26 ms·

Exxon knew that fossil fuels were influencing the climate in 1978

457 points by ajhaupt7 7y ago

caminante 7y ago
OP do you have a connection to the blog? I noticed your submission history favors it.
- jchw 7y ago
  Comment history has the answer for whatever that’s worth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753300
- sk0g 7y ago
  Seems like they work on it. Or used to. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753300
- ajhaupt7 7y ago
  Yep, I'm the author + developer -- hope there isn't a problem with posting your own content. I think there's value in it!
  - throwaway66666 7y ago
    I (not a mod, just your a regular HN user) think it's perfectly fine to post your own content. As long as you don't spam it, and you don't post over-flattering headlines for it. And definitely way better than posting your content under a guise of an "unafilliated" friend. It will reach the front page and stay here only if it's good, so who cares if it came straight from the wolf's mouth. Also pretty creepy that people go down post comments history to check who it is and where you 're coming from. Eh.
    - jchw 7y ago
      I generally don’t look at post/comment history except out of general curiosity myself. It’s not like the stuff posted here is private, and it’s probably more permanent than most sites. I also post under effectively my real life identity. Could eventually regret that, but there’s definitely downsides to the alternative approaches to online identity too.
    - reitanqild 7y ago
      Not sure how to vote this: Totally agree with the first part. The second part describes a thing I regularily do as "pretty creepy". To clarify: before deciding to flag, downvote or vouch for someone I might have a look at their comment history to see if I am misunderstanding something. Also if someone posts something nice I look through their history to find more good comments. I don't think I'm the only one who does this and in fact I'd recommend it instead of blindly thinking "troll" and hit downvote and flag whenever one sees something one doesn't agree with.
      - throwaway66666 7y ago
        I did not mean to offend you. And I am sorry I used that terminology. To me it felt odd that if you reach the front page suddenly eyes are looking at your history and everything you have done. If you put yourself out there, suddenly eyes are watching everything. That seemed a bit scary (and again sorry for using emotional words), though of course makes sense why it happens. But in general, I fully agree with you. There are many reasons to do it, and perhaps it's even helpful when something is not clear and you want to understand better where someone is coming from, as you said. Apologies again.
        reitanqild 7y ago
        > If you put yourself out there, suddenly eyes are watching everything. That seemed a bit scary (and again sorry for using emotional words), though of course makes sense why it happens. I'm painfully aware. Which is why I often use this account :-) > Apologies again. No need for that after you cleared it up. I might even have been too harsh myself. I actually prefer if there is some room for thought here and I might have read more into your original post than you intended.
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        Downote is for comments that don't contribute positively to the discussion. Flagging is for more egregious violations of community guidelines. Whether a comment deserves either of those does not in any way depend on the commenter's posting history and to reference posting history in applying them is problematic in a manner akin to the ad hominem fallacy, in that it substitutes a general judgement of the source of an utterance when what is called for is a judgement on the utterance itself.
  - eppsilon 7y ago
    Could you add an RSS feed of your posts?
    - ajhaupt7 7y ago
      Yeah definitely, I'll let you know when it's up there
crispinb 7y ago
Not news of course, but worth restating. Credulous 'scepticism' about the fundamentals of the climate collapse threat has been largely driven by corporate propaganda campaigns. Those campaigns were themselves constructed by people who weren't 'sceptics' -- they believed AGM was happening -- but considered their short-term profitability more important. Climate collapse 'sceptics' were nearly all gulls.
- modzu 7y ago
  there has been plenty of genuine scepticism from within the scientific community (as there should be). what has happened is that it has become politicized such that the science is suffering for fear of being labeled a heretic. much of the research is published via the intergovernmental panel on climate change; well it's right there in the title. none of this is to say that there aren't also entities pushing propaganda (exxon, etc)
  - logjammin 7y ago
    Example of investigators whose work has suffered for fear of being labeled a heretic?
    - modzu 7y ago
      Freeman Dyson
      - scotty79 7y ago
        He's a physicists. Why would he have any idea about climate? He's just a person with an opinion not a dissenting scientist. And if his work suffered as a result of voicing such opinion then it was only to be expected. If you voice stupid opinion regarding domain you know almost nothing about and prop it up with your work reputation it's only fair if that reputation takes a hit.
