A lot of comments here seem to be focusing on the fact that individuals use oil products beyond what is necessary for basic life and in fact do have some personal responsibility. This seems to me to be missing the forest for the trees.
Sometimes society ends up in a situation where we need things that are not sustainable, like oil or coal. Producing those unsustainable products to meet the demands of society does not make the producers solely responsible for any side effects. What is immoral is trying to artificially delay the transition to more sustainable alternatives or to socialize the costs of doing business.
Oil companies have repeatedly run well funded PR campaigns with the explicit goal of discrediting arguments that more sustainable energy technology was necessary despite knowing them to be false. Similarly, they have lobbied hard to ensure that when the impacts of oil to the environment are larger than expected, society picks up the tab. This lets them be more reckless with our communal environmental resources.
I mean, if we're going to talk about forest and trees, consider that the whole "big oil lobbies governments" thing flies right in the face of the "democracy is the voice of the people" argument. If people collectively don't care to fight back at a legislative level against socialized costs, wouldn't that logically mean they're the ones ultimately responsible for their own predicament? Or more philosophically speaking, whose fault is it that people living under democratic rules don't challenge the efficacy of their governments? Or, perhaps more importantly, why?
I think the problem with finger pointing is that it distracts from meaningful introspection. I think there are far deeper connections between oil and consumption than the "I do my part" crowd seems to realize, from the economics of the logistics industry, all the way down to the fundamental assumption that modern growth-oriented economics and consumption are even "normal" (compared to, say, how native tribes lived eons ago). In other words, merely being aware of the need for unsustainable resources in various cases doesn't fully detach us from the reality that the system we rely on to live is broken.
Sometimes I contemplate the "weird" trees in this forest: people investing into off-grid living, or people stocking up bunkers, or isolated tribes in the middle of nowhere; and I wonder if thinking about regular society in terms of scalable homogeneous solutions isn't in a way similar to breeding cavendish bananas - highly optimized in one specific metric, but susceptible to being wiped out globally by a single unforeseen threat (or in our case, by one of the many potential global catastrophes that scientists have been warning about)
If darwinism applies to civilizations, things ain't looking great for the vast majority of us precisely because we're stuck in a rut talking about ifs-and-buts instead of physically adapting to the logical end state of the trends we see in scientific data.
> consider that the whole "big oil lobbies governments" thing flies right in the face of the "democracy is the voice of the people" argument
I don't think it does. An important part of the lobbying is that we know oil companies are attempting to intentionally deceive politicians and the public about the negative effects of their industry and the positive effects of competitors. That deception is the point at play, the voice of the people can be misinformed.
> If people collectively don't care to fight back at a legislative level against socialized costs, wouldn't that logically mean they're the ones ultimately responsible for their own predicament?
This reads a lot to me like blaming the victim of a scam for being scammed. I've met quite a few climate skeptics in my day regurgitating oil lobbying talking points that were known to be false when published. I don't blame them for not fully comprehending the science behind climate change, I blame those oil companies are knowingly misinforming them.
Of course big oil has its share of immorality, but it's not like we never knew that poisonous smoke comes out of the back of our cars, right?
Again, going back to forests and trees, one could also say the sugar industry is deceptive, or that big tech is, or that big telecom is, etc. So clearly there's a pattern, and companies are all run by people, who are motivated by accumulation of wealth. In other words, the negative factors of the system are intrinsically a part of the system, because greed is, for better or for worse, built into it (it's quite literally the driving force for capitalist economic activity).
What I'm saying is that it doesn't really matter whether "companies lying" or "blaming the victim" is the "correct" position, the crude reality is simply that dishonest things happen as a direct negative side effect of a core principle that we as a society agreed to adopt. Pragmatically speaking, the question then becomes one of: a) what can I personally do to "surgically remove" the negative side effects of this core principle, b) if I can't, to what extent do I "care" in the dilemma between participating in a rotten system vs selfishly enjoying my life or, c) when all hope is lost, how do I take cover when shit inevitably hits the fan
It's my impression that most people have lost hope on a), are in denial about b)[0] and have no clue about c).
> Or more philosophically speaking, whose fault is it that people living under democratic rules don't challenge the efficacy of their governments? Or, perhaps more importantly, why?
Because, in the US at least, average people have very little actual influence over government policy relative to the influence enjoyed by business interests and the capital class.
There's nothing preventing us from living in a similarly 1-2% growing economy but with net zero GHG emissions. Yes, free resources lying around was amazing, but since then our economic surplus is abso-fucking-lutely enormous.
We merely opt to allocate that on other things instead of decarbonizing. Eg. we spend it on silly things like paving half the world, giving everyone their own car, building small (actually gigantic) cookie cutter houses in suburbs, building new fabs every few years to get more transistors on chips, cramming even more photo gadgets into phones, producing more and more Netflix Prime content, etc.
Building a ton of wind turbines and PV farms, spending years (and billions of USD) reviewing nuclear power plant permits, instead of building more efficient power plants.
as far as I know, "we" are not paving the world. The average person is not spending millions and millions on a marketing plan to bring these ideas into the american and then global imagination.
Concentrated interests (oil companies) tend to win in battles against diffuse interests (individuals and their descendants who are threatened by climate change.)
An interesting corollary is that a "majority" oppressing a "minority" is not a going concern, but the opposite is. That is, black vs white in the United States vs. South Africa are entirely different things. (Think, 90% of the population can steal everything from 10% of the population and raise it's standard of living by about 10%. 10% of the population can steal 10% of the standard of living from the other 90% and double its own standard of living.)
I mostly agree with what you said here. I'm constantly reminding people I know that its called the petrochemical industry because its about far more than just fossil fuels, you can't unwind the need for advanced chemicals in modern society, the population is just too big for us to realistically unwind our need for e.g. the Haber-Bosch process without major advances, and both the pharmaceuticals industry and high tech are completely dependent on extremely complicated oil-based supply chains. Many people will at this juncture reply that we just need less people, but thats not really an ethical solution by any modern standard.
>susceptible to being wiped out globally by a single unforeseen threat
I'm actually pretty optimistic about this, I think that we have enough people and growing standards of education, that assuming the technological solutions are out there, we will probably find them. The only threat that we aren't taking seriously that would really screw us up is some sort of cosmic event (I am very frustrated that with all the talks of creating a more flexible grid for renewables we aren't taking on the added burden of hardening against a solar storm, which seems inevitable. I'm pretty sure we would be pretty screwed if another Carrington Event happened today.[1])
>"democracy is the voice of the people" argument.
Serious question, is this really a point of view that people have in serious circles? I don't know a single person who believes that the US doesn't suffer from a burgeoning plutocracy. I've been calling this the second guilded age for years now, and it only seems to be getting worse. There is no Teddy Roosevelt figure rising that I see. I can only hope that the next generation of politicians will take reigning in this monster more seriously, but I'm skeptical.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
I feel like something of this magnitude would be enough of a setback on science, in many ways, that all hope might be lost of escaping the terminal state we have put the earth into.
Capitalism rests on the promise that inequality maximizes economic growth and economic growth in itself will sweep all other social problems including inequality away. Once there is a prolonged period without (high enough) growth, the promise becomes worthless. People see the inequality for what it is.
However, since there is no growth, they are barely scraping by. They have no spare resources to throw into caring about the environment. So they will all do the thing that hurts them the least today. Meaning they will prefer cheap and destructive products and services over sustainable but expensive ones. Mandating sustainability essentially forces expensive products down the throat of people but since inequality is high they can't afford them.
What truly perplexes me though is that even in Germany people will keep voting for parties that basically double "dip", they promise to ensure the availability of cheap unsustainable products but also enact policies that make inequality worse. Cheap meat and oil have basically become a form of welfare to bribe the population.
> Mandating X essentially forces expensive products down the throat of people but since inequality is high they can't afford them.
This is true for anything. For example on classic argument is about consumer safety. If the state puts up barriers to trade (eg. I can't sell my cheap lead painted toys and maybe fake generic medicine and maybe rancid meat), then things will be much more expensive.
Of course the slippery slope is many times just the continuum fallacy in disguise.
In these cases the real problem is manifold, on one part it's a serious lack of social solidarity and social safety net, and the other component is whatever the actual other part is (eg. unsafe toys that babies can swallow, health concerns about food, drugs, etc.).
Real solutions have to address both. Eg. carbon taxes with direct social dividend. (Or other variations, where the raised money goes to directly address those same issues that arise due to climate change.)
The democracy is more of an illusion, because the biggest factor in a particular policy being implemented is whether or not the wealth class supports it. If a bill has 70% support from the poor/middle class but 70% of the upper class oppose it...it's pretty likely to never pass. Reverse the numbers where 70% of the commoners don't support the bill, but 70% of the upper class do...well it's pretty likely to pass.
This is probably not be true for all markets or industries, of course, but I think that (and availability regarding prices) is relevant to not shifting it back onto individual consumer responsibility.
I will never understand why people protect oil companies. You know how in comic books there's always a villain going trying to DESTROY THE WORLD and it seems unrealistic and over the top?
Oil companies are this villain in the real world. They are doing their best to kill off humanity, for short term profit.
Jokes aside, I really don't see the reason for downvotes. Oil made our world what it is; but any company who still focuses on its profits while knowing alternatives exist that are better for the planet, and parallelly spending billions in PR, is downright evil.
I'd even say it's much more evil than Facebook's or Google's privacy issues that HN bashes every week.
Well, I'd say it's a bit funny to call something evil when a lot of people would die if it disappeared tomorrow. It's very easy to criticise the costs of modern life when the 'evil' is displaced onto someone else. But the truth is, it's a much more morally grey area than we like to admit. And it's hard to opt out of this 'system', but not impossible - I'm sure the Amish would take converts, but not many people want to go that route.
It's an appealing story to say that the O&G economy is the villain and all the people participating in it are innocent, but the truth is, we know how to live in bronze age societies. This 'evil system' doesn't stick around because it holds us prisoner, it sticks around because most of us prefer the lifestyle. And a story that absolves us of responsibility for participating seems like just another defence mechanism the system has built up.
> It's an appealing story to say that the O&G economy is the villain and all the people participating in it are innocent, but the truth is, we know how to live in bronze age societies. This 'evil system' doesn't stick around because it holds us prisoner, it sticks around because most of us prefer the lifestyle. And a story that absolves us of responsibility for participating seems like just another defence mechanism the system has built up.
Normal people have much less choice than you imagine.
Even in the rich western world, only the very affluent can buy electric car instead of gas one. Only the very affluent can afford apartments in city centers so they can walk instead of driving. Nobody can change where their electricity comes from, whether is it coal or renewables. Nobody can pick between grocery store that gets its supply in diesel trucks and second grocery store that gets its supply on electric trucks and trains powered by renewable electricity. There's no "planet non-destroying iphone" next to "planet destroying iphone" in the shop for you to decide between.
The problem is that the choice presented is not, and will never be, "planet non-destroying iphone" versus "planet destroying iphone". The choice is between "iphone" or "nothing".
Understandably people choose "iphone", but that's doesn't negate that the choice exists. Yes it's very expensive to live a modern lifestyle with fewer direct O&G inputs. It's however really cheap to live a subsistence lifestyle in the middle of nowhere without all the environment wrecking conveniences; it's not near as comfortable though.
I see where you're going with this, but I disagree. Normal people want cars and planes and phones sure. But they don't really have any voice or choice in how the manufacturing is done, and they always want the cheapest options. Most don't even know what environmental issues the products or services they consume result in. They are intentionally deceived, kept uneducated, and lied to via sold media outlets and false advertising.
Thus, it is responsibility of the powers that be to move in the direction which research suggests is the best for humanity's and the earth's long term existence.
Politicians are supposed to do that via taxes and subsidies to promote environment-friendly options. But, the US has shown that it's easy for a old, selfish, and dumb politicians to sway the masses with false promises and grandiose oration. And the politicians, given that they have less than 20 years remaining on this earth, are happy to fill their pockets with more money than they can use rather than giving a fuck about the future.
