put more succinctly, they deserve blame because they chose lies when confronted with an inconvenient truth.
If oil companies have been campaigning specifically to deceive customers about the potential harms those customers may cause, then that should be what they are "held responsible" for. Trying to make them responsible for harms others caused using their products is rather orthogonal to that, and doesn't bolster arguments criticizing them.
Tangentially, while some vehicles presumably have worse mileage than a comparably-sized vehicle from the 1980s, fuel efficiency has significantly increased since 2005 (after a small decrease from 1985-2005) while supporting continuously increasing power and weight [0]:
In the two decades prior to 2004, technology innovation and market trends generally resulted in increased vehicle power and weight (due to increasing vehicle size and content) while average new vehicle fuel economy steadily decreased and CO2 emissions correspondingly increased. Since model year 2004, the combination of technology innovation and market trends have resulted in average new vehicle fuel economy increasing 32%, horsepower increasing 20%, and weight increasing 4%.
> Tangentially, while some vehicles presumably have worse mileage than a comparably-sized vehicle from the 1980s,
There's a challenge here: people have been encouraged to buy larger vehicles. A small car will have better mileage now but the kind of vehicle the average person is commuting to work in now is much larger than it was three decades ago. I would argue that this is in part due to the successful campaign which fossil fuel companies funded to reverse conservation wins of the late 70s & early 80s. It wasn't just them but they had a significant role in shaping the political and social discourse (e.g. promoting gas guzzling as a macho thing).
Thanks for your civil engagement on what is often a contentious topic.
While not a perfect representation of purchases, I believe the EPA chart (Fig. ES-3) I referred to shows the average of all for-sale models for a given year, so this should capture the increasing preference for larger vehicles. Indeed, the horsepower and curb weight are shown as significant increases, even while fuel efficiency is improving (≥2005). It looks to me like the average fuel efficiency passed the 1985 peak (presumably driven by the 1970s oil crises) around 2007.
Clearly two decades of decreasing efficiency was not ideal, but I posit it may be the 1985-2005 period which you are mostly remembering. Going by the chart there was a fast shift to smaller and 'weaker' cars for highly increased efficiency 1970-1975, after which there was a slow continuous increase of power and weight - first occasioning a slow but relatively small decline in efficiency (compared to the 1970-1975 increase), but then changing to increasing efficiency as that became a more important factor for consumers.
Relatedly, while I am certainly not the target audience for the kind of advertisements that may encourage people to purchase more oil-based products, I cannot recall seeing any automotive advertising that wasn't clearly produced by a specific vehicle manufacturer. It sounds like you are suggesting 2nd and 3rd tier advertising by fuel companies for reversing the 1970-1975 reduction in consumption, but I'm not familiar with that space - I would appreciate it if you could direct me to any resources you have about that.
> I cannot recall seeing any automotive advertising that wasn't clearly produced by a specific vehicle manufacturer.
You're right — what I was thinking about wasn't that the Exxon was running ads saying you should buy an F-350 for your grocery shopping but the more subtle long-term stuff: pouring millions of dollars into funding the people who say climate change is a hoax (meaning fewer people feel guilty about 10mpg), turning that into a litmus test for politicians so the same people in office are also receptive to continuing exemptions from pollution laws, etc. The blame is wider than them I think it's important to separate out unknowing mistakes from deliberate attempts to delay action after you know there's a problem.
There's also an interesting split here: until about a decade ago, the interests of the oil and car companies were perfectly aligned. Now that EVs are popular, however, that's diverging and I'm curious what the political realignment will look like — Ford won't be backing transit or high-density housing but they'd be totally cool running ads about how their latest Mustang can be powered by American wind farms.
You would be right if they didn't lobby against e.g. public transit. As it is right now, especially in the US, many people are forced by circumstance and lobbying to own and maintain a car, and usually it's an ICE car. Acting like they are blameless because millions and millions of people have no choice in the matter is just wildly disingenuous.
You're missing the point. Their impact on the subject is much greater than simply making oil products available. They pushed a narrative that aligned with their self interests at the same time it was detrimental to the world. They did this through various means, including press/media and lobbying. The world of energy production could be very different from what it is today if they didn't act only on their self interest. Actions were taken much later due to their misinformation. In my view, the decision makers should pay heavily for what they did.
The address Carl Sagan made in 1985 is well worth watching for those who remember those times and especially for those who weren't alive back then [0]
People knew about this before you were born and decided their best interests were more important and they acted in wilful disregard for your life and the lives of everyone on this planet. They weren't ignorant. No facts were hidden from them that they could be forgiven for being misinformed. They knew with certainty what the science was revealing and spent money to discredit the science, cut funding to their own researchers, bought politicians, funded PR campaigns, and continued building their fossil fuel empires.
Everything Carl Sagan said in that address has come to pass. It's wild to watch.
Except for the ~40k employees of the coal industry[1], who are used as a scapegoat by the politicians (ahem, Manchin) who take the most ardent stands against modernization of our electrical infrastructure. And I'd bet that most of those employees' skills would transfer pretty directly to any other sort of mining. But it's just not that many people. We could cut them each a $1M check for the trouble, which is about 10 years worth of coal subsidies[2].