        Youcandothis 7y ago
rorykoehler 7y ago
There are articles that are over 100 years old that point out fossil fuels cause climate change. Surely they knew far earlier than 1978?
- dcl 7y ago
  Those earlier articles made educated guesses that the greenhouse effect would eventually come in to play. Exxon attempted to model the effect to work out the possible impact.
bnolsen 7y ago
Having now been in China for several weeks this beating the drum trying to make americans feel guilty (and give power over to other people) is absolutely absurd. You want to control pollution the first places to start are china and india. The US in comparison produces negligible impact.
- jordache 7y ago
  US still accounts for double digit percentage of global greenhouse gas emissions.. so it's not a non-trivial amount
- umanwizard 7y ago
  Nonsense. The US produces more than double the CO2 per capita as China. As usual, total numbers are meaningless without scaling them by population. If China split into 100 independent states tomorrow, they wouldn't be a problem anymore by your metric, even if they produce exactly the same amount of CO2 as they do now. Fair comparison with roughly equal population: Europe, the US, and Australia combined vs. China. And the former group produces more CO2 than the latter.
  - sparky_z 7y ago
    Surely, as far as the planet's concerned, the total numbers matter more than per capita. If, say, Andorra hypothetically had the largest per-capita numbers by an order of magnitude, that still wouldn't make them the biggest threat to the planet, nor would it Andorra the most effective place to target activism. Also, if you look at the trendlines, the US's per capita numbers are going down, while the China's and India's are going up with no signs of slowing. So is their population growth. The US is currently "taking care of itself" more or less, but China and India (already # 1 and #3 in total carbon numbers) are getting worse at a frightening pace. If we spend all of our energy focusing on the US, even if we're extraordinarily successful there, we'll look around in 20 years and see we lost progress globally. As though we didn't heed Amdahl's law and spent all of our time optimizing the wrong function. The most important thing we can do is find some way for China and (especially) India to grow their economies and pull their citizens out of poverty in a way that doesn't destroy the planet.
Reedx 7y ago
> The accuracy of their predictions are chilling — they anticipated (in their "21st Century Study-High Growth Scenario") that in 2020 atmospheric CO2 levels would fall between 400 and 420 ppm. They also foresaw the accompanying sea level rise, melting of polar ice sheets, change of rainfall patterns, and agricultural failures. Wow. How does this compare to other predictions at the time?
- sbarker 7y ago
  Nostradamus.
- Maarten88 7y ago
  Maybe they were somewhat later, but Shell oil knew too. They did similar research and came to the same conclusions. Here is a video they made in 1991 warning about climate change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTlYYlRN0LY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTlYYlRN0LY
rdm_blackhole 7y ago
No surprises there. I don't understand why it took so long to uncover the truth. Even today, they are just playing the long game using the same tactics that the tobacco industry used and deny, deny and deny some more. Hopefully this company one day will be prosecuted.
- perfunctory 7y ago
  It's not hard to imagine that in the future there will be some kind of Nuremberg trials against people involved in deliberate climate disinformation campaigns.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    The strategy is that you die before the pitchforks arrive.
crimsonalucard 7y ago
What do we expect? If your purpose in life was found to be a total lie. Do you bury the truth and deny it to yourself and the world? Or do you commit suicide? Every fossil fuel company is going to lie their pants off because that's what you and all other humans would do if they got into the same situation.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dunstad 7y ago
  Where is option 3, come clean, change their ways and work to correct the damage? Why are 'lie' and 'kill themselves' more obvious?
  - crimsonalucard 7y ago
    Option 3 is what people admire but it is not human behavior. Throughout history people and corporations have chosen to lie to themselves and others rather than accept a cold hard truth.
    - dunstad 7y ago
      Sounds like the profit motive has some significant issues.
- reitanqild 7y ago
  > Every fossil fuel company is going to lie their pants off because that's what you and all other humans would do if they got into the same situation. Speak for yourself. 1. A good number of people actually have a spine. I'd not say the majority "is good && have a spine" but enough that you are lying. 2. It doesn't help at all to spread the lie that everyone else lying. Speaking as someone who has been embarassingly honest, and who also admires his friend who came back and admitted he'd been laughing at me behind my back.