Secondly, the oil companies are supposed to have some sense and care for humanity and not continue choosing options that damage the earth but instead should have started shifting to environmental friendly options when they became aware of the consequences of burning oil. But, again, they are happy to forget it all in return for some extra profits. Maybe it's because they know that if they stop selling oil, some other competitor will start. But if the top oil companies actually worked with the government to get oil restricted and promote renewables, they could actually have made a difference and at least taken a step in the right direction. But they didn't even try.
It's really futile to share blame with the consumers, the world we live in does not give the average person any choice. And the average person is too damn tired with working a meaningless 8h+commute/day to even think or learn about these issues. The blame lies fully with the powers on top.
The people who oppose oil companies are often the same people who take progressive views on a lot of other topics -- gay rights, gun control, pollution, etc. And that generates an almost knee-jerk opposition: anything they are for, we must be against.
It's tribalism. If liberals are opposed to oil companies, than oil companies must be good. Then they'll be provided with arguments to support it, derived by think tanks and distributed via dedicated media, web sites, social media, etc. Those are generally pretty poor arguments, but it doesn't matter: they have a thing to say, and no particular interest in questioning it.
So the whole thing ends up being shortcut by the longstanding culture war between left and right. Neither side has to do any thinking; the thinking is all done for them. It just so happens that the anti-oil-company side is having its thinking done by scientists, while the pro-oil-company side has its thinking done by professional propagandists, political strategists, and the occasional hand on the wheel from full-time troll farms.
"the longstanding culture war between left and right"
...by which you must mean the "culture war" that only the right wing seems to know or care about. It is not really "between" the left and right as much as it is a right-wing concept that people on the left almost universally roll their eyes at (or fall into the trap of actually responding to right-wing agitation).
"Neither side has to do any thinking"
Except that, as you point out, one side is responding to scientific results indicating a serious and growing problem, while the other is not. One side is thinking, or at worst dependent on a group of people who at least try to push their personal biases out of the way when they are thinking. The other side reflexively calls all of it some combination of "socialist," "hoax," or "government takeover," without even acknowledging the existence of a problem.
Yes, I know the downvotes are coming for this, but the fact is that the Republican party has stopped even trying. You can be pro-oil-company and also be pro-reducing-carbon-emissions. Where are the Republican proposals to develop industrial-scale carbon capture to offset all those tailpipe and smokestack emissions? Carbon capture could have been an entirely new industry for oil companies to expand into, growing their businesses while reducing net carbon emissions. Instead Republicans lined up behind someone who declared climate change to be a Chinese hoax and stopped even suggesting alternatives to the Democrats' proposed solutions.
I'm infected with that same consolation-seeking attitude that so many left-centrists show: "Always admit your own side's weaknesses."
So I can't avoid acknowledging that I do see a certain amount of culture-warrioring on the left, and a lot of people arriving at the right answer for the wrong reasons. I do that even though the things you point out are undeniable and obvious. The Republican party has stopped trying. They know perfectly well that even their nominal "centrists" are always going to side with their lunatic fringe, even as I can't control the impulse to limit my own (and earning their ire in the process).
I'm completely aware that almost every post I make with even the slightest hint of progressivism is going to be downvoted. (I'm stunned that my above post is currently sitting at +3, though I've little doubt it will be down below zero by morning.)
And yet... I grew up talking at a time when we were entitled to differences of opinion but not differences of fact. And I just can't seem to shake the way that pushed me to seek accommodations, to trust that the truth was the best way to argue and seek a compromise we could all live with. It's been a very long time since I've believed that -- over a decade. But the habits are hard to break.
The unmoral corporate and legal pressures and incentive structures they're in dictate that they do their best to earn short term profits. They are unconcerned whether their actions kill off humanity eventually, that's simply not a factor they're capable of caring about.
Then we must destroy the very idea of a corporation. If it is truly impossible for a corporation to avoid fundamentally damaging human civilization in search of the almighty dollar, then we need to prevent those incentives from existing in the first place.
There is a better solution: the government reins in corporations that are creating a problem for the world. Once upon a time that was a non-controversial idea.
There is a market for the products they supply at the price they offer, there is a demand for return on investment they provide in a global financial system (and just try to disconnect from that).
I hate that companies are ruining the environment, I hate that companies are killing people with unsafe products, I hate that companies are mistreating workers, I hate that countries have bullied their way over indigenous peoples to "own" the country I live it, I hate that companies profit off of promoting things that destroy humanity as we used to know it.
But I don't see there being a clear line between who is "good" and who is "bad". My own answer, which I expect will please very few, is that we do our best in the small sphere of influence we have to be loving toward all, and beg God to save us.
I see more and more of these types of comments that just go so far out there as to be absurd, and I'm glad they're downvoted.
You have a long way to go to prove that this vague, evil entity called an "oil company" has a will of it's own, and that will is to destroy the world. My guess is that the will of this entity is to make money, and an unfortunate side-effect is that it damages the earths ecosystem.
That's totally true, but it's also true that if we reined in consumption, altered our habits and focused on reusing more then we are doing two things. First, we're taking ownership for our responsibility in this whole mess (acknowledging that there are trees in this forest), and second we're hurting oil companies where it counts. If we don't consume they can't supply.
If we wait for our governments to hold them to account we're not going to get anywhere.
I don't think focusing on individual responsibility will work. In order to make a meaningful difference we need to make sure that
a) everyone knows what the issues are and what changes need to be made
b) everyone is willing to make the sacrifices necessary
If we've learned anything from (the entire history of the human race) it's that people who know and care will shoulder the burden of making changes while those who don't will benefit from it all.
If we want to make a dent in our fossil fuel consumption, we need meaningful action at the national and global scale by major political powers. Taxes, regulation, criminal consequences are the only way to move the needle.
That may be true, but refusing to make meaningful sacrifices before everyone else does is awful PR. Even if the only meaningful thing anyone can do is change public opinion, leading by example is still the most effective way of doing so.
I really think the DeFi movement is the only group making any headway there, because reducing consumption is billed as a means to further one's own self-interest there.
I don't think it's pessimistic to say that as the "green" economy expands we are starting to see those same well-funded parties buying PR to selling snake oil or spreading fud. Energy is pretty hard to the average person to understand and energy+politics is almost impossible without some interest/background in foreign policy.
There is a heck of a lot of this that goes on within the energy and environment community where I have been involved for a decade. Tragedy of the Commons basically means that individual responsibility is a complete dead-end to solve any kind of shared resource issue. We've known this formally within economics for 200 years. Government, law and enforcement is the only solution, whether we're talking a city park or the entire planet's atmosphere. You should know that any time you are getting shamed or guilted into doing something like recycling, reducing energy consumption, cutting up plastic soda rings, instead of there being a law, some monied interest put a lot of effort into shifting the perception of responsibility away from themselves and onto someone else.
I am a staunch environmentalist and I full out reject any effort to make any of this somehow my personal fault and that I should guiltily stop having children, stop traveling, stop eating, stop driving or anything else. We are either all in this together, collectively solving the problem through our collectively determined governments or we're not.
More and more I think we are not going to solve this in a way that doesn't involve a massive diminishing of planetary carrying capacity. Currently we are bailing out the Titanic with a thimble.
Productive for whom? Children should not be seen as just workers for future, like they already have tasks ready for them to perform, to fix things their ancestors screwed up. It's not the conscientious kid's responsibility. It's pretty selfish of parents to bring them without their consent to do this. Let's see them as normal humans.
I will never want my kids to bear this burden, doesn't matter whether they can or not. Anyway dystopia is waiting for them, there is no reason to bring a kid here which for the interest of the potential kid.
Huh! It’s not every day you see your work called out in The Guardian as “insidious propaganda”!
I worked for Ogilvy and Mather in the 00s and made the Carbon footprint stuff they mention, at least one version of it. Didn’t come up with the concept or wording, but was responsible for the web implementation in the US.
Not my proudest work, but this was pre-Deepwater and BP was honestly putting a lot of new money towards green and renewable projects. At the time, it felt like a step in the right direction.
I know someone who joined Shell with the hope of helping it transition to renewable technologies (and who was actively lured with that promise), and who later quit after they realized that Shell was just trying to get all capable people who could be working on sustainability stuff to work for them instead, then drip-feed them promises of change while tempting them to work on other projects and give up on those sustainability things with big sacks o' money. One might almost say "embrace, extend (the usage of oil), extinguish".
With hindsight, do you think something like that was happening at BP too?
Maybe! I think the one thing I've learned from my biggest clients is that slight % increases in sales for companies of that size equal billions of dollars, so there's so much room for waste. It doesn't have to be villainous - they can spend $50m on renewable tech and it just doesn't matter - it's a drop in the bucket compared to other things, and can fail without consequences. I bet it attracted a lot of great talent, and I bet a lot of that was lured towards more profitable things with big bags of money.
It doesn't keep me up at night. In retrospect, it was probably one of the most dubious things I worked on in a decade of advertising, but I (mostly) left the industry because it was morally neutral, not outright wrong. It just felt like a big waste of talent and money, rather than "insidious"
I’ve read that oil companies were well aware of how climate change is going to develop based on their sales volume and the resulting oil consumption.
Assuming that's true for BP. To which detail was the climate change impact communicated to you? Was it an explicit requirement to focus public interest away from BP?
I can't really speak to BP's higher-level strategy, but this was the mid-2000s. The fact that an oil company was saying anything about climate change felt like a step forward. Other oil companies' ads were all about American workers and generic shots of sunsets over oil fields, BP wanted to position themselves as the "green" gas station at a time when that was becoming more a concern - not just with climate change but overall. At that point, BP had a pretty good environmental record compared to competitors like Exxon, who was still reeling from the Valdez disaster - so the requirement would've been to focus public interest on BP, not away from it.
But oil companies don't run ads telling people not to buy gasoline, so you've got to come at it from a slightly different angle. Luckily, "Greener than Exxon" was a pretty low bar, so they didn't need to talk about carbon taxes or emissions. Personal energy consumption has been a part of the discourse since the 70s, and probably fit in well - virtually no one will actually change their habits in any meaningful way, but will probably come out of it feeling better about themselves and BP.
The article itself seemed kinda all over the place. I agree that the world would be a better place if her preferences would've been enacted fifteen years ago, but I'm not sure that BP's advertising campaign had that much to do with it. It wasn't 4-D chess, it was "BP = Green = Good", and literally blew up in their face a few years later when Deepwater exploded.
Honestly, the only way for grassroots efforts to do anything is to become less dependent on these doubleplus ungood corporations. I think your work is incredibly valuable, and given the quality of the Guardian recently I wouldn't be surprised to learn they're criticising your work because it encourages people to consoom less.
Bit of a technical question for your AMA, how do you see the tradeoffs in carbon footprints if supply chains shorten? There's efficiencies of scale balanced against cost of moving materials that I assume means the smallest carbon footprint for a given lifestyle requires some extended supply chains, but probably shorter than what we have today. Any thoughts on that?
It's interesting how much more complicated and better thought-out that stuff is now than it was fifteen years ago. I think supply chains and lifecycles are a huge part of things, and it was barely a part of our thinking back then. It was more like "hey did you know taking a plane burns carbon too?"
There is this one thing I always wonder about, not just in this particular context, but generally about what is seen as "greedy" corporations, politicians and so on.
Was the conversation ever blatantly villainous or was it a bit more veiled, as is the public discourse?
What would the unveiled villainous conversation sound like?
I think this stuff is a lot less complex than people think. Companies just want to increase sales with effective marketing that makes them look better than their competitors.
People act like oil companies are the ones burning oil. They’re just responding to demand. We need to make oil less competitive, with better alternatives. No point or even value in demonizing these companies — the whole world is complicit.
> People act like oil companies are the ones burning oil. They’re just responding to demand.
No, they’re not.
> We need to make oil less competitive, with better alternatives.
Like tobacco companies, oil companies have actively lied and lobbied to maintain demand and obstruct coordinated effort of exactly the kind you describe as necessary. They are not passive actors simply responding to demand as they find it.
The oil industry and the auto industry and the layout of 20th century American cities are all pretty thoroughly tied together, so I think you're significantly underestimating the effects of deliberate action on the world.
