7 ms·

Smoke and Fumes: How the oil industry influenced the debate on climate change

122 points by petekistler 10y ago

lutusp 10y ago
Easily solved -- let's all stop using petrochemicals of all kinds.
- jonknee 10y ago
  That would devastate the global economy.
  - beatpanda 10y ago
    There's no economy on a dead planet
    - AlgorithmicTime 10y ago
      The planet's not going to die from an increase in CO2. We might, but the planet will be fine.
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    Then there is a massive problem with the global economy. Perhaps we should be trying to find ways of moving away from petroleum as a fuel?
  - cryptoz 10y ago
    Using petrochemicals has already devastated the global economy. We will spend trillions to attempt to fix the damage that has already been caused, when exactly $0 is what we should have to spend. We are causing a mass extinction event on the planet and will never be able to undo all the physical damage done. We will spend a huge amount of the world's money, resources and time to do our best to fix it, and all that is wasted because it could have been used to move forward sustainably rather than make a few people obscenely rich at the expense of most life on Earth.
    - pitchka 10y ago
      Animal agriculture is the leading cause of ocean dead zones, habitat destruction, extinction of species and deforestation. It all comes down to human greed, complacency and conveniency. We all like flesh, we all like speedy travel. If we sought for the long-term we would reduce or abolish the use completely, on our own.
    - oldmanjay 10y ago
      Your basic premise is not terribly convincing. The earth, and humanity, are in no serious danger of collapse. The measurable advantages our species has because of our industrialization seem far more tangible and have far more weight than your emotions, no matter how stridently expressed. I understand how difficult it is to hate people who have things (your unrelated parting shot at the "obscenely rich" is rather telling) and also want to express that hatred in a morally defensible way, but I don't think hyperbolic lies are as useful as you want them to be.
      - cryptoz 10y ago
        > The earth, and humanity, are in no serious danger of collapse. Many species on Earth are indeed in very serious danger of extinction due to human-caused climate change. Here is a paper in Nature discussing this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14712274 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14712274 > The measurable advantages our species has because of our industrialization seem far more tangible and have far more weight than your emotions, no matter how stridently expressed. I disagree with this. We could have industrialized and gained those measurable advantages without causing all of this destruction. That's what this HN link is about: why did we do this? Partly because the rich and wealthy people controlled the public's understanding of the risks in a way that would keep their money flowing at the detriment of our health. > your unrelated parting shot at the "obscenely rich" is rather telling How is this unrelated? The pursuit of wealth and the greed of the oil executives is directly related to this disaster. I do not "hate people that have things". I have lots of things. I do, however, hate people who are so greedy as to pollute our planet and cause runaway global greenhouse effects purely for their own gain.
    - jonknee 10y ago
- roschdal 10y ago
  Multiple renewable energy sources in combination, like solar and wind are a viable alternative. Also bringing down the Oil cartel OPEC, and having real market prices on oil would make the alternatives more viable.
  - sremani 10y ago
    lets start with basics shall we, how do you produce steel with out "coke"?
sremani 10y ago
Outrage is not the answer, if you live in OECD countries you have a massive footprint that rivals villages of developing countries. So do something about it. No, your pre-order of Model 3 that is going to come 3 years down the pike, does not put a dent in your carbon footprint. It is one small step, the roads your Tesla drives on needs petro-chemicals, so do those perfectly manicured french fries. Oil industry is greedy and entrenched, and do not expect some sort of Egalitarian enlightenment not from them, Nor from SV companies that colluded to screw their employees by forming a Cartel. Understand human nature, and it will help you trying to see the problems through caricatures and hopefully to work towards solution. Here is the hard truth, We are a fossil fuel civilization. The problems are complex, we can green wash and eat some organic pop corn, but that does not help. edit: there are some serious people trying to bring real solutions, I find Vaclav Smil, taking it to the next level of thinking instead of the constant greenwashing marketing campaigns.
- joe_the_user 10y ago
  Outrage is a tool that could do one useful thing - exclude a group of disingenuous people entirely from the discussion. You have a powerful, organized group that have worked to obstruct discussion on the crucial topic of how to solve this problem for a while. Punishing them harshly would serve the important purpose of preventing their obstruction. Figuring out how to deal with the climate change problem would be hard if everyone was negotiating in good faith. If we can exclude those who have polluted discussion entirely, so much the better. And of course the power of individual choice to solve is minimal, rhetoric like "you can do something to stop global warming" is exactly ridiculous greenwashing. Broad state policy is needed. And said policy has to be formulated from enlightened self-interest - sure the solar industry is as self-serving as the oil industry but if we can use their self-interest, so much the better. Edit: Suppose you had a company with ten divisions. The head of one division pursued a project that made the company a bunch of money but which that head knew would result in the company ultimately loosing even more. When that came to light, would not the sensible thing be to demote the head down to dog catcher and consult with everyone else how to change course? Does this kind of reasoning require that the other divisions head be saints or something? No.
