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From the article: "The new lawsuits will benefit from revelations about what fossil fuel companies knew about climate change and when they knew it. In the year

From the article: "The new lawsuits will benefit from revelations about what fossil fuel companies knew about climate change and when they knew it. In the years since Kivalina, reporting by InsideClimate News and others has shown that fossil fuel companies, Exxon in particular, conducted their own research in the 1970s and ‘80s confirming the risks posed by greenhouse gasses. Internally, companies prepared their own infrastructure for climate change, raising the decks of drilling platforms and designing pipelines for predicted rising seas and melting permafrost. But externally, they denied the risk, marketing and selling fossil fuels while sowing doubt about climate change through front groups. The suits compare the disinformation campaign to that waged by tobacco companies, a comparison made easy by the fact that both industries paid some of the same people to downplay the danger." So you are saying it is legal for corporations to tell lies in order to influence consumer decisions?

poster123 9y ago
Smokers who got lung cancer and emphysema were harmed. Our lives have been greatly improved overall by access to cheap and abundant electricity. It is easy to blame "them", the oil companies, but the fact that a carbon tax cannot become law suggests that Americans prefer cheap electricity even it means a slightly warmer planet.
- woodandsteel 9y ago
  You're not addressing what I said. I didn't ask if it should be legal for companies to purposely misinform the public, but rather if under present law it actually is. The answer is no. That is why the tobacco companies settled for a hundred billion dollars once the the evidence became public that they had been doing that.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    They didn't settle because they misinformed the public. They settled because people had credible arguments that they had been harmed as a result of the misinformation. The harm is a critical component. (Of course, something that has a net benefit still ma y have harmed someone, so that a particular misrepresentation supported something that was on balance good doesn't mean that it would involve no liability. But the misrepresentation alone is insufficient for liability, generally. And, in any case, I'm not certain that, even discounting future costs that have yet to materialize, misrepresentations on climate change have been harmless even in net so far.)
Udik 9y ago
I don't think companies speak with a single voice, nor that it is the role of companies to educate the public in regards to the general societal impact of their products- especially when those impacts are as uncertain as climate change has been in the past 40 years. Lobbying in the US is a legal activity, and if politicians allowed themselves to make harmful decisions because of it, it's entirely their fault and of the people who voted for them. On the other hand, climate scientists, some working for Exxon itself, have been publicly warning about the risks of climate change for 40 years. Did you stop buying petrol or petrol based products, and did you stop enjoying the benefits of cheap energy extracted from the oil reserves? No, you didn't. Now you'd want Exxon to pay for the liabilities, while keeping the wealth you enjoyed and accumulated during these years thanks to the very product you blame them for. Are you able to calculate what part of your wealth and security is derived from the availability of the cheap energy Exxon has provided you? Are you willing to give it back to Exxon, as you're asking Exxon to pay for the damages it caused with its product? You aren't. You're trying to offload the risks and responsibility of your choices on someone else, while keeping for yourself the benefits they provided you.
- woodandsteel 9y ago
  See my answer above. You say "nor that it is the role of companies to educate the public in regards to the general societal impact of their products- especially when those impacts are as uncertain as climate change has been in the past 40 years." I am not talking about whether they should educate the public, I am asking if it is legal for them to lie, and the answer is it is not.
  - Udik 9y ago
    I am not really sure of what it means for a company "to lie". And I'm not sure it's illegal even for a person to lie, except under oath or in official investigations. A company can falsify official documents, but that would be fraud, and I think it's limited to financial matters, where there are precise algorithms to follow. Then there is false advertisement, but this as well, needs to say something definitely wrong about intrinsic characteristics of the product. As far as I know (not much, in truth) allegations are that some Exxon scientist informed the management board of the concerns in the scientific community about climate change; the board simply decided that the risks were too far away in time and too uncertain, while the alternatives simply weren't there, for the company to take action upon this information. Which sounds like a perfectly reasonable conclusion in 1982. Also, throughout the years, Exxon seems to have financed and published sound climate science, while at the same time emphasizing the uncertainty of the conclusions in the communication for the general public. And again, this seems to be legitimate, as it is in everybody's right to state the facts as they are, while trying to spin them in the least damaging way for themselves. Again, if the peer reviewed science was so sound, and publicly available, it was the duty of the government and politics to act upon it, not of the very companies that sold the product.