There's a certain mindset of technological determinism that says we can't control what happens with a new technological development, and how it impacts our society, but I completely disagree with it. And so do the people running a lot of the companies developing those technologies - they have and will continue to aggressively push for the policies which favor them regardless of the externalities, so we absolutely have to push for regulation of how technology is used and shapes our lives.
If you want to say part of the reason we have suburban sprawl is auto companies, I'll agree with you, but people had real increases in standard of living when moving out of towns. The air was cleaner, the area safer for kids, and it was quieter (especially given our shoddy apartment buildings).
The way the GI Bill was structured contributed as well.
But Big Oil? Way down the list. If you aren't conceiving of the real reasons, you can't address people's true concerns. In a democracy their vote is just as valuable as yours.
I can’t say definitively for the first one, but for the second one, obviously not.
However, lies are bad.
Presumably they had a motivation to tell such lies, yes? Presumably they believed that telling such lies were to their benefit? Presumably the mechanism by which they believed telling such lies would be to their benefit would be by influencing the actions of others?
Surely you don’t think the reason for the lies is just that they would feel socially awkward if they had been honest?
Presumably they perceived a risk that if they hadn’t lied, that some regulations would have been imposed.
These regulations could have restricted emissions by reducing consumption.
Yes, this would mean that consumers would lose something they wanted.
I didn’t say they people would be against the regulation. I said they would lose something they wanted, which is something people do basically whenever they spend money (they lose money, which is something they want, in exchange for goods or services that they want more).
Yes. I think you're trying to be sarcastic, but it's true.
Cities are designed the way they are because of cars. Roads and highways cut up the city and make neighborhoods less walkable. That wasn't an accident, but the result of decades of lobbying by oil and car industries.
People like flying to places because they are fed FOMO about travel. That has a profit motive. You may find this less convincing.
And yes, it's cheaper to use natural gas because of... Drum roll... Lobbying. Consider what heating would cost if those companies were properly paying for the environmental damage they are causing. Look at California PG&E going bankrupt after the damage from the huge forest fires they kept causing. Climate damage is no less real, but who is footing the bill?
2: Big oil did push to keep the plane fuel low (or rather inexistant) worldwide though. But true.
3: What? No. Unless recently is everything after the 70s. Heat pump was more efficient than gas heating since the 50s (at least), but was hard to control, that was the main issue. My friend grandad learned to work with heat pumps during the Franco-Algerian war (54 i think) and installed one in his home (on Oleron Island) in the 70s (first that were home-sized). I think they were built in Sweden. His career was made on this tech.
Our electrical grid was mostly coal which is more carbon intensive than gas, requiring an efficiency not possible for heat pumps to emit less carbon than burning natural gas directly. Additionally they did not work below freezing well or at all.
Of course, insulation is and was the most carbon-efficient investment.
Whataboutism is not very effective to an audience trained to understand it. Perhaps try again.
The oil industry has spent much on misinformation and lobbying around their impact to climate. They are actively evil. From Standard Oil on, this industry has always been about enriching the few at the expense of everyone else. Big Oil is an active threat and everyone involved in its climate change denial needs to be removed from the energy industry.
> Like tobacco companies, oil companies have actively lied and lobbied to maintain demand and obstruct coordinated effort of exactly the kind you describe as necessary. They are not passive actors simply responding to demand as they find it.
These really aren't very similar. Big Tobacco's lies were the only thing propping up the tobacco industry. As soon as the truth became clear, their industry was absolutely crushed. The truth about climate change has been clear for decades, but unlike the situation with tobacco, the demand for Oil & Gas keeps on growing[0]. This is because, unlike tobacco, Oil & Gas is absolutely indispensable--especially for developing countries.
Lying about climate change was a terrible thing, and it cost us precious time. But we still need them to keep the lights on, and pretending that the act of producing Oil & Gas today--when it is literally a hard requirement to keep the lights on around the world-- is somehow pernicious, is just silliness. The world is stressful enough without all the outrage theatre.
Arguably the only thing propping up the oil industry is lies as well... If it wasn't for the big lie that Climate Change isn't real, then the USA would have never left the Paris Accord, and would have much stricter Climate goals already in place.
So yes, lies and lobbying are propping up big oil.
"a hard requirement to keep the lights on around the world"
That is a bad example of what we need the petroleum industry for. A combination of wind, solar, hydroelectric, and nuclear power could meet the world's electricity needs for many decades to come, especially as we have become so much more efficient with our electricity use compared to previous decades. The very link you provided states, "Globally, fossil fuels account for a much smaller share of electricity production than the energy system as a whole."
The bigger challenges are transportation (especially airplanes and cargo ships) and the chemicals industry, where oil is much harder to replace. Electric cars and trains are doable with sufficient infrastructure investment, but for cargo ships the only real alternative right now is nuclear power, and I am not sure we have any viable alternatives for air transport as we know it.
Seriously, not sure what they're talking about. Many tobacco companies have exceptional dividends. If they're going to continue to supply their wares, I want a little piece of the pie in my portfolio.
Yeah, after looking at some data, my characterization of the tobacco companies getting crushed is probably not accurate. I knew that tobacco use has been in stark decline, but the data show that it has been a steady decline over many decades (down ~60% over ~60 years), and not a stark, immediately like I had (mis)remembered.
The specific impact of the big tobacco trials on the tobacco industry at large is still a mystery to me, though. I'd still like to see some data for the entire domestic tobacco industry's revenues (I searched, but I did not find anything) going back to the ~50s, so that we could see the impact of the very public lawsuits, the big settlement, and the implementation of warning labels. The Phillip Morris stock ticker you linked isn't very helpful in determining that impact, as it only goes back to 2008.
> You could fire all of the corporate PR propagandists and lobbyists on the planet and I doubt it would make a dramatic dent in oil consumption.
There's a good chance we could have had a carbon price or other real measures 10 or more years ago without the malignant denialism seed planted by their propagandists.
> Petroleum products are a requirement for modern life.
This is the most insidious and false lie that is spread. Right now we are going through a technological revolution in humanity, maybe on the level of the development of agriculture, in how we generate energy. Renewables and storage are often cheaper than fossil fuels at the moment, and they are getting cheaper just like Moore's law describes the densification of transistors on chips.
HN is full of technologists. We, of all people, should recognize the capacity for technology change. And that technology change is actual work, that needs actual funding and labor, in order to happen.
We do not need fossil fuels for modern life, if we develop the technology. Dedicated technologists and entrepreneurs over the past 50 years have made solar power the cheapest energy out there, despite massive political power and the all the money of fossil fuel companies fighting against them.
If we had prioritized solar and storage, could we have accelerated the tech's development by 10 years? 20 years?
We don't have every single aspect of technology for decarbonization solved yet. Aviation fuel, for example. But that doesn't mean we can't, it just means that we haven't tried hard enough.
When I say petroleum products are a requirement for modern life, what I mean is that more than 80% of the energy driving modern society comes from fossil fuels. It probably doesn’t have to be that way, but it is. You definitely can’t say that for cigarettes.
I think that you raise a valid point, but also that you’re far too optimistic about renewables.
The people of HN are indeed very tech focused, and I believe that such optimism about energy transformation with renewables may be more difficult to foster if this forum were called “Engineering and physics news” simply because technologists tend to suffer from the “Law of the hammer” problem.
There are very real engineering challenges with renewables that may very well preclude the kind of dramatic progress you’re referring to. Solar and Wind for example require huge amounts of land, and have a fairly high materials throughput as their lifespan is typically only 15-20 years. All of that effort is spent gathering a diffuse source of energy. There are very real physical limits to how much energy you can gather per square foot, per kg of silica, concrete, or steel.
I think your sentiment is correct about nuclear though, which makes me wonder how much big oil has been funding groups like the Sierra Club et al. who have spent nearly half a decade campaigning against nuclear energy.
I didn't say anything about nuclear here... but since you brought up the subject, I think it's a perfect illustration of how misaligned perception and reality are on the subject.
The "physical limits" of renewables are not limits to our current energy use or even an order of magnitude more. Similarly, the amount of materials is still far far far less than what is required with fossil fuels. And the amount of material needed to build a 1GW nuclear reactor is within a factor of 5-10 of what it takes to build an equivalent amount of solar power, last time I checked. Both of these are far far far less material than what's needed to generate equivalent energy from fossil fuels, it doesn't even really compare.
The complaints against renewables are pretty much insignificant, and definitet not applicable to reality, but these are the complaints that get perpetuated and listened to again and again in utility decision makers. Meanwhile, these same decision makers are not avoiding nuclear because of what environmental groups are saying, they are avoiding it only because of financial reasons. What it took to restart nuclear construction wasn't protection against environmenta lawsuits, it took the South Carolina and Georgia legislatures passing bills that would allow the utilities to bill for construction even if it weren't overbudget, and even if construction failed and the project never generated electricity. Cost is the primary barrier to new nuclear, not environmental opposition.
Nuclear has spent 50 years over-promising and under-delivering, solar and wind have spent 50 years under-promising and over-delivering. They are a study in contrasts between a hype driven field (nuclear) and a results driven field (renewables).
There is also the fact that most wind farms use about 400x more land per TWh generation, and solar is about 150x. You can compare solar plants to nuclear on Wikipedia.
Then you’ve got the countless real world examples of where nuclear plants get shut down and the per capita emissions of that area shoot up, despite a bunch of politicians talking about renewables and clean energy (Vermont, California, etc.)
Nuclear isn’t hype. Look at France vs Germany for a great real world example of why nuclear is the better technology.
You talk about 50 years under delivering, but there have hardly been any nuclear plants even built in the last 50 years in the West, mostly due to public opposition to a technology that kills less people than wind farms.
If it’s so expensive why are places like Bangladesh, India, and China making massive investments in new reactors?
Aside: What I find remarkable is that any talk of renewables ends up in a debate about nuclear. Talking about oil and fossil fuel never makes people say "yeah but what about nuclear?" No, it's only discussion of renewables that makes nuclear supporters come out of the woodwork... very odd behavior for people that claim to be concerned about emissions.
Back your main comment: These are all statistics without any significance for deployment of the technology.
For example, 15x material means.... what exactly? Is 15x more material bad somehow? Sure doesn't seem like it. The amount of material that goes into solar panels is not a fundamental constraint on their use.
When wind power "uses" land it does not require exclusive use of the land. That same land will be used for other purposes without impact. Similarly, the amount of land we need to use solar is vanishingly small.
> Look at France and Germany for a great real world example...
For France, I have looked, never found the cost numbers. I do know the Mesmer plan never reached fruition, and that only about a third of the planned reactors were built. I used to cite CANDU as a potential success too, but then somebody who knew better pointed me to the financial numbers...
Bangladesh and India are building new reactors because of corruption, the same reason that they build completely uneconomical new coal plants. China is building a few nuclear reactors, as part of a "try everything" approach, but they are building only a minuscule amount of nuclear compared to renewables, because nuclear is mostly hype, and renewables mostly deliver. Remember that even a construction power house like China, when building France's EPR design, ended up with a build that took twice as long as expected.
I brought up nuclear because I felt that your original comment above was overly optimistic about what is possible with renewables.
People bring up nuclear because it’s the only high density low carbon energy source we have. Splitting atoms produces orders of magnitude more energy than gathering sunlight. Our current reactor designs are incredibly inefficient. The ceiling of what is possible with nuclear is much higher.
If you want to preserve the environment higher power density typically means less impact.
We’ve gone from burning wood, to coal, to petroleum, to nuclear, and then took a huge step backwards on nuclear because of Cold War fears and Chernobyl. Renewables are great but nuclear is the only high power density option that can keep up with our insatiable demand for more energy in a way that doesn’t require converting vast swaths of land into wind and solar farms.
If you think that wind turbines and solar farms don’t have a negative impact on the environment you haven’t been paying attention.
Wind farms impact on insect populations for example is another new area of research and it doesn’t look very good.
15x material throughput means you have to mine/produce/transport/refine/smelt/forge 15x more materials, which means more environmental impacts for the lifecycle of those materials.