It's easy to claim coal miners could transition to another mining industry, but what mining industry in those regions could absorb that many miners? None I think. It's not as though a secession of coal mining would create a boom in other mining industries.
> We could cut them each a $1M check for the trouble, which is about 10 years worth of coal subsidies[2].
Maybe if they were offered that deal for real, they'd take it. But without such a deal, can you really blame those workers for not wanting their careers erased in America of all places? Their families would become destitute and there would be little sympathy for them. Instead of a buyout, they'd receive little but 'learn to code' jeers. They'd be told they're expected to move away from the communities they've live in for generations, leave their families behind and scatter with the winds. I know this doesn't seem like a big deal to a forum full of rootless cosmopolitan tech workers who often live thousands of miles away from where they came from, myself included, but people don't often wish this sort of radical uncertainty and instability on themselves and their own families. So of course they elect politicians who advocate for their interests. If you think this is about politicians duping coal workers, you've got it backwards. The tail doesn't wag the dog.
I don't think this is about politicians duping coal workers, no. And that $1M bonus idea is just a comparison of scale. It's a comparatively tiny industry, which is extremely harmful to the environment and its workers. There are certainly coal-mining towns that exist solely because of what's in the ground, and of course you can't just dig up something else there.
I'm not a "rootless cosmopolitan tech worker," I'm one of the only cousins in my family who isn't blue-collar or in deep poverty. I don't expect this to be painless, but we need to get off of coal for the good of the species.
I don't think the coal workers are being duped. I know that they're in a really tough spot. I think that the coal (and more generally fossil-fuel) executives are lobbying politicians hard, with complete disregard for the long-term impact that we've known very clearly for _decades_ now. Follow the money: politicians and executives are raking it in, and the small population of front-line workers' lives depend on it. Blame the politicians, blame the executives, who make their decisions for personal benefit at great cost to humanity.
Quitting tobacco, as a person, is hard in part because of withdrawal symptoms. The analog for quitting coal, as a nation, is that an industry needs to die. We need good policies to take care of the people whose jobs are impacted, but we techies are in large part responsible for automating away entire industries -- way more than 40k jobs -- and who's there to take care of _those_ workers?
We could simply give the coal workers a sort of "pension".
40k people at $60k a year is $2.4 billion/year, which is a tiny fraction of the annual $4.8 trillion federal budget. You can structure parts of this in different ways outside of a blanket cheque, such as ways to incentivize starting businesses, credits for free education, or whatnot. It's still a lot of money, but the benefits are probably worth it, IMO. If $24 billion/year in student loan forgiveness is possible then I don't see why this isn't.
Politically it's a non-starter so I don't expect anything like this will happen. The GOP seems more concerned with simplistic "culture war" chest-beating and the Dems don't seem overly concerned with the plight of the working class and have their own style of simplistic culture war chest-beating (albeit less egregious).
the last thing that the COAL industry is concerned with is the workers, why mention it? It diverts the topic by exploiting the natural concern of most people for other people, instead of addressing the economics and authority in jeopardy with change. If there are "billionaires" based on IP valuation, why isnt a slice of that money applied ? because Coal Barons, their investors and clique, and that simple question of who runs the show. Coal is a blight on the face of the modern world and there are few excuses at this point.
And yet, thanks to the decisive victory of the lawful end of the morality axis, the only actions the public supports are those working within the system. There is no amount of (theoretical or not) fuck-up that warrants putting the fear of god into the heart of someone. All people involved have knowingly created (and themselves been) an existential threat and the most extreme action people find morally acceptable is writing some mildly mannered stuff on a cardboard... but only when and where the government approves.
Otherwise they wouldn't have dared. If the public supported measures against them that are proportional to their threat, they would never have done these things.
If the species was a human, it would by now be institutionalized for self-harm while delusional, but well, there is no warden to put us into a zoo and govern affairs, so there is that.
Instead we basically have a species, that is the equivalent of a homeless drug addict on the tenderloin, soiling its own future.
A good start would be to honestly communicate this as the starting point of every debate. Then evaluate what can be done, without retardations setting in, in the range of the limitations.
How much of the day can be used, without withdrawl syndroms.
How can delusions be crafted into something that moves the species forward towards a reasonable goal?
What has to go, even if it hurts temporary and the "other hand" wants to prevent it?
Are you advocating blowing up a pipeline? Won’t even get into the morality of that, but that’s a nice way to get yourself killed or spend decades in prison for terrorism.
If the action would make them a hero, are there reasons they shouldn't do it anyway?
Common reply to the latter is that people may be misguided in what constitutes a heroic selfless action and shouldn't take matters into their own hands. This philosophical debate is as old as time itself.
Tobacco is a good one actually. A legendary statistician, IIRC Fisher(?), came up with a bunch of reasons why the statistics might not show causality. As in, how do we know it isn't just people who were at higher risk of dying that smoked? He had a whole bunch of these statistical critical thinking type objections that are all very valid from an epistemological point of view.