matt_wulfeck 10y ago
> When do we hold someone responsible for a harm? What if the harm is climate change? We all burned oil in our cars. We didn't make an effort to carpool because it wasn't convenient. Skipped days riding our bike to work because it's too cold, etc. To me holding the blame entirely on the oil industry is akin to persecuting prostitutes for sex crime.
- chris_wot 10y ago
  Did you deliberately obfuscate, falsify documents, spend millions on misleading advertising, attempt to buy off critics or fund massive lobbying of law makers to make legislation become more favourable to yourself and increase your profitability?
  - dsp1234 10y ago
    Combining the two, would still have done this: "We didn't make an effort to carpool because it wasn't convenient." if the oil companies had not done this: "deliberately obfuscate, falsify documents, spend millions on misleading advertising, attempt to buy off critics or fund massive lobbying of law makers" If you think the answer is obviously yes, then also please think about the dramatic turn in smoking statistics since it was revealed that the cigarette companies were acting in the same manner.
    - chris_wot 10y ago
      Um. I'm having difficulty parsing your question. Are you saying we wouldn't have behaved in the way we did if petrol companies didn't do all those dreadful things?
      - dsp1234 10y ago
        There are certainly a lot of 'not's in the statements, so I apologize for the confusion. I was trying to keep the previous comments pure. At a basic level: Would we have taken the same actions, if the oil industry had not taken the same actions? If someone thinks the answer the question is, 'obviously yes', then I'm suggesting they look at the results of the revelations of the same actions by the tobacco industry. If someone thinks anything else, I'm not making any specific statement.
guelo 10y ago
Not divulging their internal research cannot be a crime because industries conduct private research for all kinds of competitive reasons. But the funding of false propaganda campaigns that they know are the opposite of their research should definitely be illegal, probably under fraud legislation I think. The problem is you can't find out that their propaganda campaigns are knowingly false because the research is secret. Though, as with the tobacco industry, the research does seem to leak out eventually, but it can take decades after all the original criminals are dead.
givan 10y ago
Is the industry or us evil? most of us have big suv's that we drive alone and the only thing we care about oil is the price. Some will look worried, chat on forums about these stuff but continue to do nothing because "there is nothing we can do".
- surfaceTensi0n 10y ago
  I don't think your assertions are correct. This article[0] is a bit old (2015), but it puts the number of SUVs on the road at 35%. There absolutely are things you can do, though obviously you, personally, aren't going to solve the problem. For example, skipping meat one day a week can have pretty substantial affects on emissions[1]. Or you can get involved with a group that is organizing around climate change. [0] - http://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2016/01/usa-suv-crossover-market-share-2015-sales-chart.html http://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2016/01/usa-suv-crossover-marke... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestock's_Long_Shadow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestock's_Long_Shadow
- surfaceTensi0n 10y ago
  I don't think your assertions are correct. This article[0] is a bit old (2015), but it puts the number of SUVs on the road at 35%. There absolutely are things you can do, though obviously you, personally, aren't going to solve the problem. For example, skipping meat one day a week can have pretty substantial affects on emissions[1]. Or you can get involved with a group that is organizing around climate change. [0] - http://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2016/01/usa-suv-crossover-market-share-2015-sales-chart.html http://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2016/01/usa-suv-crossover-marke... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestock's_Long_Shadow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestock's_Long_Shadow
- NumberCruncher 10y ago
  Words are cheap. Actions are not. That is why you see a lot of talking but no doing.
btbuildem 10y ago
Even if you took all the oil industry executives and board members and brutally murdered them on live television, leaving their corpses to hang from trees by their disemboweled entrails, it would not change anything. Others would take their place, doing the same thing. We all enable this by creating the demand.
- chris_wot 10y ago
  Yeah, that's a pretty inappropriate reaction!
pdonis 10y ago