A single ACR-1000 reactor can produce more output than the 14000 acre Bhadla Solar Park in India for example, and it will last 4-5x longer.
The problem you're possibly missing here is that oil is used for a lot more than just fuel and energy production. It's used for everything else: road surfacing, plastic production, synthetic fibres, chemical and pharmacutical production, lubrication, fertiliser production (although you could switch to green hydrogen for that), and much more. None of that demand disappears if you stop burning oil and gas, although maybe you could use bio-oils as a starting point for some use cases.
What's the problem there though? If it's not burned, for energy, then it's not causing emissions.
The one emitting use case you talk about is fertilizer, and the switch from the Haber process to using electrolyzed hydrogen is already starting. It will require a decade or more of tech development to make it cheaper than existing processes, most likely, but it's almost certain to happen as we scale industrial electrolysis.
There are alternatives for plastics too, from plant sources.
Modern life does not require that we get these end services from petroleum, it's just how we currently achieve the end goal.
Blurring this distinction between the way things are currently and what is possible is a very effective FUD technique. I want to be very clear that I'm not claiming the original poster meant to spread FUD, consciously or unconsciously, I don't know their mind. But it is definitely a persistent tactic among the fossil fuel propaganda that we are immersed in.
If you want to frame this in terms of the demand side, then downsizing all of the PR propagandists would be a great start, along with all the other zero sum jobs. Instead of efficiency gains causing people to work less and consume less resources for the same output, central banks insist on "full employment" stimulus that creates make-work jobs to compensate. And despite their utility being zero-sum, these workers are churning hard in the rat race - buying new cars, fancy clothes, big houses, and other wasteful spending as they're time strapped. If instead of churning these people were allowed to just retire, they would use much less resources.
But it seems like we can't insist on financial reform to slow down the economy, because every crisis becomes an excuse for the central banks to pump the gas while scaring people with the deflation bogeyman. And so we're stuck focusing on direct intervention to prevent the ever growing throng of antiproductive labor from doing as much damage.
I’ve never heard a complete argument as to how central bank policy makes people want new cars, fancy clothes, or big houses (or tropical and ski vacations)…
I think people want those luxuries and (many) are willing to work for them entirely independent of central bank policy.
Have you, or someone you know, ever alternated between having a high-compensation low-free-time (eg high paid tech job), and low/no-compensation high-free-time (ie funemployment) ? They're two completely different operating modes. In the first mode, every minute of time is valuable so you pay more for convenience (eg restaurant food, same-day shipping), and when you're not working you're willing to spend a lot of money to "relax harder". You also tend to buy new gadgets for the dopamine release and hope of doing something with them, and then never quite get around to actually using them. In the second mode, you're willing to spend more time to get routine things done, engage in hobbies that take patience, cook your own meals, and generally try to keep your burn rate lower. The financial treadmill pushes people towards the first mode, as one's burn rate always includes housing rent that demands a significant base level of income.
I’ve definitely had times in my life with both modes.
There is very much a lifestyle trap in which the current work culture prevents a truly balanced approach.
I suspect one of the barriers to having a reduced work week is the cost of employee benefits. Companies want to get their money’s worth for every employee on payroll. So the options for reduced work hours are somewhat limited. If you make 75k a year, it seems every extra dollar beyond that has less value per unit of time spent to earn it. I would rather work 20-30hrs a week for half of my salary but there aren’t any employers who like that idea, nor is it easy to do the consultant/contractor thing as a solo contributor who only puts in 20-30hrs.
Personally my response (intentionally or not) has been to leave roles when I’m feeling burnt out, take some time off, learn some new skills to boost my market value, and then rinse and repeat.
The biggest intrinsic barrier is that increasing the number of employees increases the communications overhead. Would you rather have one computer with 8 cores and 64G of memory, or two computers each with 4 cores and 32G of memory?
Employees could push back regardless, but lack the power because the BATNA is being left with zero income in the face of huge economic rent. If housing rent were much less of your income, then your necessary burn rate would be much lower and you'd have more bargaining power.
And yeah for highly paid tech roles, a pragmatic solution is to alternate between pouring yourself into a job full time, and taking off periods of funemployment (or possibly a grassroots startup, etc). But we should recognize that's only possible due to our outsized compensation, and can't really define the economy writ large.
I see the multiple modes, but I think it’s human nature and not central bank policy as being the prime driver of that behavior or of the overall financial treadmill.
On average: People want nice things more than crappy things. Nice things cost money. Getting money requires doing something to create value. Creating value for most people means working at a job. If you want nicer/more things than last year or than your neighbor, you need to increase your income.
The beauty of this system is that individuals can choose to live frugally and opt-out of the race to a significant extent, taking advantage of the equity market’s consistent long-run returns to setup a system where they can work hard for 10-15 years and bank enough to live a frugal life for their lifetime. In that regard central bank’s current easy money policy is very much supportive of the choice of people consuming less than 100% of what they could rather than encouraging 100+% consumption.
I'd call that choosing to consume less despite the central bank's policy. Pulling back to coast doesn't work when you're "in it". To get to that point, you've got to churn hard in a city (economic center), avoid hedonistic temptations as much as you can, and then at some point decide to pull the ripcord and leave to a low cost of living area. At which point you know that it will be really hard to get back on if your projections don't hold.
That's also to say nothing of the (inherently majority of) people who can't sock away enough surplus to do that, and end up on the treadmill their entire life. Tech gives us an outsized perspective here once again, by giving us more than urban-subsistence wages such that we can save up in the first place.
As to people's want of ever-more "nice things" driving their need to work so much, I just don't buy it. Rather, I see an extreme social pressure to keep working as much as possible (try negotiating less than 5 days a week, or every third week off), and then they fill in "nice things" as a rationalization. The same sentiment is repeated in many different areas (spend more time with your kids, etc), but yet few can individually move in that direction without totally eschewing the system ("pulling the ripcord").
And while it's possible for some people to escape the treadmill, it's not a possibility for most people and therefore not sustainable for society. There's a reason people doing it get labels like retired, FIRE, startup lottery, trust fund kid, etc.
As for central bank policy, it's reflected in malinvestments like much of Surveillance Valley. One of the most glaring examples was those startups buying electric scooters in bulk, under the hope that if they filled the sidewalk that money would eventually fall in. That's misproduction (and environmental pollution) driven directly by too much capital sloshing around, seeking any sort of return.
Isn't it basic that if there's no point to saving and investing is a rigged casino, you might as well spend it on something fun?
Consume consume consume! It's good for the economy (if you don't grow exponentially at any environmental cost then you can't keep up with inflation and our economy collapses)
> Isn't it basic that if there's no point to saving and investing is a rigged casino, you might as well spend it on something fun?
I don't think it works that way. I know a few people who are very financially conservative, and I am as well. None of them have responded to interest rates of 0% by consuming more. Everyone has shifted their accepted risk a little bit, but that's about it, they're still putting aside money.
On the other hand, the people I know that are spending every available coin for vacation and consumption already did so 20 years ago.
"full employment" is everyone who is willing and is able to work, not everyone. Also, "full" is defined as something like 96% of people who are willing and able.
I don't see how spelling out their technical definition addresses what I said. Current central bank policy guarantees that most everyone will "want" to be working to keep paying for their dwelling. Sure, technically if they changed the stimulus to basic income that was high enough to make fewer people "want" to work, then "full employment" could be achieved with less human labor. But in practice that's not how the term is used at all, because of the underlying protestant work ethic asserting that work is good for work's sake.
So did the oil companies, and they still continued lobbying against environmental regulations and in favor of fossil fuels. So why are you giving them a pass?
> > > People act like oil companies are the ones burning oil. They’re just responding to demand.
> > No, they’re not.
> That would be more convincing if you gave a reason why you say "no, they're not". Even better would be evidence.
He did give his reasoning, you just chose not to quote it:
> > Like tobacco companies, oil companies have actively lied and lobbied to maintain demand and obstruct coordinated effort of exactly the kind you describe as necessary. They are not passive actors simply responding to demand as they find it.
And his reasoning was based on propaganda, if oil companies are just passive actors responding to demand, what's the need for such vicious amounts of lobbying and propaganda? My guess is that they're creating the need, and making sure that information and products that go against that propaganda don't become widespread.
Choice quotes from above: "... I created a model that showed the Earth would be warming very significantly. And the warming would introduce climatic changes that would be unprecedented in human history. That blew my mind.
They (the oil execs) were saying things that were contradicting their own world-class research groups..."
Season Summaries:
Season 1: The Origins of Climate Denial traced the corporate-funded creation and spread of climate denial, including interviews with former Exxon scientists, primary source documents, and an in-depth look at the history of fossil fuel-funded influence campaigns.
Season 2: Hot Water follows a group of West Coast crab fisherman who are experiencing first-hand the devastating impacts of climate change. And this unlikely group of climate activists just became the first industry to sue big oil.
Season 3: The Mad Men of Climate Denial digs into the history of fossil fuel propaganda and the few “Mad Men of climate denial” who shaped it.
Season 4: There Will Be Fraud follows the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to use the COVID-19 pandemic to push through its wishlist of deregulation and subsidies.
Season 5: La Lucha En La Jungla looks at the decades-long battle between indigenous groups in the Ecuadorian Amazon and Chevron.
Season 6: The Bridge to Nowhere: A season in three parts about the past, present, and future of the natural gas industry.
I promise you that the reason I drive my car everyday has nothing to do with propaganda from the oil companies in any meaningful way.
I'm 100% certain they covered up the truth, but I have no reason to believe that had everyone known the truth, anyone would have cared beyond hardcore environmentalists.
Most everyone does what's convenient and necessary until otherwise required.
Driving your car does not fundamentally require burning carbon. That's the thing. Oil companies did not create demand for energy. But they did create demand for oil by sabotaging efforts to shift to other energy sources.
These disinformation campaigns are a major obstacle to introducing the kind of reforms required to decarbonize our economy. Overcoming these obstacles largely requires shining a light on their bad behavior so the oil companies (and other industry groups) lose credibility and thus undermine their disinformation campaigns.
Perhaps to your point, there's no way out of this mess without carbon pricing, and even Democrats (who profess to believe that climate change is an existential threat) won't rally behind it even though it would free up massive amounts of money to fund their redistributive programs--choosing instead to spend large amounts of money on symbolic efforts such as a "citizens climate corps". I suspect this speaks in large part to the extent to which corporations have politicians in their pockets (certainly Joe Manchin is in the pocket of the coal industry and doesn't even pretend otherwise). Note that this isn't to say Republicans are better--by and large Republicans haven't even signed onto the idea that climate change poses an existential threat.
EDIT: everyone should write their congresspeople and urge them to support carbon pricing initiatives. Here's a dead-simple link that takes your email and your address, identifies your representatives, and gives you a form pre-populated with a canned message that will be emailed when you click "submit": https://citizensclimatelobby.org/house/
I used to only blame consumers, until I learned how inefficient oil production is and how much CO2 is emitted at the oilfield. Yes, some oil companies are burning huge amounts of oil and methane before the product even reaches the end user. For decades, these companies have chosen against implementing process improvements, and the only way they will do anything is by penalizing them.
They call themselves "energy" companies, so where does it matter where that energy comes from?
In that perfect world where once they knew early on that the consumption of their product would lead to an uninhabitable planet for future generations (because that's what we're facing now), couldn't they have pivoted (slowly) towards true renewables and battery technology? They could have been the leaders instead of the culprits, and positioned for greater long term growth and shareholder value, instead of the relatively short term profits of business as usual.
As long as we're writing science fiction that is... But someone somewhere made a choice to bury the science and keep the status quo, either by action or inaction.
They do invest in renewable energy, as it becomes the clear replacement for diesel and gasoline.
First you had the decarbonization of the electric grid, and of course that those companies de-carbonized first. Now that cars are getting de-carbonized, you see Shell, BP and others invest in green energy as well.