Climate change actually has the same. There's a bunch of stats and a bunch of "yeah but what if" things that have been dealt with over the years.
> very valid from an epistemological point of view
Philosophers can be dangerous creatures (if unwittingly), perhaps some of the most dangerous. It's incredible how you can draw a straight line from many of the most destructive political narratives (across the spectrum) to reasonable seeming scholarly papers and debates.
There's a near universal consensus today regarding the horrible, unacceptable presumptions behind Social Darwinism and related theories from the turn of the 20th century. Mid-century philosophers, particularly structuralists and post-structuralists, led the charge in attacking those earlier theories. (By first identifying the underlying cultural presumptions, and then "deconstructing" them.) And yet you can draw a straight line from, say, Putin's whataboutism and ethnoreligious rhetoric--not to mention all the culture war narratives (from both the left and right)--straight to those philosophical ideas and debates--i.e. structuralism, post-structuralism, etc. I mean, Putin's rhetoric has always existed in some form, but those and other philosophical schools absolutely supercharged the rhetoric and its intellectual resilience. If there is no objective truth, and if even older moral pillars of Western philosophy, like the exaltation of individual dignity, can be just as illegitimate as any other principle, then Putin supporters can argue the legitimacy of his viewpoint and it would be dishonest to outright reject absolutely everything about it. (There are obvious and time-tested counterarguments, but they're in tension with favored moral norms in the West, such as victim culture. The left birthed victim culture, linking moral worth to membership of a persecuted minority, but the right has embraced it for all its worth.)
American propagandist and inventor of "PR", Edward Bernays, is infamous for convincing American women to smoke cigarettes. But privately, he wanted his own wife to quit.
And then there are the people who sell phone/tablet devices, and child-oriented apps and games through their walled-garden stores — and at the same time have banned the devices for their own children.
It's an apt comparison because many of the science deniers started their careers with the tobacco industry. For example, this guy is on Fox News a lot — he started with tobacco but moved on to things like claiming banning DDT killed people (funded as part of the tobacco industry's opposition to public health agencies in Africa whose anti-smoking campaigns were cutting into sales), climate change denial, and COVID-19 misinformation and skepticism about vaccines:
In any just world the company would be dissolved and all of its resources taken and put towards fixing the problems it intentionally created, and the people that knew about this be held personally liable.
> the company would be dissolved and all of its resources taken and put towards fixing the problems it intentionally created, and the people that knew about this be held personally liable
I get the second part. But what's the utility of the first over a fine? Are you suggesting nationalizing Exxon? Or liquidating it?
I think actually liquidating isn't so bad. Now and again nature strikes down a giant and a lot of other creatures benefit from it.
It's actually a bit odd that when we invented corporations we didn't have some sort of catastrophe mechanism in there just to shake hands up now and again.
I think society would find ways to become more resilient if we lived with possible corporate sudden death.
The corporate death penalty. It's reasonable that nobody came up with it at the invention of the corporation, but America should absolutely have implemented one along with Citizens United.
You're guaranteeing either consolidation in an already oligopolistic sector, or a recession from the output drop caused by an inexperienced operator learning to scale to a major.
> we didn't have some sort of catastrophe mechanism
We do. They're fines and license revocations. Companies that can't afford their fines go bankrupt. Government gets cash; the stakeholders' clean up the mess. "Corporate death penalty" and related talking points are almost all about dismissing talk about bigger fines.
We do, but corporations which are rich enough just bribe the government and gets bailouts or special treatments.
If it was the people vs Exxon with private judges in private courts (judges which compete with one another on who's the best, not government officials with a comfy chair and a guaranteed lifetime of administering "justice"), it would be way harder to corrupt.
That's why we need to decentralise our government power.
Maybe not dissolved but fines aren't enough: if they're not big enough or likely enough, companies may take their chances and if they don't apply personally to the C-level some fraction of people will try to see if they can get rich and leave before the fine arrives.
Perhaps that's something along the lines of turning them into highly-regulated public utilities. The big thing I'd focus on is basically real auditing & accountability: serious environmental assessments with full public disclosure, a blanket ban on political involvement so you avoid the case we have currently where someone [not inaccurately] thinks it's cheaper to give lobbyists $10M to avoid regulation which will cost them $100M, and criminal liability for anyone who knowingly tries to hide information or mislead the public.
Without defending their wording, I think the absolute best case for nationalizing a firm is one where the industry is based off of natural resources, vital to the public in the short term, and detrimental to the public in the long term.
"all of its resources taken" would seem to require liquidation or putting those resources under a different management structure, possibly government directly or government appointed.
What would Exxon be able to do once all of its resources have been repurposed? The company would be effectively dissolved even if not explicitly dissolved.
I don't want to wish someone the worst. But I wouldn't loose one second of sleep if all those people involved in delaying climate action got some karmic justice.
There was plenty of action possible; building more railways, different city design less dependent on car travel and maybe publishing their own research instead of burying it for 40 years...