poster123 9y ago

Smokers who got lung cancer and emphysema were harmed. Our lives have been greatly improved overall by access to cheap and abundant electricity. It is easy to blame "them", the oil companies, but the fact that a carbon tax cannot become law suggests that Americans prefer cheap electricity even it means a slightly warmer planet.

woodandsteel 9y ago
You're not addressing what I said. I didn't ask if it should be legal for companies to purposely misinform the public, but rather if under present law it actually is. The answer is no. That is why the tobacco companies settled for a hundred billion dollars once the the evidence became public that they had been doing that.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  They didn't settle because they misinformed the public. They settled because people had credible arguments that they had been harmed as a result of the misinformation. The harm is a critical component. (Of course, something that has a net benefit still ma y have harmed someone, so that a particular misrepresentation supported something that was on balance good doesn't mean that it would involve no liability. But the misrepresentation alone is insufficient for liability, generally. And, in any case, I'm not certain that, even discounting future costs that have yet to materialize, misrepresentations on climate change have been harmless even in net so far.)

Udik 9y ago

I don't think companies speak with a single voice, nor that it is the role of companies to educate the public in regards to the general societal impact of their products- especially when those impacts are as uncertain as climate change has been in the past 40 years. Lobbying in the US is a legal activity, and if politicians allowed themselves to make harmful decisions because of it, it's entirely their fault and of the people who voted for them. On the other hand, climate scientists, some working for Exxon itself, have been publicly warning about the risks of climate change for 40 years. Did you stop buying petrol or petrol based products, and did you stop enjoying the benefits of cheap energy extracted from the oil reserves? No, you didn't. Now you'd want Exxon to pay for the liabilities, while keeping the wealth you enjoyed and accumulated during these years thanks to the very product you blame them for. Are you able to calculate what part of your wealth and security is derived from the availability of the cheap energy Exxon has provided you? Are you willing to give it back to Exxon, as you're asking Exxon to pay for the damages it caused with its product? You aren't. You're trying to offload the risks and responsibility of your choices on someone else, while keeping for yourself the benefits they provided you.

woodandsteel 9y ago
See my answer above. You say "nor that it is the role of companies to educate the public in regards to the general societal impact of their products- especially when those impacts are as uncertain as climate change has been in the past 40 years." I am not talking about whether they should educate the public, I am asking if it is legal for them to lie, and the answer is it is not.
- Udik 9y ago
  I am not really sure of what it means for a company "to lie". And I'm not sure it's illegal even for a person to lie, except under oath or in official investigations. A company can falsify official documents, but that would be fraud, and I think it's limited to financial matters, where there are precise algorithms to follow. Then there is false advertisement, but this as well, needs to say something definitely wrong about intrinsic characteristics of the product. As far as I know (not much, in truth) allegations are that some Exxon scientist informed the management board of the concerns in the scientific community about climate change; the board simply decided that the risks were too far away in time and too uncertain, while the alternatives simply weren't there, for the company to take action upon this information. Which sounds like a perfectly reasonable conclusion in 1982. Also, throughout the years, Exxon seems to have financed and published sound climate science, while at the same time emphasizing the uncertainty of the conclusions in the communication for the general public. And again, this seems to be legitimate, as it is in everybody's right to state the facts as they are, while trying to spin them in the least damaging way for themselves. Again, if the peer reviewed science was so sound, and publicly available, it was the duty of the government and politics to act upon it, not of the very companies that sold the product.