The key document given in this article is the Robinson report of 1968. Looking at the excerpts given, this report made a prediction for CO2 level rise that can be tested: it predicted about 400 ppm by the year 2000 (from a value of about 320 in 1968). This was an overestimate: the actual level in 2000 (using the Mauna Loa measurements, which seem to be the key reference relied on in the report) was about 375. This enables us to test a second prediction made by the report: the temperature increase caused by C02 level rise. The report gives a very wide range for this: 1.1 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on the humidity change. The usual baseline assumption about humidity is that relative humidity will remain constant, and the report notes that that assumption leads to the larger prediction--7 degrees F--for temperature rise by the year 2000. That is about 4 degrees Celsius. Even if we correct for the actual CO2 level rise vs. predicted--about a 20% increase vs. 25% predicted--that still gives about a 3 degree Celsius predicted temperature rise by the year 2000, as compared to 1968. The actual rise was about 0.5 degrees Celsius. The report does say that the estimating method it uses likely overestimates temperature rise; but it does not, as far as I can see, consider the possibility that it might overestimate temperature rise by so much. So as far as I can see, the oil industry's decision to treat this information as much more uncertain than its authors claimed was reasonable.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- btilly 10y ago
  It seems that you're cherry-picking items in a deliberately deceptive way. The CO2 level rise clearly must have been an estimate based on, "If we project current usage trends forward, here is how much fossil fuel gets burned. Here is what that does to CO2." That usage model would have been thrown off by the first OPEC price shock of the 1970s, which induced a lot of conservation efforts and resulted in significantly less emissions. I'd be shocked if they had the basic "fossil fuel to CO2" relationship wrong. There is no way that they could have predicted the economic shocks that slowed consumption. Now let's talk about their environmental model. They gave a range from about 1 F to 7 F. The actual rise is about 1 F. I'd call that a success! (And why did you switch between F and C? Was it just to make the actual rise seem smaller.) Moving on, you argue for which model should apply, then argue that they got it wrong. Your behavior already doesn't make me trust you, but let's assume you are right. What mistake likely explains it? My best guess is that they simply did a long-term steady state model for what temperature things would stabilize at. That is a relatively simple calculation, and would have been fairly accurate if the atmosphere were mostly separate from the ocean. However we've learned since that heat exchanges with the oceans are much larger than we knew. (I remember circa 1990 learning in fluid mechanics that there was a big question THEN about how much global warming would slow down.) So the long-term temperature picture in the model is relatively accurate, but we get there more slowly than predicted. This is the kind of detail of our system that we COULD NOT have predicted with 1960s science. They knew that they were overestimated and knew that they would be right in the end, but had no way to know how long it would take to get there.
minikites 10y ago
The harder problem to solve is social, I think. The planet is literally unable to support 7 billion people living a USA/Western Europe lifestyle. Who's going to be the one to tell all the people in developing economies, "Sorry, but you can't have those things that we have."
- PavlovsCat 10y ago
  > Who's going to be the one to tell all the people in developing economies, "Sorry, but you can't have those things that we have." Who is going to be so brave to tell poor third world countries they cannot have nice things? We do all the time, by complicity in geopolitics which consist in things such as propping up dictators elsewhere so "our" corporations can get bigger slices of pies and resources rather than the local population. Not to mention war. So who is going to tell the actual centers of power that this can not be tolerated any longer? That is the real question IMO. The problem is taking out resources and exploiting people at a level that cannot be sustained; not that others want to do it too, but that anyone does. I mean, what is "a Western lifestyle"? For me it's stuff like basic sanitation, freedom of speech, high literacy rates, having medicine and clothes and shelter. Living and letting live, and last but not least work, preferably meaningful. Yes, some prosperity is a requirement to even have the possibility of those things. But buying new things all the time, ordering screws individually at Amazon, and throwing away a lot of plastic, those things and others seem not strictly needed to me. We need the scientific method, human rights and rule of law, not so much a constant stream of trinkets. People should be free to strive for trinkets, sure, but without too much pollution (which is essentially a way of restricting the freedom of others; indirectly, but very powerfully). As many things in life, it's not really a complex issue, it's not wanting to step on the toes of powerful people or peers that makes it complicated and contorted I think.
saiya-jin 10y ago
how about we start considering every single corporation above certain size/revenue not as an altruistic setup but rather ruthless gain-at-almost-all-costs oriented businesses and deal with them accordingly. and it would be their responsibility to prove state and public otherwise. something along presumed guilty until proven innocent. I know, naive and with many holes, but imagine it for a moment...