These are companies that respond to shareholders, not sure how they could "invest for the greater good" at a loss without betraying their investors. Only governments can invest at a loos, if the public opinion can stomach it.
the tragedy is that we'd probably be carbon neutral if it wasn't for activists who lobbied against nuclear energy decades ago because it wasn't "environmentally friendly"
It was inextricably linked with nuclear weapons; Greenpeace got their start protesting against atom bomb tests in the Pacific, and later against the dumping of radioactive waste in the sea.
The pollutants are uniquely permanent, and not enough effort was made to not just contaminate the world.
Perhaps the nuclear industry needs to examine why their marketing failed where the oil industry succeeded.
It's largely because of the free market. There is not really a nuclear "industry", nuclear plants are more of a government thing worldwide. Governments aren't as good at the ruthless cost-cutting and decision-making that is needed to be competitive with the private sector. It's hard to imagine an Exxon-for-nuclear when you consider that nuclear fuel is impossible to acquire privately.
From what I understand, nuclear power was “inextricably linked with nuclear weapons” because it was designed to be that way. From what I hear, it can, and could, relatively easily be designed otherwise, but the powers that be wanted nuclear weapons at the time.
Absolutely; the power generation was almost a side effect of producing plutonium. This also cross funded the projects. Many of the countries with reactors have the bomb (notable exceptions: Canada, Japan, Germany)
Ah the old “don’t hate the player hate the game” argument.
It’s quite possible to hate both. Yes we as a populous need to do our part too but the oil companies aren’t providing us with their services out of generosity. They’ve been actively campaigning against change. Which is literally what this submission is trying highlight.
That is not "just responding to demand," it is actively working to inflate demand. Oil companies have worked hard for decades to keep people in their cars, including participating in the conspiracy to dismantle electric streetcar lines across America (along with GM and several tire manufacturers). You say we need to make oil less competitive, but oil companies are actively working against efforts to do so.
While I do agree that it's overly simplistic to exclusively blame oil companies, and for the most part agree that we are all complicit, it isn't quite as straightforward as that.
Most of our jobs depend on the creation of demand for products and services that didn't exist yesterday. Capitalism isn't strictly about fulfilling our needs, but perpetually creating new needs, in order to perpetually generate more profit. Those needs become real, we're all complicit only in that all of us are incapable at this point of honestly living a fossil fuel free life.
We can't radically change our society at this point, but it's naive and incorrect to assume that our unsustainable way of life was the only option. Most indigenous peoples around the globe had lived in a way that was sustainable. The Pre-columbian population of the America's is estimated to have been as high as 112 million people [0]. The societies were large and complex and yet still were able to avoid destroying their local portion of the biosphere.
Even in our industrial society there have been critics of our way of life every generation and there have been people working to silence that criticism, and it's not just the average person doing this work. One the example that I find particularly surprising is that the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth, published in 1972, was a fairly major part of the American zeitgeist, so much so that Ronal Reagan specifically attacked this idea in his famous quote:
> There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder.
Consequently an era of aggressive neoliberalism means that ideologically people are less willing to accept that infinite growth on a finite planet is a problem than they were 50 years ago.
I think it's important not to fall into the easy trap of thinking that a bunch of evil oil execs are solely responsible for climate change, but at the same time it's overly simplistic, and perhaps equally dangerous, to simply say "this is what everyone wanted". A severe alcoholic might want to quit drinking, but at the same time wants to continue, if there is someone in that person's life encouraging and enabling their drinking we typically find that individual culpable in the former's struggle to recover.
> "Say you have a certain amount of time and money with which to make change – call it x, since that is what we mathematicians call things. The trick is to increase that x by multiplication, not addition. The trick is to take that 5 percent of people who really care and make them count for far more than 5 percent. And the trick to that is democracy."
> That is, private individual actions don’t increase at a rate sufficient to affect the problem in a timely fashion; collective action seeking changes in policy and law can.
This is actually a description of the politics of "special interest groups" and it usually leads to horrible things. If an idea is only supported by 5% of the population, we generally do NOT want that 5% of the population driving the legislative agenda. Instead, ideas need to first gain broad support among the general population, at which point enacting legislation may be desirable in order to solve collective action problems such as preventing free riding.
> If an idea is only supported by 5% of the population, we generally do NOT want that 5% of the population driving the legislative agenda.
It depends. The other 95% of the population might be agnostic or unaware of the idea, or the other 95% of the population might be opposed to the idea.
If Congress were to pass a law mandating funding for WWVB radio until 2050, for example, would even 5% of the population have an opinion on it either way?
I guarantee nobody would care. Even when you tell people the impact it might have on them... they may only have to replace one clock, or not any at all. Their cell phone clock works just fine.
There's a difference between them perceiving it to have no impact, and it having no impact.
It also may be important enough to keep funding with 0.0001% of the budget or whatever it costs, but not important enough for a higher level of funding. Still requires advocacy.
That's not how I interpret that quotation from the article at all. "The trick to that is democracy" not "the trick to that is lobbying."
Instead of spending your time trying to reduce your own "carbon footprint" spend it convincing other people to support legislative action.
"Big Oil" wants you to spend your time working just on yourself instead of spending your time sharing the information about why we need to reign them in. The private individual efforts of 5% of people will do less than the evangelical efforts of that same group.
The climate crisis is too big to solve as an individual. Even if a million of us immediately stopped driving cars, and lived in a carbon-neutral commune nothing would change, in terms of the overall climate picture.
The only way to solve this is to build new infrastructure that removes the need for carbon emissions, while also stopping oil extraction at an increasingly rapid pace. Anything else is a distraction, and that includes asking people to "help" by driving less.
If you want people to make good choices, those good choices need to be made possible, effective, and meaningful. This is what our politicians have been avoiding.
Here in Toronto, our local federal MP once posted on Twitter that he fights climate change by shopping at a local produce market. Not only was this absolutely not stopping climate change in any meaningful way at all, it reflects the absolute inability of the vast majority of politicians to communicate that they understand the severity of the situation, much less do anything meaningful about it.
I love how people who drive cars, fly on planes, use plastic, get goods delivered by truck, etc etc, act like oil companies just pump oil out of the ground for fun then light it on fire. The mental gymnastics are impressive.
Well, some of us might drive electric cars, don't fly if they don't absolutely have to, avoid single use plastics, shop locally and in bulk, etc, etc
Or at least some of us do some of those things. We don't all have to live perfectly carbon neutral lives before we can demand action on a political level or criticize organizations that are actively trying to keep the status quo for as long as possible to maximize their profits.
Big changes need government intervention. The government needs to take away the option to run cars, trucks, etc on gasoline, and restrict flights that don't use renewable energy (such as via Hydrogen). Otherwise the individual can only do a very little, and often can't afford to do that.
Yes, people who refuse to recognize the problem beyond the greed of oil companies are a problem. Yes, oil companies are in fact a bigger problem. However, the biggest problem is if you want a government to stay in power long enough to actually do anything meaningful about eliminating carbon emissions, then announcing some kind of imminent intention to take away gasoline-powered cars and trucks is one of the worst things you can do.
The smart thing isn't to take away cars, but to invest heavily in high-quality alternatives, while making emissions increasingly expensive. Unfortunately, this isn't happening at nearly the level it should be.
or at least require the cost of putting carbon back into the ground to be factor price.
The problem is when you slow gdp it's the most marginalized that are hit the hardest.
So, the CEO only makes 10M instead of 50M(or whatever number) but what about the poor farmer that was making just enough to run his tractor to get by and feed his family.
Carbon externality pricing is another attempt at market intervention that faceplants in practise. It doesn't get properly implemented, because it's politically unpopular, it gets fudged with highly speculative green-washing "offsets" that amount to planting a few trees and then counting your forests before they're grown (the trees subsequently die of neglect), and the costs get passed on to the little guy.
The correct approach is to outright ban gasoline.
There are cases where no alternative exists right now, such as flight. Those uses should be restricted away from casual use.
Yes, this means no flying on holiday, until they get hydrogen airplanes up and running.
Nobody who travels ‘wants’ to burn oil. Capital decided oil is the most profitable way to deliver that. There was never a point where individual personal consumption habits could have changed this course.
It’s profitable because it’s physically efficient - fossil fuels are readily available and highly energy dense and relatively safe. Nothing else offers that. This isn’t some sneaky capitalist plot - the soviets burned lots of fuel as well.
I’m not defending the continued dependence on fossil fuels, but let’s be realistic about how (externalities aside) fossil fuels are very, very good at what they do. The problem is those externalities have turned out to be pretty bad, and our economic systems have been slow to respond.
> The problem is those externalities have turned out to be pretty bad, and our economic systems have been slow to respond.
The problems are much more specific and blatant than that:
* The externalities were known to be bad by the oil companies and this knowledge was suppressed.
* Our economic system is incapable of responding because there is no direct fiscal cost of the externalities that would make alternatives cheaper at the point-of-purchase decision point.
* Fossil fuels being good at what they do is exactly why external regulation is needed to get us out of that unhealthy addiction.
I entirely agree. Strong carbon taxes or other similar systems are the way forward. By correcting for the true cost of pollution we can allow renewables to really shine.
I was only trying to push back against the idea that we’re only using fossil fuels because of capitalism. We’re using fossil fuels because with our initial naive inspection they appear to be an excellent, bordering on miraculous, resource. I’m not denying that they’ve turned out to be very harmful and/or that people have done bad things to preserve the naive interpretation.
> fossil fuels are readily available and highly energy dense and relatively safe. Nothing else offers that.
Your car or plane can't tell the difference between fossil hydrocarbons and biofuel hydrocarbons. (Though you might adjust a car to use ethanol instead of longer compounds.)
> One of the most often cited results from Sheehan et al. is that the fossil energy ratio of biodiesel is equal to 3.2. In other words, biodiesel yields 3.2 units of energy for every unit of fossil energy consumed over its life- cycle.
> Recently, a 5.54 fossil energy ratio (FER) was reported [1] which means one unit of fossil energy input is required to produce 5.54 units of biodiesel energy output. This FER shows a stunning energy return of biodiesel that surpasses other fuels [2].
Seems fine. And that's probably without even trying to use all electric equipment.
This article is right. Individual liability for climate change is a con. The absolute best thing you can do as an individual for the climate is to never have existed in the first place. This sets your climate footprint to 0. However, even in this case, this does not change the trajectory of climate change at all. The hypothetical best is not good enough. So, individual liability is much ado about nothing.
While I'm no expert in propaganda, Newsspeak was certainly a major topic in Orwell's 1984. The purpose of Newspeak was solely to build language to control how people think about certain topics [1].
Doublethink [1] also facilitates control. I expect this comment to be controversial, but I will express it nonetheless.
Unsurprisingly, doublethink is very prevalent in online discussion boards, I have observed it in both progressive and conservative spaces.
> Doublethink is a process of indoctrination whereby the subject is expected to simultaneously accept two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in contravention to one's own memories or sense of reality.[1] Doublethink is related to, but differs from, hypocrisy.
An example of this within conservative spaces is demanding freedom, but supporting fascism, such as the instance where the datascientist that reported covid cases from Florida was swatted by the police and had her computers and hardware confiscated.
An example of this within progressive spaces is demanding equality across genders, but at the same time screeching about saving women and children from Afghanistan and sending men to die like pigs to the slaughterhouse. Or, supporting women's education and equality while supporting anachronistic systems found within religions that facilitate subjugation.
Language doesn't appear to be the driver here. The concept of a carbon footprint is what changes how I think, the name is just a compelling way of conveying that concept. If it were called 'per capita carbon consumption', it would still change how we think in the same way, though fewer people might be aware of it.
Of course larger-scale changes are larger. One problem is that when you argue for a large-scale change, people generally expect you to be not-a-hypocrite on the small personal level. Small-scale actions give authority to large-scale ideas/arguments.
Blaming supply or demand when you have an unpriced negative externality doesn't make sense. Tax carbon, and use the funds to pay for decarbonization. We'll get better and cheaper alternatives and carbon sinks.
Many quote $100 to $1000/tCO2e. But if we get down to $10, getting to net zero and negative won't break the bank.