Yes, and we can also not use plastic straws and eat seasonal vegetable, but it doesn't change that much compared to the amount of fossils we needlessly burn.
So because alternative technology didn't exist there was no case to have the discussion and invest more heavily in alternative green tech research, shortening the time frame to action and reducing dependence on fossil fuels earlier?
This isn't about what occurred then, it's about the time and opportunity cost of inaction that was fostered by rubbishing climate science and hiding the research.
You can certainly have the discussion, but it would not have helped. We are still having discussion TODAY and it's doing nothing of any consequence.
The only thing that matters for actual deployment is how much the energy source costs. Nuclear power costs were dramatically increased due to unnecessary fear.
For example solar power needs inverters - but those didn't work well back then. It just so happens to right now technology has finally reached the point that alternate power actually is cheap enough to deploy.
So we are deploying it.
All the "climate talk" is doing nothing, what actually matters is the money.
The massive drop in renewable prices was triggered by government manufacturing support and subsidies. Huge amounts of it here in the US, in Europe and in China.
Similarly, the few countries who have massively built out nuclear power (ie, France) did so because of deliberate government policy, not because their free-market economies were chasing the cheapest source of kilowatts.
The fear of nuclear power isn't unnecessary. We're talking about a giant company doing terrible things and a government unwilling and unable to do anything about it. Why then should the answer to that problem be trusting big companies and the government to safely run nuclear power plants?
This is a good observation. It's so sad that we haven't used the best tool we had. We still don't use it properly even now, when it's clear that we are already in a terrible crisis.
That's incorrect, there were plenty of suggestions even forty years ago, many of them involving using less energy. Better construction, reduction of mobility for people and cargo, less wasteful mobility, resource recycling, many of the things that we still talk about.
Of course many of them imply a change in behavior and some of them imply a decrease in what's traditionally referred to as living standards.
State oil companies dwarf the international producers like Exxon by a factor of 10-20, depending on how you count.
All the wonderful carbon free schemes ignore the fact that these state owned oil companies hold trillions in oil wealth in reserves. How do you get these states (e.g. Putin/Russia) to walk away from that money?
This is why we need to think about mitigation strategies a lot harder.
If you look at historical cumulative CO2 emissions: the US utterly dominates, with (Western) Europe coming in second place. It’s only in the past few years that other countries begin to catch up. At the time these early climate studies were done, the US and its European allies had the wealth to consume and burn that oil; we also had the wealth and scientific capability to develop lower-emitting technologies.
We, as a society, chose not to do either of those things. We made that decision during a time when it might have made a huge difference to our lives today. This decision was largely influenced by the actions of US non-state-owned oil companies, who were instrumental in preventing such policy decisions via lobbying, withholding evidence, and deliberate strategies to muddy the debate by funding climate denial PR. I’m sure the state-owned oil companies of Venezuela and the USSR/Russia deserve some blame as well for pumping and selling the oil (mostly to the West where our economies burned it), but I think pinning the blame right here in the US is pretty accurate.
PS This is the second or third company in this thread that tries to blame the deeply unethical actions of these oil companies on “foreign state-owned oil companies” and it’s such a specific and bizarre defense that I tend to wonder if some Exxon-funded PR office has been pushing that line.
Just because it's in your best interest to fuck over the world doesn't mean it's morally justifiable. The fact is that the people profiting from Big Oil would have still been plenty rich enough if they did campaign against their own product, so their choice to withhold this information can only be attributed to plain greed.
We don't expect murderers to turn themselves in, we pay police forces to find them. But it's not hypocritical to call murderers evil, and it's not unreasonable to expect that people should not murder.
> Just because it's in your best interest to fuck over the world doesn't mean it's morally justifiable.
When people talk about corporations and morality, I am reminded about the quip about Larry Ellison:
> You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower.
Think of a corporation like a function called `makeMoney`, which takes inputs like costs, advantages, benefits, and so on. Morality is not an input parameter at all, so why do people expect that it would be taken into account? If one wants morality to be taken into account, it should be explicitly done so, via some sort of input parameter, like legislation. Otherwise, don't expect anything to change.
Why are you so willing to absolve all responsibility from decision makers?
Corporations do not act but for the behest of their controllers and decision makers, who clearly should take morality into account. Larry Ellison is not a lawnmower, he is a person who is responsible for the decisions he makes and how those decisions effect those around him. Larry Ellison CAN hate you, Larry Ellison COULD give a shit about you. He chooses not to. He deserves the negative repercussions from decisions he makes. It is simply inane to demand that every aspect of morality must be legislated before corporate owners and decision makers should include it as a factor. It is only the security afforded to them by the rest of the population permitting them to continue operating that allows them to operate as they do.
Frankly, your point is far less insightful than you think.
Explanation is not condonation, condemnation, or absolution.
Like it not, my comment is how corporations work. We've tried letting them have in-built morality, but guess what, it didn't work before, and it doesn't work now.
> who clearly should take morality into account.