122 points by petekistler 10y ago

lutusp 10y ago

Easily solved -- let's all stop using petrochemicals of all kinds.

jonknee 10y ago
That would devastate the global economy.
- beatpanda 10y ago
  There's no economy on a dead planet
  - AlgorithmicTime 10y ago
    The planet's not going to die from an increase in CO2. We might, but the planet will be fine.
- chris_wot 10y ago
  Then there is a massive problem with the global economy. Perhaps we should be trying to find ways of moving away from petroleum as a fuel?
- cryptoz 10y ago
  Using petrochemicals has already devastated the global economy. We will spend trillions to attempt to fix the damage that has already been caused, when exactly $0 is what we should have to spend. We are causing a mass extinction event on the planet and will never be able to undo all the physical damage done. We will spend a huge amount of the world's money, resources and time to do our best to fix it, and all that is wasted because it could have been used to move forward sustainably rather than make a few people obscenely rich at the expense of most life on Earth.
  - pitchka 10y ago
    Animal agriculture is the leading cause of ocean dead zones, habitat destruction, extinction of species and deforestation. It all comes down to human greed, complacency and conveniency. We all like flesh, we all like speedy travel. If we sought for the long-term we would reduce or abolish the use completely, on our own.
  - oldmanjay 10y ago
    Your basic premise is not terribly convincing. The earth, and humanity, are in no serious danger of collapse. The measurable advantages our species has because of our industrialization seem far more tangible and have far more weight than your emotions, no matter how stridently expressed. I understand how difficult it is to hate people who have things (your unrelated parting shot at the "obscenely rich" is rather telling) and also want to express that hatred in a morally defensible way, but I don't think hyperbolic lies are as useful as you want them to be.
    - cryptoz 10y ago
      > The earth, and humanity, are in no serious danger of collapse. Many species on Earth are indeed in very serious danger of extinction due to human-caused climate change. Here is a paper in Nature discussing this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14712274 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14712274 > The measurable advantages our species has because of our industrialization seem far more tangible and have far more weight than your emotions, no matter how stridently expressed. I disagree with this. We could have industrialized and gained those measurable advantages without causing all of this destruction. That's what this HN link is about: why did we do this? Partly because the rich and wealthy people controlled the public's understanding of the risks in a way that would keep their money flowing at the detriment of our health. > your unrelated parting shot at the "obscenely rich" is rather telling How is this unrelated? The pursuit of wealth and the greed of the oil executives is directly related to this disaster. I do not "hate people that have things". I have lots of things. I do, however, hate people who are so greedy as to pollute our planet and cause runaway global greenhouse effects purely for their own gain.
  - jonknee 10y ago
roschdal 10y ago
Multiple renewable energy sources in combination, like solar and wind are a viable alternative. Also bringing down the Oil cartel OPEC, and having real market prices on oil would make the alternatives more viable.
- sremani 10y ago
  lets start with basics shall we, how do you produce steel with out "coke"?

sremani 10y ago

Outrage is not the answer, if you live in OECD countries you have a massive footprint that rivals villages of developing countries. So do something about it. No, your pre-order of Model 3 that is going to come 3 years down the pike, does not put a dent in your carbon footprint. It is one small step, the roads your Tesla drives on needs petro-chemicals, so do those perfectly manicured french fries. Oil industry is greedy and entrenched, and do not expect some sort of Egalitarian enlightenment not from them, Nor from SV companies that colluded to screw their employees by forming a Cartel. Understand human nature, and it will help you trying to see the problems through caricatures and hopefully to work towards solution. Here is the hard truth, We are a fossil fuel civilization. The problems are complex, we can green wash and eat some organic pop corn, but that does not help. edit: there are some serious people trying to bring real solutions, I find Vaclav Smil, taking it to the next level of thinking instead of the constant greenwashing marketing campaigns.