Who do you think opposes carbon taxes, why, and how do you think they express that will politically, and by what means of supporting that action?
One of the largely unspoken truths of economics is that wealth is power.
Actually, it was spoken, by Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, but somehow that short, succinct, critical phrase is ignored in favour of a much longer one strung together out of multiple sections over hundreds of pages using what for Smith was not an explanatory mechanism, as it's often portrayed, but of a statement of ignorance, that a cause is unknown.
Genuine question to all the anti "Big Oil" commenters here: what's your alternative?
Let's imagine an alternate history where oil companies hadn't fought against climate change science. What does that alternate universe look like?
We have known for years that climate change is real, and yet the vast majority of people simply won't actually change their consumption when push comes to shove. This is the largest, most serious, tragedy of the commons that we will likely ever face. This problem is so much more complicated than just blaming a few evil CEOs.
Roughly diverges from Carter putting solar panels on the White House and Reagan not taking them off. Other countries follow France in building out nuclear power as a substitute, while investigating how to reduce oil consumption to avoid depending on OPEC. Salter gets more wave power funding. Siemens get started on wind turbines earlier. Basically we end up 10-20 years ahead of current. And the discussion about what to do is easier because there are fewer financially motivated liars involved.
(We can assume that state owned oil companies still captured their respective governments, we're just stipulating that a separation of corp and state can be achieved in the west)
(However, until 1990 the world remains more concerned with the threat of immediate obliteration by nuclear war than the slow problem of climate change.)
>Roughly diverges from Carter putting solar panels on the White House and Reagan not taking them off.
It's a well-known story, but it's based on spin* . Carter did not place the solar panels due to belief in climate change. What Carter and his staff did believe in was Peak Oil, and that it would occur in the 1980s. Also, Carter wanted to wean the US off Middle Eastern oil following the 1973 oil embargo and the 1979 oil crisis.
Solar panels were a part of Carter's adaptation effort, but a bigger part was oil shale and coal liquefaction, liquefaction being so incredibly polluting (CCS wasn't even considered at the time) we'd probably be looking at 5C had it been commonplace.
The actual priorities of the Carter effort are easily discoverable for anyone looking at the period:
* To be clear, the spin does not come from OP, but from the Democratic spin handler that years later told the solar panels story but without the context which changes the story entirely. It's easy for people to fall into the spin if they don't know the period.
I'm not sure how any of this would radically change where we are today (not saying it wouldn't be better, just urging some basic PCA here).
Solar was only possibly due to massively unprofitable investment by the Chinese state and cheap labor. Wind costs haven't decreased nearly as much as solar and still suffer from the same problems they did decades ago. Battery technology has been driven by the consumer electronics revolution, which couldn't have been otherwise sped up.
Long story short: I'm not sure that even in a perfect world, that we would be all that different. Fossil fuels were still the cheapest source of energy for many, many decades in a rapid growing global economy. 20 years ahead is certainly a stretch. 10 years would be high case, 5 years base case...in a perfect world.
Improving energy supply methods would have been tough without future knowledge. Reducing energy consumption was however much more doable.
For example, the West switched quickly from Incandescent bulbs to CFLs to LEDs in the 2010s. But CFLs was arguably doable in the late 1970s, definitely in the 1990s. We could have had a far earlier CFL transition, saving decades of incandescent bulbs.
> Reducing energy consumption was however much more doable.
This I agree with 100% but is generally not something people have been keen to do. They want to drive more, air condition more, eat more animal protein, fly to more places, etc. The last 80 years of prosperity have been driven by increased consumption. And nobody seems keen to be the generation of "less is more".
> Other countries follow France in building out nuclear power as a substitute
The problem is there is a ton of overlap between people who are really concerned about global warming, and people who have an irrational fear of nuclear power.
> This problem is so much more complicated than just blaming a few evil CEOs.
That's a good point. I'd say it is universal greed, but the vast amount of power is concentrated in the hands of a few who do anything to preserve it.
Perhaps we need to look at others to blame...
The industrial revolution opened the floodgates for greed among all types of CEOs/Presidents that ran faster than the law or science could keep up. Although I doubt the blighted factory towns in England that lived under perpetual smog darkness were like "Sure, this is OK for the environment."
The baby boom? Everyone wanted to live in suburbs, which required cars, roads, tires, gasoline, oil?
American's sense of entitlement? "I deserve more and I'm going to take it?" Let's be honest, most americans are greedy seflish bunch who think "Well, this one little thing isn't going to hurt anyone this time..." x 1,000,000 instances.
It's probably just the fruition of Manifest Destiny: man's toxic urge to conquer and oppress: only the strong survive, winner take all, yadda yadda yadda. When is the last time you heard a leader (with actual power!!!) say, "Hey, wouldn't it be great if we were all just nice to each other?" ... And that guy was nailed to a tree...
> The industrial revolution opened the floodgates for greed among all types of CEOs/Presidents
It's not that easy. There would be no failed/struggling businesses otherwise. CEOs would just will their enterprises into success.
> The baby boom? Everyone wanted to live in suburbs, which required cars, roads, tires, gasoline, oil?
Now we're talking. Those greedy CEOs are just people. Greedy people like everyone else. A handful of greedy CEOs didn't force billions of people to collectively emit 1.5 trillion tons of CO2.
Solving the problem requires giving these people an alternative. This isn't some attempt at absolving whatever issues people have categorically with CEOs, rather just a realistic take on what needs to happen to unfuck the planet.
The suburbs could have had public transportation, but there was an active propaganda against that. Only poor people use buses, manipulating people into buying big, gas-guzzling cars by creating a demand for it.
And then there is 50 years of a few CEOs suppressing evidence that this was wrecking the environment.
So yes, a few evil CEOs really did work to manipulate people into ignoring their actions' consequences. I would say, given the strength of marketing and propaganda, they were indeed forced.
50+ years of manufacturers spending on R&D for internal combustion engines could have been spent on improving electric powertrain technology.
Think about how many engineer's have spent their entire lives optimizing ICE powertrains, with all this tech actively harming us with smog shortening our lifespans, acid rain and climate change.
> 50+ years of manufacturers spending on R&D for internal combustion engines could have been spent on improving electric powertrain technology.
You're missing the point. This didn't happen because it wasn't economical. You're just wishing for fanciful things. You might as well just wish that CO2 weren't a GHG.
Consumer demand forced R&D into ICE instead of electric.
Consumer demand is not, realistically, an isolated phenomenon, though. There's a tangled web of feedback in many directions among what people want to buy, what industry offers people to buy, what technologists are can work on, what R&D risks industry wants to take, and probably other factors. Advertising drives culture to some extent and reflects culture to some extent, not just one or the other.
The key point to figure out, I think, is so we know which lever(s) is most effective to fix the problem, rather than just assigning blame.
Sure, but demand drivers are usually pretty isolated. For commodities, like energy, this driver is price. People want cheap energy. And until recently, nothing could compete with dead dinos.
A large part of why it wasn't economical is that no one was being charged for the economic costs of carbon emissions. If combustion didn't have this massive subsidy, it wouldn't have been the more economical choice for so long.
Those CEOs set us back by 50 years in getting people used to the idea that we need to make changes in order to have stability in the future. They manufactured the idea that there was no problem, and therefore the greater resistance to change.
The alternate history looks more like CFCs and the ozone hole, only slower and writ larger. The time it takes to convince most people a) that there is a problem, and b) it will require big changes to address is a very important factor. If the scrambling towards renewables we see now happened in 1980 or even 1990 instead, we’d have more runway before missing some tipping points. It would be more of a behavioral adjustment instead of a crisis.
I don’t just blame the CEOs, I also blame our politicians. They only respond to big donors and public pressure. Without the billions backing the big lie, and with more time to alert people to the problem, public pressure would have won out much earlier—not that it has, yet.
Without dedicated lobbies paying politicians to ignore the problem, Republicans could have promoted conservative solutions like nuclear energy and carbon pricing.
Green energy could have been cost-effective decades earlier, leading to wider adoption and massive investment in research. We could have been building nuclear plants for the last several decades instead of pretending coal was still viable.
> Republicans could have promoted conservative solutions like nuclear energy and carbon pricing.
Arguably the two most important missed opportunities, imho.
We would still be left with transportation because battery tech advanced on the back of the consumer electronics revolution, but with cheap nuclear power and a functioning emissions market, we could accelerate the transition much faster.
>Let's imagine an alternate history where oil companies hadn't fought against climate change science. What does that alternate universe look like?
It has a carbon tax. As to what else happens, the whole point of using a carbon tax rather than some kind of targeted reforms (bike lanes, vegetarianism, solar panels) is because allowing different solutions to compete in the market has been shown throughout history to be more effective in the majority of cases than top-down economic planning. The reason a carbon tax is the best solution is because we don't know exactly what it does. It leaves our options open.
Now, granted, there are a bunch of possible problems with the implementation of a carbon tax. But we rarely get to the point of in-depth discussions about how to implement a carbon tax. Instead, we're held up at the starting gate by pseudoscience, fearmongering, and the fantasy of individual action.
Perhaps we would already apply environmental legislation to CO2 as a pollutant such that carbon intensive industries and products would be more expensive and low carbon products/industry more competitive giving consumers more choice.
Who do you mean by "we"...because some countries don't give a shit about the impact they are having on the world and still pollute the air and water worse than EU and US countries 50 years ago (China, India, etc).
China has a lower CO2 per capita emissions than the US.
Of course, the environment doesn’t care about who has the most per capita emissions, just “cares” about the total emissions, but in terms of measuring efficiency of “how much CO2 needed to support the lifestyle of each person” it seems they currently have a better rate.
Like, if you replaced a random subset of China with the population of the US, with another copy of the US, the total emissions would [edit:on average] be increased.
Therefore, I think in order to get them to decrease their rate (which is important to do due to their large population/ their large total emissions), it may be useful to lower our own rate in order to have a convincing position.
So if we reduce still further (the UK and the US have made significant cuts) you think China will think again about the 43 new coal-fired power stations now in the design stage?
I'm not so sure. While paying lip service to the Green agenda, my guess is that perhaps the Chinese don't really believe that the world is headed for armageddon. They are of course happy to see ideas like 'net zero' take off in the West.
I'm not even sure what this comment is about. The important bit right now is trajectory. China is definitely not trending lower. They have added huge amounts of coal generation in the past year, and their carbon market is broken by design (to keep emissions cheap).
The US has been trending down per capita for the last 50 years...but the problem is we have more people so the total output is higher. China's trend, as another poster said, is always going higher.
By “we” do you mean the US? Because the population of China is over 1 Billion, while the US population (as of 2019) is only 328 million.
Or do you mean “China” by “we”? Because in that case yes, the total emissions in China are greater than in the US, corresponding to their larger population (despite their per capita emissions being like half those of the US)
Under the current circumstances, sure they do. But just like skipping landlines for cellphones, if the incentives were such that developing countries could leapfrog over dirty industry without a development penalty (which could be possible had we taken a different path the last 50+ years) - they very well might.
Have all the billions of subsidies flow into renewables, battery and electric car tech, instead of oil? Today it's slowly catching up, but we'd be decades ahead if we started decades ago.
Nobody is saying it all the fault of "evil CEOs", but it fair to point out evil CEOs and in general evil deeds by corporations.
When people talk about "subsidies" to oil, what they really mean is lower retail taxes for gasoline at the pump.
This isn't for the benefit of oil companies, it's to placate voters, who want to pay less at the pump.
It's not as if the US government is running around dropping truck loads of cash into insanely profitable businesses.
And no, if gasoline had higher taxes, that would not be absorbed by the oil companies. It would be passed on to the consumer just like every increase in oil prices is. Gasoline has a very flat demand curve.
Although I am currently optimistic about the future and think we’re on a good course WRT anthropogenic climate change and (peak) oil production, I do remember 15 years ago when I was worried.
The two big differences between what I wanted done and what actually happened are: (1) mandatory solar systems on all new buildings (unless there is a very good special exceptional circumstance), and (2) bike lanes automatically added to every city road whenever and wherever roadworks occur, and those made grade-separated when the existing roads are 3 or more car-widths in each direction.