"Clearly?" Why? How is it clear at all? If there are no consequences or benefits for doing so (and indeed, a highly beneficial outcome by not doing so), why should they?
> he is a person who is responsible for the decisions he makes and how those decisions effect those around him
You're viewing this from your own moral viewpoint. Imagine, what if Ellison simply doesn't give a shit at all about how his decisions affect those around him, what would you do then? At some point, if corporations or other entities aren't following the rules we set out informally as a society, then yes, you must formally and explicitly lay out the rules you want them to follow. Otherwise, stuff like in TFA will happen, and will continue to happen.
I refer you to my first question. Why are you so willing to absolve the leaders of their responsibility to behave within a societally understood moral compass?
That same moral compass which without they would not be able to function or operate?
>Like it not, my comment is how corporations work. We've tried letting them have in-built morality, but guess what, it didn't work before, and it doesn't work now.
Except it isn't, they rely on the morality of their WORKERS to achieve their objectives. You simply believe that leaders and decision makers get a free pass on ignoring morality while anyone without sufficient power must behave morally lest they be punished. How does boot polish taste?
Strange response, looks like the parent said (a few times even) they're not exempt morally but seems like you're still trying to insinuate that the parent thinks they are.
Please quote me the sentences where the parent says they are not morally exempt.
>"Clearly?" Why? How is it clear at all? If there are no consequences or benefits for doing so (and indeed, a highly beneficial outcome by not doing so), why should they?
Quite obviously implies that corporations are justified in optimizing for their own benefit without factoring morality.
The anecdote provided about Larry Ellison has the same implication.
The parent saying an approximation of "I'm just explaining how the world works" is not only incorrect, patronizing and overly general but also implies that corporations are just a force of nature rather than a group of people who should be held responsible for the immorality of their decisions.
I agree, but plenty of people seem to think this excuses immoral behavior by corporations. You can even see a couple in this thread. We can't really get effective legislation passed until we can agree that it is indeed bad for a corporation to lie, cause harm, etc, and that misbehaving corporations (and more importantly, the people who lead them) should be punished.
> Morality is not an input parameter at all, so why do people expect that it would be taken into account?
Do people expect it or do they merely want to change things such that it is an input parameter?
Just because sociopaths are allowed to run rampant and fuck up everything for the rest of us doesn't mean we have to like it and it certainly doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing something about it.
Some of the people profiting from oil usage are you and me. We get (relatively) cheap transportation, cheap heating, cheap power, a huge variety of foods without regard to season, cheap vacations, etc, etc.
IMO, it's less "all those other bad people are enjoying running fossil fuel companies" than it is "all of us people are enjoying the benefits of fossil fuel burning".
(I daily an EV; I don't pretend that makes me any better than the average American, which is to say I am substantially worse than the average Earthling.)
Are you saying Exxon is justified because people get to use oil?
It's not about burning fossil fuels, it's about misinforming the public about the long-term dangers of your product. If I sell you a delicious candy while secretly knowing it will give you cancer in 10 years, I don't get to say "well you enjoyed the candy didn't you?" once I'm caught out.
I'm saying when we point a finger at the oil companies who sell us the oil that we demand and consume, we should recognize that there are three fingers pointing back at us.
Are they blameless? Nope. Are they solely (or even primarily) to blame? Also nope.
I don't know what argument you are trying to respond to. I'm saying it is an evil act to supply a product while withholding the knowledge that it will cause massive long-term harm to the entire world.
How are consumers complicit? By wanting nice things?
Yes: consumers are complicit by demanding the oil. Don't want Exxon, Shell, BP, et al to dig up the oil? Don't do things that consume oil and they'll stop doing it for you.
But that's inconvenient, so consumers keep demanding oil and then act shocked and tut-tut when oil companies provide it.
What choice is there for consumers but to demand oil? If cities create suburban sprawl and inadequate public transportation, it's the consumer's fault for using a car? If every industry whose products I require to participate in society uses oil, how can I choose otherwise?
I really don't understand your point and your smug judgements on consumers. Do you consume no oil products? Or are you just saying that you knew all along oil is bad so you're better than the 'naive masses'?
I'm not shocked that oil companies provide oil, I'm shocked that many people don't want to take any action even when it comes out that the oil companies baldly lied about their role in climate change.
I'm also baffled that some people want to shift the blame away from the oil companies.
I think the reductionist blame-shifting of "consumers get a pass because not buying oil is inconvenient because <reasons>" is unhelpful.
I don't get confused or pretend that oil companies go to great lengths to provide oil to the world because they're evil. They do it because people (you and me and billions of others) demand it and benefit from it.
We can't reap the benefits and avoid the blame for our choices. (I mean, we obviously can, but that doesn't actually result in any change, so if you want to feel better but not actually change anything, have at it...)
I don't say oil is convenient, I say oil is necessary. Is farming your own food without any fossil fuels possible for you? For me, it is impossible. Not inconvenient, not infeasible, but impossible. I can't afford land to farm on, I can't buy or catch or tend to farm animals to replace tractors, I can't buy or make farm tools that do not come from fossil fuels. Alas, I have to buy food shipped to me using fossil fuels, and farmed using fossil fuels.