joe_the_user 10y ago
Outrage is a tool that could do one useful thing - exclude a group of disingenuous people entirely from the discussion. You have a powerful, organized group that have worked to obstruct discussion on the crucial topic of how to solve this problem for a while. Punishing them harshly would serve the important purpose of preventing their obstruction. Figuring out how to deal with the climate change problem would be hard if everyone was negotiating in good faith. If we can exclude those who have polluted discussion entirely, so much the better. And of course the power of individual choice to solve is minimal, rhetoric like "you can do something to stop global warming" is exactly ridiculous greenwashing. Broad state policy is needed. And said policy has to be formulated from enlightened self-interest - sure the solar industry is as self-serving as the oil industry but if we can use their self-interest, so much the better. Edit: Suppose you had a company with ten divisions. The head of one division pursued a project that made the company a bunch of money but which that head knew would result in the company ultimately loosing even more. When that came to light, would not the sensible thing be to demote the head down to dog catcher and consult with everyone else how to change course? Does this kind of reasoning require that the other divisions head be saints or something? No.

matt_wulfeck 10y ago

> When do we hold someone responsible for a harm? What if the harm is climate change? We all burned oil in our cars. We didn't make an effort to carpool because it wasn't convenient. Skipped days riding our bike to work because it's too cold, etc. To me holding the blame entirely on the oil industry is akin to persecuting prostitutes for sex crime.

chris_wot 10y ago
Did you deliberately obfuscate, falsify documents, spend millions on misleading advertising, attempt to buy off critics or fund massive lobbying of law makers to make legislation become more favourable to yourself and increase your profitability?
- dsp1234 10y ago
  Combining the two, would still have done this: "We didn't make an effort to carpool because it wasn't convenient." if the oil companies had not done this: "deliberately obfuscate, falsify documents, spend millions on misleading advertising, attempt to buy off critics or fund massive lobbying of law makers" If you think the answer is obviously yes, then also please think about the dramatic turn in smoking statistics since it was revealed that the cigarette companies were acting in the same manner.
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    Um. I'm having difficulty parsing your question. Are you saying we wouldn't have behaved in the way we did if petrol companies didn't do all those dreadful things?
    - dsp1234 10y ago
      There are certainly a lot of 'not's in the statements, so I apologize for the confusion. I was trying to keep the previous comments pure. At a basic level: Would we have taken the same actions, if the oil industry had not taken the same actions? If someone thinks the answer the question is, 'obviously yes', then I'm suggesting they look at the results of the revelations of the same actions by the tobacco industry. If someone thinks anything else, I'm not making any specific statement.

guelo 10y ago

Not divulging their internal research cannot be a crime because industries conduct private research for all kinds of competitive reasons. But the funding of false propaganda campaigns that they know are the opposite of their research should definitely be illegal, probably under fraud legislation I think. The problem is you can't find out that their propaganda campaigns are knowingly false because the research is secret. Though, as with the tobacco industry, the research does seem to leak out eventually, but it can take decades after all the original criminals are dead.

givan 10y ago

Is the industry or us evil? most of us have big suv's that we drive alone and the only thing we care about oil is the price. Some will look worried, chat on forums about these stuff but continue to do nothing because "there is nothing we can do".

surfaceTensi0n 10y ago
I don't think your assertions are correct. This article[0] is a bit old (2015), but it puts the number of SUVs on the road at 35%. There absolutely are things you can do, though obviously you, personally, aren't going to solve the problem. For example, skipping meat one day a week can have pretty substantial affects on emissions[1]. Or you can get involved with a group that is organizing around climate change. [0] - http://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2016/01/usa-suv-crossover-market-share-2015-sales-chart.html http://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2016/01/usa-suv-crossover-marke... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestock's_Long_Shadow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestock's_Long_Shadow
surfaceTensi0n 10y ago
I don't think your assertions are correct. This article[0] is a bit old (2015), but it puts the number of SUVs on the road at 35%. There absolutely are things you can do, though obviously you, personally, aren't going to solve the problem. For example, skipping meat one day a week can have pretty substantial affects on emissions[1]. Or you can get involved with a group that is organizing around climate change. [0] - http://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2016/01/usa-suv-crossover-market-share-2015-sales-chart.html http://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2016/01/usa-suv-crossover-marke... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestock's_Long_Shadow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestock's_Long_Shadow
NumberCruncher 10y ago
Words are cheap. Actions are not. That is why you see a lot of talking but no doing.

btbuildem 10y ago

Even if you took all the oil industry executives and board members and brutally murdered them on live television, leaving their corpses to hang from trees by their disemboweled entrails, it would not change anything. Others would take their place, doing the same thing. We all enable this by creating the demand.

chris_wot 10y ago
Yeah, that's a pretty inappropriate reaction!