My takeaway from this article is "Big Oil" should have invested their billions in research on renewables, batteries, etc, instead of lawyers and fighting change.
If you have a short-term-great, but long-term-dying business (which is all business), it's really hard to make the decision to invest in alternatives that - if successful - will invalidate your current business. You are basically investing against yourself. On the other hand if you don't do it, someone else will. This is the innovators dilemma.
They've generated a few trillion dollars in profit over the past few decades, and now they have tens of billions at their disposal to invest in R&D now that there's a market beginning to demand it.
From an innovators dilemma perspective, if they can pivot, they will have nailed the balance perfectly (granted, we may have fucked the planet in the process, but that's just an outcome of a demand function).
* Oil, at minimum, gets much more expensive, more quickly.
* Renewable energy develops more quickly because see the first bullet point
* Nuclear doesn't die
I think it is like the car industry. The push to electric vehicles has forced companies to adapt, reskill and do the R&D because they know their business will be going away in 10+ years.
I would like to think that heavy R&D into renewable energies would have been the priority of "Big Oil", not the alternative.
I find it infuriating that your perfectly reasonable question/comment is so heavily downvoted, and yet it's followed up my many thoughtful and interesting responses. Boggles the mind.
I would have happily taken that blame, if not for the oil companies decades long and bad faith activities against climate change. Their lobbying, funding dubious studies, tactics of FUD, outright lying, etc.
Those must have consequences.
Why taxpayers are made to give billions to them every year is beyond understanding.
"Identity theft", likewise, is an attempt to put the onus - and blame - on consumers for the failure of corporations to protect personal information and combat fraud.
We should be generally wary of corporate "Do your part!" campaigns.
"Personal virtue is an eternally seductive goal in progressive movements"
You don't say... Almost sounds like planting a sign in your yard enumerating the various reasons you're a good person is the brand of activism advocated by regressive causes. Doesn't matter if you do anything to advocate those causes, so long as you pretend to care. Broadcasting it to your other privileged friends and neighbors. That way you can continue business as usual while thriving on the status-quo, but rest assured you're on a pedestal above everyone who didn't plant a sign next to their stoop proclaiming activism. Printed free of regulation in SE Asia, wrapped in plastic, shipped across the ocean, and delivered to your front door. Now if only there were a way to wear it on your face...
Isn't Big oil coining "carbon footprint" similar to Big tech coining "FSD"/"Autonomous Driving"?, doing what they need to do to support their investments?
I worked in the oil & gas industry about a decade ago. I recall a conversation with our CEO directly talking about renewables and the environment. He said, very clearly, that this entire industry is about money, and they will do whatever makes them the most money. If renewable ever paid more than oil, they'd go there. But direct from his mouth - it is 100% about money.
If anyone doubts that they are greed-driven, just ask. They don't hide it.
I’m not sure how that CEOs response differs from <insertanyindustryhere>. It is a rare case that you see a CEO decide that some other metric is more important than making money.
While the pendulum goes back and forth on this issue, and in past decades, it did lean towards profits, I'm not aware of any regulatory enforcement of business decisions to maximize profits. Quite the contrary, almost all large businesses make charitable donations, which is the legal basis dating back to a 1956 NJ Supreme Court decision to support the legal rights to put social good above corporate profits.
Even if that were not the case, we have recently swung to the other end of the pendulum, with corporate governance groups making an explicit change to work towards more than just profits a couple years ago -- https://fortune.com/longform/business-roundtable-ceos-corpor...
The question is about long term interests versus short term. having an excellent qtr when you company falls off a cliff at the end of the year would probably be considered not looking out for share holder's best interest.
Sure? All of these evil companies have had many, many good quarters (decades worth...which is pretty long term) and now have tens of billions of quarterly profits at their disposal to invest in wherever the next decades of demand will be.
Isn't that just capitalism? Replace "oil & gas" with any other for profit organizations and the same would be true, no?. E.g. if being privacy focused could make Facebook even more money than what they're doing now, they'd do it, etc.
Soviet Russia was into oil production just as much as anyone else. The simple truth is that oil is very useful and the externalities are easy to ignore. The blame game is not useful for this situation.
> If anyone doubts that they are greed-driven, just ask. They don't hide it.
They have a legal obligation to pursue profits for shareholders. This is their fiduciary duty.
And they are like this because their consumers are like this. If people weren't so "greedy" demanding hydrocarbons at rock bottom prices, and instead wanted to pay a premium for solar powered EVs, well then hell believe me they would pursue those businesses.
But the demand isn't there. Consumers are too greedy. Consumers don't want to change their behavior.
EDIT: Downvotes, but no replies. Really HN, we just downvote people we disagree with? How about tossing your hat in the ring.
The downvotes are because you are parroting a common misconception. There is no 'duty' (legal or otherwise) for a company to pursue producing profits for shareholders.
They have to act in the interest of the shareholders, which could mean all sorts of things other than producing profit. That could include things like "not paying huge amounts of money on lobbying and advertising campaigns to spread misinformation about renewable energy and try to cast doubt on climate change for decades while they knew it was real"...
Oil companies/execs should be held accountable for misdeeds.
But that is a tiny fraction of the problem facing us. Let's say they came out decades ago and said "hey, there's probably going to be some repercussions for using our products" ... do you really think that would have changed anything?
We know right now what needs to be done. And yet Biden is running around pleading with OPEC to increase production to bring gasoline prices down. Why? Because people want cheap hydrocarbons, no matter how many downvotes you throw at me.
> Let's say they came out decades ago and said "hey, there's probably going to be some repercussions for using our products" ... do you really think that would have changed anything?
Yes. Big oil's lies and disinformation seeded the denialism that took hold in the Republican party decades ago.
Fine. What would that have changed? You can blame denialism all you want but a much more powerful motive is economic. For most of their history, fossil fuels have been the cheapest source of energy.
It's not as if I see half of the US (Democrats) driving EVs, installing solar on their roofs, eating plant based diets, etc. Blaming Republican denial is just dishonest.
I think Exxon et al saying climate change is real and their own internal research confirms it would have changed policy. Better policies could have meant batteries, nuclear, solar, wind, etc could all have been cheaper faster. It could have meant a carbon border tax which would have hamstrung a lot of US manufacturing going to China. The negotiations between Obama and Lindsey Graham for a carbon price might have succeeded.
There's a whole "What if?" where the innovation and beginnings of a post-denial GOP could have happened earlier.
Of course this is absurd because consumers have no access to information about the emissions that factor into their products, and various corporations work very hard to prevent this kind of transparency (including misleading people on the calculus a la TFA).
Not only that, but most consumers don't concretely understand the implications of "climate change" because most people can't summon a dozen climate researchers to do a study and communicate the results (indeed, in most places the actual studies are paywalled). And here too, corporations are deeply invested in making sure people believe that climate change is just a myth or that the implications aren't as severe as the science leads us to believe.
> But individual and collective action don’t have to be pitted against each other. Individual choices do add up (they just don’t, in McKibben’s terms, multiply). That vegan options are available at a lot of fast-food chains is because enough consumers have created a profitable market for them. We do influence others through our visible choices. Ideas spread, values spread, habits spread; we are social animals and both good and bad behaviors are contagious. (For the bad, just look at the contagiousness of specious anti-vaccination arguments.)
Strong agree with this. I see people argue all the time that individual action won't do anything when it's at least a part of getting to a tipping-point where big changes are made.
It's like the public (who want stuff), companies (who want money), governments (who want votes from the public and approval from companies) and countries are locked in a stalemate all pointing fingers at each other over who is responsible and should change first. Everyone has to do their part and stop making excuses.
Eat less animal products, fly less and drive less where practical is the bare minimum everyone should be doing in my opinion instead of trying to cling on to unsustainable lifestyles as long as they're allowed to.
Easy snark on the headline contribute nothing positive to this site. Explain what fault you find in the Guardian premise and I will listen. For e.g., the sister comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315019 perhaps share your view?
I upvoted the snark because I think in this case it's warranted. I see this article as part of a broader messaging shift to pin the blame for global warming on the N companies that pollute the most, which I don't think is productive.
As an example of how absurd it gets, someone in my local nextdoor group posted something along the lines of “why should I reduce how much I drive when X% of emissions come from N companies”. Those companies are polluting so that you can drive!
This your comment has some well reasons, and I thank you despite that I disagree. It contribute to the exchange of ideas. The top comment does not so, this is my objection.
Exactly. If consumers stopped driving, how much retail auto gasoline would big oil produce? If people stopped buying airline tickets, how many airline flights would fly?
I can’t buy Big Macs and then blame McDonalds for farming the cattle.
Sure, a carbon tax would do essentially that, and I am supportive of it.
But absent a carbon tax, the idea that I can morally just consume willy-nilly and blame “corporations” is crazy. It's a form of moral laundering. Exxon isn't spewing CO2 for the heck of it, they're doing so as part of a production process that eventually some consumer demands. That consumer should not be let off the hook so easily.
I recently had a conversation with someone about Canadian Federal climate policies and I found it very interesting that they seemed to think consumers should bear no sacrifice to solve the climate issue.
The two most popular parties have plans aiming to reduce emissions. The Liberal party has implemented a progressive and revenue neutral carbon tax, and the Conservatives have a regulatory approach that sees consumers receiving a monthly refund into a special savings account when they buy things like fuel so that they need not bear as much of the increased costs of petroleum products due to the regulatory approach.
The latter policy really emphasizes to me that that there are a large number of people who do not want to change their behaviour in any way, and would much rather have a corporate scapegoat to point at.
It’s as if they think that the oil industry just mines and drills for fun or something.
Realistically and politically, people will not bear any significant sacrifice to solve CO2 emissions. They just won't. They won't do it.
You can say that they ought to as much as you please. You can say that they need to. But they still won't. You aren't going to scold them into being different. You aren't going to lecture them into being different. And you aren't going to use politics to force them to be different, because they vote, and all the politicians know they vote.
For us to get anywhere on CO2, the non-CO2 path has to be better and/or less expensive. That's it. In the real world, with the humans that we have, anything else isn't going to get any traction.
> The latter policy really emphasizes to me that that there are a large number of people who do not want to change their behaviour in any way, and would much rather have a corporate scapegoat to point at.
I find this to be a fairly common perspective, when talking to Canadians online; and there's some data to support that it is[0][1].
The truth is that individuals are _hugely_ influential on carbon emissions, and changes to individual consumption, commuting, and so forth are necessary if we're to tackle climate change meaningfully. The Covid lockdowns made the impact of individuals irrefutably clear.[2][3][4]
I don't understand why you would cite Covid lockdowns (a centrally-coordinated government policy) as evidence of individual impact. Is this not an argument against your own point?
It's (partially) centrally coordinated, but it's individual behaviors that change, not "corporations making factories and ships magically better while consumers don't feel a change", which is the average (sl)activist's proposed solution.
I find it interesting that both your reply and mine are being downvoted without explanation as if it’s a controversial idea that consumers are culpable.
And yet there are no replies making a logical argument about why this perspective is wrong?
It's an unpopular proposition to state that there exists a collective responsibility to make individual adaptations to combat climate change.
I also argued that the lockdown was good for combating climate change, and there are many people who are desperate to leave their bedroom communities, hop in their car, and commute to the downtown office.
> there exists a collective responsibility to make individual adaptations to combat climate change.
Individual adaptations do not matter unless they are undertaken collectively. My personal lifestyle changes don’t impact the state of CO2 emissions in any significant way.
Leading by example AND talking about it has more impact, but still negligible unless/until enough people do it.
Changing incentives, by making production account for the climate change externality, will shift more people into changing their lifestyle based on price alone. It’s the same reasoning behind targeting drug dealers and cartels more heavily than end-users.
I think we all agree that incentives are the single most important factor.
That isn’t an argument against consumers being culpable though. We are all culpable.
Lifestyle choices do matter a lot. Do you buy the tiny condo in a walkable area and put your money into public transit? Or do you live on an acreage and drive a lifted Dodge Ram? How do your behaviours shape the culture of those around you? How will your children choose to live?