If I pay taxes I help subsidize fossil fuels. If I get an EV its manufacturer burned fossil fuels to create it and ship it to me.
Tell me who I can vote for to change this. Tell me how I can eat without using fossil fuels. Tell me how I can work without using fossil fuels. Tell me what choices I can make so that I am not to blame.
There is no such choice. I literally cannot avoid fossil fuels.
Maybe if we could all agree that the fault is indeed with fossil fuel companies, who not only provide oil but also lobby the government to prevent us from moving away from it. Maybe then, we could have the actual change you are clearly so invested in.
OK, I accept your argument that oil is necessary. What is the appropriate punishment for the companies who are reliably supplying this critical-to-society natural resource?
Must the oil companies both continue to reliably supply oil and ensure that society obsoletes them? There are order of magnitude 20 million people working in oil, gas, and coal. Perhaps they could continue to focus on supplying society with these necessary resources and the other 7.85 billion people on the planet could take up the responsibility to migrate society off of those fuels rather than making those same 20 million people have to do both jobs?
Obviously this question deserves more thorough and qualified treatment than I could give, but it doesn't seem outlandish to expect that the corporation should lose some 'rights' much like people do when they face consequences for crimes.
I would want the executives in this case to face personal consequences, like jail time, and I would want to e.g., prevent oil companies from lobbying, or nationalize them, or something to similar effect.
> the other 7.85 billion people on the planet could take up the responsibility
Something I haven't been able to communicate to you this thread, despite my best efforts, is that taking that responsibility is impossible when fossil fuel companies have mountains of money and power. Fossil fuel companies are worth more to elected representatives than constituents, and they have a vested interest in promoting fossil fuels in all sectors of society. They aren't meekly and reluctantly providing oil to us nasty consumers, they do their best to create and grow markets for their products. They are already doing 2 jobs: supply oil and ensure society doesn't obsolete them.
You speak as if people have always known fossil fuels cause climate change and simply like to act against their best interests, or that climate change is in our best interests. In my opinion, neither is true, and given that Exxon actively suppressed their own research on the matter, I think they would agree with me.
> You speak as if people have always known fossil fuels cause climate change
The knowledge of CO2 (and water vapor) acting as an insulating blanket and having a warming effect on the planet was known years before the very first oil well was drilled and over a dozen years before Standard Oil (which eventually became Exxon and later ExxonMobil) was even founded.
It was also well known before Standard Oil's founding that oil is a hydrocarbon and that the complete combustion of hydrocarbons emits primarily CO2 and H2O.
Portraying Exxon of 100 years later as being the sole possessors of secret knowledge of the existence of atmospheric warming is grossly inaccurate IMO.
This discussion is spiralling. It feels like you attack tiny parts of my comments while ignoring the broader point, and I don't really know if you're commenting in good faith.
You're telling me people in power in 1923 knew that human oil consumption was causing climate change that would be detrimental to human life? If you asked Congress today many wouldn't agree with you, and I'm sure some of them sincerely believe there's no problem. Do you think voters knew back then? If this was common knowledge, why did Exxon have to suppress anything?
From the OP:
> Exxon knew of the dangers of global heating from at least the 1970s, with other oil industry bodies knowing of the risk even earlier, from around the 1950s. They forcefully and successfully mobilized against the science to stymie any action to reduce fossil fuel use.
My original argument was that this is evil and every individual in charge of suppressing this information and continuing to advocate for fossil fuel use deserves punishment. Do you agree? Because throughout this conversation what I've understood from your comments is that you think they did nothing wrong because people consume oil.
> My original argument was that this is evil and every individual in charge of suppressing this information and continuing to advocate for fossil fuel use deserves punishment. Do you agree?
Based on everything I know, I vehemently disagree. We don't punish "evil"; we punish law-breaking; this is a very good thing for individuals and companies in a free society to be able to rely upon.
We have a justice system based on laws, not (directly*) on morality. This is important, especially given the propensity for morality to vary per person and to shift and evolve in its interpretation and for similar actions by different people, or similar actions by the same people at different times, to be morally judged differently.
If it was legal for Exxon to not share their proprietary knowledge (that there was no legal obligation for them to publish their knowledge), there's no legal basis for punishment. I believe that's the exact situation that we're in, which is why there are outrage articles published (moral judgments) but not indictments (prelude to legal judgments).
I believe that's responsive to your major point.
On your more minor point:
> You're telling me people in power in 1923 knew that human oil consumption was causing climate change that would be detrimental to human life?
I believe that that knowledge was available within the body of scientific knowledge, based on the evidence I provided above. I can't prove one way or the other, therefore will not surmise, what "people in power" nor voters did or didn't know, on average, in 1923.
* Our laws are loosely based upon on our morality, but there's a critically important level of indirection and specificity that precludes persecution of people based on an implied moral proscription rather than a codified legal proscription.
