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.
Now... the leadership folks who commissioned these predictions and then ignored them... That's another matter!