pdonis 10y ago

The key document given in this article is the Robinson report of 1968. Looking at the excerpts given, this report made a prediction for CO2 level rise that can be tested: it predicted about 400 ppm by the year 2000 (from a value of about 320 in 1968). This was an overestimate: the actual level in 2000 (using the Mauna Loa measurements, which seem to be the key reference relied on in the report) was about 375. This enables us to test a second prediction made by the report: the temperature increase caused by C02 level rise. The report gives a very wide range for this: 1.1 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on the humidity change. The usual baseline assumption about humidity is that relative humidity will remain constant, and the report notes that that assumption leads to the larger prediction--7 degrees F--for temperature rise by the year 2000. That is about 4 degrees Celsius. Even if we correct for the actual CO2 level rise vs. predicted--about a 20% increase vs. 25% predicted--that still gives about a 3 degree Celsius predicted temperature rise by the year 2000, as compared to 1968. The actual rise was about 0.5 degrees Celsius. The report does say that the estimating method it uses likely overestimates temperature rise; but it does not, as far as I can see, consider the possibility that it might overestimate temperature rise by so much. So as far as I can see, the oil industry's decision to treat this information as much more uncertain than its authors claimed was reasonable.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
btilly 10y ago
It seems that you're cherry-picking items in a deliberately deceptive way. The CO2 level rise clearly must have been an estimate based on, "If we project current usage trends forward, here is how much fossil fuel gets burned. Here is what that does to CO2." That usage model would have been thrown off by the first OPEC price shock of the 1970s, which induced a lot of conservation efforts and resulted in significantly less emissions. I'd be shocked if they had the basic "fossil fuel to CO2" relationship wrong. There is no way that they could have predicted the economic shocks that slowed consumption. Now let's talk about their environmental model. They gave a range from about 1 F to 7 F. The actual rise is about 1 F. I'd call that a success! (And why did you switch between F and C? Was it just to make the actual rise seem smaller.) Moving on, you argue for which model should apply, then argue that they got it wrong. Your behavior already doesn't make me trust you, but let's assume you are right. What mistake likely explains it? My best guess is that they simply did a long-term steady state model for what temperature things would stabilize at. That is a relatively simple calculation, and would have been fairly accurate if the atmosphere were mostly separate from the ocean. However we've learned since that heat exchanges with the oceans are much larger than we knew. (I remember circa 1990 learning in fluid mechanics that there was a big question THEN about how much global warming would slow down.) So the long-term temperature picture in the model is relatively accurate, but we get there more slowly than predicted. This is the kind of detail of our system that we COULD NOT have predicted with 1960s science. They knew that they were overestimated and knew that they would be right in the end, but had no way to know how long it would take to get there.

minikites 10y ago

The harder problem to solve is social, I think. The planet is literally unable to support 7 billion people living a USA/Western Europe lifestyle. Who's going to be the one to tell all the people in developing economies, "Sorry, but you can't have those things that we have."

PavlovsCat 10y ago
> Who's going to be the one to tell all the people in developing economies, "Sorry, but you can't have those things that we have." Who is going to be so brave to tell poor third world countries they cannot have nice things? We do all the time, by complicity in geopolitics which consist in things such as propping up dictators elsewhere so "our" corporations can get bigger slices of pies and resources rather than the local population. Not to mention war. So who is going to tell the actual centers of power that this can not be tolerated any longer? That is the real question IMO. The problem is taking out resources and exploiting people at a level that cannot be sustained; not that others want to do it too, but that anyone does. I mean, what is "a Western lifestyle"? For me it's stuff like basic sanitation, freedom of speech, high literacy rates, having medicine and clothes and shelter. Living and letting live, and last but not least work, preferably meaningful. Yes, some prosperity is a requirement to even have the possibility of those things. But buying new things all the time, ordering screws individually at Amazon, and throwing away a lot of plastic, those things and others seem not strictly needed to me. We need the scientific method, human rights and rule of law, not so much a constant stream of trinkets. People should be free to strive for trinkets, sure, but without too much pollution (which is essentially a way of restricting the freedom of others; indirectly, but very powerfully). As many things in life, it's not really a complex issue, it's not wanting to step on the toes of powerful people or peers that makes it complicated and contorted I think.

saiya-jin 10y ago

how about we start considering every single corporation above certain size/revenue not as an altruistic setup but rather ruthless gain-at-almost-all-costs oriented businesses and deal with them accordingly. and it would be their responsibility to prove state and public otherwise. something along presumed guilty until proven innocent. I know, naive and with many holes, but imagine it for a moment...