Not really, because while I am talking about how things ought to be, you are talking about how things are. Once again my point: this was evil and the people responsible deserve punishment. Saying they did nothing illegal is irrelevant since, as you say, laws and morality are not equivalent. If you don't believe evil should be punished, then you believe old laws should never change and new ones shouldn't be created. As you say, morality changes, so then why would laws remain unchangeable? How can we ever codify moral standards when people get more upset at outrage than at the immoral act?
There's no legal culpability in this case, but if society follows your lead there wouldn't be legal culpability in any future cases either. Next time an article reveals Johnson & Johnson has been knowingly putting poison in its baby powder or something like that, will you once more argue against the outrage and claim there's no legal culpability and the consumers could have been testing their baby powder, so really it's their fault?
> available within the body of scientific knowledge, based on the evidence I provided
Not really, the evidence you provided only said people knew CO2 could heat the world, but nothing about its effects on mankind (which Exxon did know about, per the previous leaks). And as you admit, you can't know if any voter or policy-maker actually knew. So how are we responsible for allowing Exxon's actions again?
I'm finished with this discussion, your nihilism is exhausting.
Oil and coal have lifted more out of poverty than possibly any other invention/discovery in the modern era.
The key is not to villainize fossil fuels, but to recognize their benefits and costs and decide collectively via policy what tradeoffs we’re willing to make.
Think about how privileged you are in life that you can even consider not depending on fossil fuels. Hysterical takes like yours come across completely naive and uninformed.
I'm not vilifying fossil fuels. I'm vilifying fossil fuel companies.
> recognize their benefits and costs and decide collectively via policy what tradeoffs we’re willing to make
How can we do that when fossil fuel companies lie about the benefits and costs? How can we do that when they bribe politicians for favorable legislation? You are the naive one, and not particularly well-informed given you did not even read the article.
Why would you ask fossil fuel companies about the cost/benefit to begin with? They are a biased party
It may feel cathartic to lash out at perceived “evil” entities but you accomplish nothing that way. Some prefer perception of justice to actual results though, so to each their own.
I think you’d find a world without fossil fuels has quite a bit more misery than the one we have today. Green transition needs to be well thought out and planned for, not taken lightly
> Why would you ask fossil fuel companies about the cost/benefit to begin with?
Indeed, tell that to the politicians who made their energy policy decisions based on conversations with oil lobbies.
I feel no catharsis from commenting, and I don't pretend that bad press is 'justice'. Justice would be prison time for the people in charge that suppressed this information. I have no way of working toward this vision of society other than bitching to politicians and peers about every individual company's moral fuck ups.
What actual results are you working towards? What is your version of justice in this case?
> For Big Oil to start campaigning against their own product?
I know people who prioritize ethics & morality tend not to get promoted too high, but that doesn't mean we should blanket forgive decision makers at oil companies for sweeping such a huge problem under the rug for as long as possible. The positive example of what to do instead would be to communicate the issue as soon as possible, not cover it up, and then pivot into the work of moving away from fossil fuel dependence.
How many billions of lives have been saved by fossil fuels and technology though?
From starvation, from extreme weather events, from exposure to heat and cold?
Would we be here if not for modernization and fossil fuels? If we stopped in the 60s, would other nations have done the same? Or would they have advanced to dominance?
Burn down your house. Yeah, your house is gone, but look how warm you are today!
Fossil fuels are not the only form of energy. We could have put decades of technological effort into wind and solar and battery and waves and all the other options. We'd be so much further forward than we are today. Instead the industry just lobbied and lied.
At the time when this research happened, so in the 1970 - 80s? Yes, they were the only viable form of energy for almost everything. Suggesting that we should've ditched fossil fuels in the 70s and 80s is a bit asinine and would've resulted in immense loss of lives, especially in less developed areas of the world. There weren't really any other alternatives. Electrification is only possible due to recent advancement in (battery, PV, electronics) technology. Your analogy does not make sense because abandoning fossil fuels back then was closer to the "house burning" move.
(Yes, nuclear existed. But only in some countries, and it could only cover some parts of energy usage).
Please quote the sentence where I allegedly said to drop fossil fuels in the 70s with no viable replacement, plunging the world into a dark age. I didn't say that.
Yes, fossil fuels do seem to be an unavoidable evil on the path to technological advancement.
However, the point is: There were no viable alternatives for the last 50 years because the fossil fuel industry did everything in their power to cover up the impending disaster and instead focused all efforts on lobbying to maintain their profits.
Imagine if Exxon had made their findings public in 1973 and had instead lobbied for renewables and moving away from fossil fuels. We'd be 50 years ahead of our current energy technology. We'd have a lot more options for generation and storage with a lot more density.
The "recent advancements" are only recent because we've pissed the last 50 years against the wall so some asshole billionaires could afford more yachts.
"What if someone else just kept polluting" isn't an argument. Fighting climate change is becoming a political necessity. The world has almost internationally eradicated many undesirable things like mass slavery and chemical weapons. These are also political necessities to run a successful country.