In a society where most people are overweight, heart disease and cancer are the biggest killers, our cities are designed around cars, and human social connection and community are fading, being replaced by superficial social media interaction, it matters very much how we personally choose to live. Our way of life tends to rub off on those who are close to us, and our children. A way of life that prioritizes human health, community, political cooperation, and respect for the environment over mindless consumerism is incredibly important to our long term prosperity.
> My personal lifestyle changes don’t impact the state of CO2 emissions in any significant way.
Collective action requires personal changes. You, and everyone else, must alter your personal lifestyle. You are only a little bit responsible for the harm, but in aggregate, the collective you are enormously responsible. Each individual must change.
> It’s the same reasoning behind targeting drug dealers and cartels more heavily than end-users.
I don't like the drug dealer analogy because it implies that targeting drug dealers has been reasonably effective in combating drug use. It hasn't.
To combat substance abuse the users must be targeted; to combat climate change, the consumers must be targeted.
I think we are talking past each other a bit. I guess it boils down to the question “where does the incentive to make widespread personal changes come from?”
Perhaps the CFC problem is a better analogy. CFCs cause problems with the ozone layer, so CFCs were mandated to be removed from products that people bought like ACs and hairspray. In that instance, the supply chain was fixed, so the option to buy CFC hairspray was removed.
I think the same fix applies here. Renewable energy, ending single-use plastic packaging, etc. are all things that should be done in order to decrease negative effects. That’s not to say people don’t have to or shouldn’t also make our own personal changes, only that the impact of changing the supply chain is much greater.
I'm old enough to remember when CFC and non-CFC hairsprays were both available, and recall the public discussion over whether you should buy one or the other.
Regardless, even though the edict eventually came from on high to stop using CFCs, it was the individual use of them that was ultimately responsible for harm. Punishing oil companies won't make a lick of difference if it doesn't result in changes to our collective, individual behaviour. Like how we stopped using CFC-laiden hairsprays, we're going to have to stop commuting by car, ICE or EV, and stop buying products from overseas, and stop flying.
There is no technological panacea that will allow us to continue to live our lives as we do now.
Like Democrat and Republican politicians, corporation and consumers blame each other not because they are enemies, but to avoid criticism of the game they pay together. Recycling (and ignoring Reduce and Reuse) is the perfect example of deploying a fake solution to avoid having to fix the real problems.
Big oil is big because billions of people rely on hydrocarbons for transport, heating their homes, electricity, and many other things. Demonizing "Big Oil" is a way to evade the fact that people are not willing to pay large amounts to stop the world from warming a few degrees.
That is ignoring the trillions of dollar this industry has spend on think tanks for the downplay of climate change, funding of paid for scientific articles to spread fud, funding conservative anti-science parties, lobbying for laws that actively hinder progress in renewable energies, hoarding patents on renewable energies, buying sustainable competitors and killing them.
This is beyond "people don't want to pay more", this is "we could get the same energy but cheaper, but that wouldn't allow the very powerfull to exhauste an available resource to depletion before they move on and leave us all with the externalised costs".
Per TFA and many other sources, "Big Oil" (and many other industries) lobby and market hard to make sure that people misunderstand climate change and lack access to the information required to make climate-friendly purchasing decisions. Your comment is peak victim blaming.
Obviously not true. People have known about climate change for many decades. Every countries media discusses it regularly. Scientists have published countless thousands of open papers about it. You act like we just found out about global warming last week
Of course we both know that it's insufficient that the media and science discuss it if huge swaths of the population distrust those institutions or if they get large amounts of conflicting information via their social networks.
> You act like we just found out about global warming last week
Humanity isn't a borg mind. Just because science has been increasing its understanding of climate change for decades doesn't mean that the average citizen possesses a climate scientist's understanding. And the carbon industries have worked hard to ensure that laypeople and especially politicians misunderstand.
I actually think everyone understands that dealing with climate change means increasing energy costs substantially. Oil companies wasted money on lobbying. Human nature would have given us the same result
I've never met anyone who could estimate with any degree of certainty how much a given climate policy (e.g., a $15/ton tax on carbon with border adjustments) would affect a given product or service (not even gasoline, which is a straightforward derivative of oil) because supply chains are so opaque. No doubt there are economists and other academics who try to get in the right ballpark, but even then the error margins are enormous and economists account for a minuscule share of voters.
> Human nature would have given us the same result
Lobbying is human nature. Human nature already gave us this result. Banding together to overcome special interests is also human nature. Everything we do is human nature, so this isn't very meaningful. The meaningful question is whether or not we might have implemented carbon pricing by now were it not for corporate lobbying and disinformation campaigns, and I'm thoroughly convinced that the answer is "yes".
Supply chains aren’t opaque. Every politician knows that energy costs effect everything substantially. Doesn’t take Nostradamus to know jacking up energy prices pissed people off. Flights go up, food prices go up. Gasoline shoots up.
So what's the carbon footprint of an XBox Series X? What about a 20 oz bottle of Trader Joe's brand extra virgin olive oil? If this information isn't readily available to consumers, it's "opaque" for all intents and purposes.
> Every politician knows that energy costs effect everything substantially.
You give politicians far too much credit.
> Doesn’t take Nostradamus to know jacking up energy prices pissed people off.
So cut a check to everyone making less than, say, $400K (or subsidize things if that's your kink). Perfectly feasible with carbon pricing. Moreover, after a while corporations will find greener ways to reduce costs. If you're a conservative or libertarian, welcome to the free market.
Wrong every politician knows massive carbon taxes will be ultimately borne by consumers. What do you think oil gas profit margins are such that they can offset taxes for anyone making less than 400,000. Lol thats like 98% of the country
How can you argue this with a straight face? There are already many carbon pricing proposals which factor in a means-tested distribution of dividends, so clearly some politicians understand that it’s workable.
> What do you think oil gas profit margins are such that they can offset taxes for anyone making less than 400,000. Lol thats like 98% of the country
This is a remarkable misunderstanding of carbon pricing. It’s not limited to domestic oil and gas production, nor are the dividends intended to reimburse 100% of anyone’s tax obligation. The dividends only offset the burden imposed by the tax. Further still, a border adjustment will bring a lot of production back to the US because polluting countries like China will no longer be able to compete as effectively.
More importantly, if we don’t pass a climate tax, we’ll have a lot bigger problem than a burden on the consumer.
Big industry of all sorts routinely tries to manipulate public opinion and the machinery of government to keep itself in business. That goes for big corn as much as big oil, but big oil is the one fucking over the planet.
Blaming climate change on the "greed" of oil companies seems to me just a way to avoid taking personal responsibility for one's own choices as a consumer.
You really can't drive a massive SUV where a smaller vehicle or even a bike might work perfectly well and then yell at Exxon about their greed.
And you can't ride a bicycle or train where the infrastructure doesn't exist because of pro-car lobbying by the oil companies, and then yell at individuals about their 'personal responsibility'.
1. Consumers don't have access to information they need to make climate-optimal decisions.
2. Oil companies lobby hard to make sure people lack the aforementioned information, specifically downplaying climate change.
3. SUVs are not even a drop in the ocean compared to industrial emissions. You're reaching hard to blame consumers for what is transparently industry's fault.
We need to pass carbon pricing and decarbonize our energy sector.
Regarding 1 & 2, I think there's more than enough information out there at this point for anyone to figure out that large SUVs are worse than smaller vehicles or bicycles for the environment, regardless of whatever lobbying is going on by oil companies.
Regarding #3, I don't know if your first statement is correct or not, but again it would seem to me that the consumer (industries in this case) would have their own share of responsibility, not just the oil & gas companies supplying them.
> Regarding 1 & 2, I think there's more than enough information out there at this point for anyone to figure out that large SUVs are worse than smaller vehicles or bicycles for the environment
That's neither disputed nor relevant. If SUVs were replaced with Toyota Corolas overnight, the climate situation would be negligibly better.
> it would seem to me that the consumer (industries in this case) would have their own share of responsibility, not just the oil & gas companies supplying them.
Oil and gas companies are faulted for obstructing efforts to change the status quo (lobbying and disinformation campaigns), not for supplying energy to their consumers.
Most importantly, we need to pass carbon pricing legislation (with border adjustments) so that consumers at every point in the supply chain can reason effectively about (and share incentives which are aligned with) the environment. Here's a site that makes it trivial to write your legislator: https://citizensclimatelobby.org/house/
We've all individually and collectively chosen to ignore the problem.
Now is the point where we lie and pretend no one told us and it was all somehow a conspiracy by big oil, big meat, big airline-travel etc to force us to emit when we didnt want to.
Fossil fuels are good for the world, The reason we used them was because we did not have any real alternative at the time.
For the vast majority of history, people were dirt poor. By utilizing fossil fuels we were able to lift billions of people out of poverty.
Think about it, you cant really run an industrialized economy on 100% reneable energy.
Wind and solar are variable energy sources the more we add to the grid the more storage you have use to balance it out.
Hydro(which has its own environmental problems) and geothermal are constrained to certain regions which have favourable geography.
Fossil fuels are literally stored energy that you can stockpile and use when you want to.
We talk about replacing plastic but plastic is one of the greatest materials we ever made(its waterproof, light, flexible, we can shape it into any form and its cheap so it is accessible) just think about all the food we buy at the supermarket most of it is stored in some form plastic to keep it fresh( not talk about things it does not make sense to store in plastic ie fruit that's just silly/wasteful)
Our modern world is built with cement just look around it is everywhere, we use asphalt to build our roads and steel to build means of transport ships, trains, cars etc
We talk about decarbonization but some countries have not even really carbonized to grow their economy to what could be considered a decent standard of living.
I can't see how we can look at 3rd world countries ie India/Africa and other 3rd world countries and tell them they can't grow their economies because we used up all the carbon "budget".
You can run an industrialized economy on renewable energy. It just wouldn't look the same as the one we have developed in the presence of fossil fuels.
If there were a colony of modern humans established on an Earth-like planet that lacked surface coal seams, didn't have limestone deposits for cement, and lacked oil fields, you wouldn't expect them to shrug and say "Well, back to the stone age, I guess."
No, instead, they'd set up smart grid networks to use power when wind and solar were available and consume less energy when it was not. They'd use DC-DC converters that were more flexible under brownouts, where early energy systems didn't have that technology and had to rely on fixed transformers and fixed frequencies. They'd connect long distance, high-voltage lines between areas with hydro and geothermal energy to regions without, using pumped hydro storage when variable energy sources had excesses. Yes, they'd run Sabatier process factories to generate synthetic hydrocarbons for plastics and portable fuels, they'd precipitate calcium carbonate from ocean salts and atmospheric CO2 to make cements and ceramics; these would probably be less plentiful as a result of their cost and because they'd be aware that they don't decay but they wouldn't be nonexistent.
Our energy systems are moving bit by painful bit in this direction already. Indian, African, and other growing economies are growing in a world where renewables are cheap, where we have tech that makes them more usable, and where there's a lot of knowledge about climate and environmental science so they don't have to make the same mistakes we did.
Yes, the industrialized world works the way it does because of a history of fossil fuels. It may even have been impossible to jump-start the industrial revolution without them. But it doesn't have to remain that way.
They could certainly have been good for the world and also bad for the world going forward. We even have cliches about this, "too much of a good thing," etc. It's not a difficult concept.
> Fossil fuels 'were' good for 'the current human civilization, as it allowed to quickly develop technology at the cost of future' because we did not have any real alternative at the time.
Sometimes society ends up in a situation where we need things that are not sustainable, like oil or coal. Producing those unsustainable products to meet the demands of society does not make the producers solely responsible for any side effects. What is immoral is trying to artificially delay the transition to more sustainable alternatives or to socialize the costs of doing business.
Oil companies have repeatedly run well funded PR campaigns with the explicit goal of discrediting arguments that more sustainable energy technology was necessary despite knowing them to be false. Similarly, they have lobbied hard to ensure that when the impacts of oil to the environment are larger than expected, society picks up the tab. This lets them be more reckless with our communal environmental resources.