In another 100 years, the idea of a country mass-burning fossil fuels will be akin to adding a Swastika to their national flag while adopting foreign policy of black slavery. Sure, they can try it, but it would be very politically and financially unpopular, and if they get too forceful then some superpower will interfere and stop them.
We could be 50 years closer to that goal. But we aren't. And that's due to the fossil fuel industry's intentional deception of the entire world.
> For Big Oil to start campaigning against their own product?
Yes!
Surely we all have a responsibility to our own _species_. If you're making something that you discover harms the species then you should change course. This company would have massive head start and could own the inevitable future of green energy if they took action then
Laws are like the immune system for humanity, this is exactly the scenario it makes sense for laws to prevent
Or at least to your own familys. My guess is, that if you made it a science to search for likely unaffected regions of the planet by climate change, you would find a lot of oil-executive real estate there.
Interesting idea, would be to ban them from owing properties or living in those places. If you nail the escape hatch shut, survival instincts might even set in.
>We have legislative bodies that we literally elect and pay to do this job.
>Let’s stop the hypocrisy and look ourselves in the mirror.
[Modern electoral] Democracy doesn't really work that way. About 2/3 of people vote in the general election. Around 1/5 vote in the primaries. Maybe 1% actually sign petitions to put candidates in the primaries.
"We the people" only directly influence the last step of the process, in so doing contributing about one bit of information per candidate in a two-party system. Public perception and conversation is a key mediator between the public and everything else about the candidates who ultimately run for office. This kind of "outrage" is not contrary to the democratic process; it is an essential part of the process.
> I don’t understand what was the expectation.
> For Big Oil to start campaigning against their own product?
How about since they saw it coming to start investing in the transition to be ahead of the curve?
What baffles me is that these people knew and presumably had children or grandchildren, presumably breathed the same air and had the same houses in areas prone to wildfires, etc. and yet they didn’t take actions that would have been in their own interests other than financial.
There was a time in the late 70s early 80s when oil companies sought to diversify into solar and other areas. Exxon bought Zilog to diversify into semiconductors... it didn't last long. When Reagan came to power Carter's emphasis on moving towards alternative energy and away from oil came to an end. The oil companies were happy to play along and go back to being oil companies instead of energy companies that started out in oil.
that's not even remotely the issue. Money may buy you access but it doesn't magically buy you votes. People could easily kick every oil lobbyist out.
The genuine reason is that citizens are not willing to internalize the costs of their pollution and change their habits. Cheap gas, big cars, big houses, cheap Big Macs, cheap plane tickets is what the people vote for. Big Oil just supplies the juice.
The voters in the 70s and 80s did, sure. But as this article explains, those voters were withheld crucial information that could have informed their voting choices.
2010 was the first election I was eligible to vote in, and in the past decade+ I (and many others) have not voted for pro-oil/coal/fracking/etc candidates. Yet we're the ones that are (and will continue to) live with the consequences of Big Oil's actions from decades ago.
they are still voting for them, for example the House of Representatives is now majority Republican who almost all don't believe in global warming or believe in it and believe "eh, whatever, I got mine". Are they not as guilty as Exxon? Are the people voting for them any less responsible than Exxon. If you participate in the modern economy, are you not also complicit?
It kind of smells of hypocrisy, it's comparable to when some italian authorities wanted to imprison scientists for not predicting earthquakes. Lots of scientists knew about it and didn't say anything, also earthquakes happen in earthquake zones.
In (public) high school, I had a physics teacher who showed his conservative politics pretty prominently. He was a great instructor, but had conspicuously placed religious books around the class room. "Teaching your students about God" was one title that I remember.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
If you look past your snide remarks, breathtaking was a quote from Geoffrey Supran who is a Research Fellow in the History of Science at Harvard and has a PhD in Materials Science & Engineering.
So i think that says more about your biases than anything about the reporters who have liberal arts degrees.
Sure after looking at data, I've lost my breath and felt my heart clench inside my chest like death itself reached in and grabbed hold. Mind you it wasn't climate data and more like "I've trashed the DB in prod" sort of thing.
Just a reminder that journalists typically don't write their own headlines. You can blame copy editors for the "breathtaking" liberties they often take with the source material.
I agree it's overused, but it might be early to jump on the reporter/journalist hate train on this particular issue, since it's extremely common for their critics to describe their reporting as "breathless", which is a nearly identical exaggeration.
In this case the word is a direct quote from Geoffrey Supran. While the headline writer chose to emphasise it, the writer definitely didn't find it in a thesaurus.
Before going for the snark, you could have noticed that ‶breathtakingly″ is in quotes, because it is part of a citation of the expert mentioned in the article.
The only choice here has been to put it in the title.
Oh great, we're at the "pretend we didn't know and blame the people who sold us the gun" stage of refusing to admit we don't actually care.
Let's all comment about how bad OTHER people are for letting us be so shitty to show how moral we are in theory while continuing inexcusable and intentional behaviour in practice.
Now... the leadership folks who commissioned these predictions and then ignored them... That's another matter!