  - crimsonalucard 7y ago
pier25 7y ago
It's terrible to think that maybe if Exxon and others didn't invest in lobbying and disinformation campaigns against climate change maybe humanity would have started acting 30 years earlier. It's 2019 and humanity is barely starting to think about acting. Global CO2 emissions keep growing as if we were in "business as usual". Humanity needs to realize the magnitude of the problem. Climate change is, by far, the biggest threat it has ever encountered and probably will ever encounter. The solution will require us to make radical changes to our lifestyle and our culture. For example, we can't keep having irrational leaders that ignore basic scientific facts.
- 1337shadow 7y ago
  Weren't documentaries predicting a global climate cooling in 1978 ? In that context, did Exxon think they were saving the climate ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei-_SXLMMfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei-_SXLMMfo
  - keithnz 7y ago
    They were predicting a mini ice age due to reduced solar activity. That is studied and incorporated in the climate models we have today.
  - breakyerself 7y ago
    Even in the 70s most climate scientists were expecting human caused global warming. The cooling thing was more a media phenomenon. 1965 - 1979 there were a total of 7 scientific papers predicting a cooling climate. Compared to 42 predicting human caused global warming (Peterson 2008).
    - 1337shadow 7y ago
      Pretty interesting, thanks for answering. I wasn't even born, found a nice wiki link where scientists predicted cooling because of aerosol increase but the greenhouse effect was apparently published about in 1972 so they should have known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science#Scientists_increasingly_predict_warming,_1970s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_scie...
imagetic 7y ago
http://graphics.latimes.com/exxon-arctic/ http://graphics.latimes.com/exxon-arctic/
gedy 7y ago
Maybe no help from Exxon, but US per capita CO2 has been decreasing since 1978. But China and India have increased per capita, which is scary given their huge populations.
- EForEndeavour 7y ago
  Both US population and absolute US greenhouse gas emissions have been growing over time. Population has simply grown proportionally faster than emissions. So yes, US emissions per capita have decreased over time, but total US emissions have been rising, and that's what affects climate.
  - bendbro 7y ago
    Thanks only to immigration. US birth rate is well below replacement.
    - earenndil 7y ago
      Didn't used to be, though.
  - gedy 7y ago
    I agree "per capita" can be misleading, but China and India are growing faster than the US, and China is outputting more CO2 than the US.
    - amanaplanacanal 7y ago
      China has a lot more people than the US, and they do a lot of the US's manufacturing too. Many people think that the US should not try to cut carbon emissions because China swamps us in this. I strongly disagree with that.
      - gedy 7y ago
        The thing is: we are cutting emissions, but it probably won’t save the planet, if China and India keep growing. The “fairness“ of per capita usage is a separate issue from climate change
cbHXBY1D 7y ago
Almost everyone on HN recognizes that climate change is an existential threat to (most) life on earth. There is less agreement on how to mitigate it's effects. One solution which I favor is nationalization of US oil companies. While hardly discussed in the US, it's a solution that is currently being discussed in the UK and has been done by many different countries, though usually because of the legacy of imperialism and colonialism. Overtime I have come to the realization free market solutions and incentives are incapable of spurring the changes needed to transition to a cleaner form of energy, especially with the short time scale we have before results are disastrous.
- mc32 7y ago
  So Venezuela nationalized their petroleum, I think Mexico did something similar. And Iran. I don’t see where those actions have kerbed the export or internal use of petroleum.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    Goals there were different. Nationalizing those industries and using tariffs to stabilize at a higher price would accelerate adoption of better technology. You could implode demand for natural gas and fuel oil by raising prices and capturing profits to capitalize heat pump adoption in the northeast, for example.
    - Robotbeat 7y ago
      ...and you'd likely elect a populist in 4 years that would wrench open the spigots. Dramatically. Live. On cable news. I'm fully in favor of "keep it in the ground." But nationalization isn't necessarily the right way. In fact: if someone sufficiently wealthy were able to buy up certain strategic assets, they'd be able to resist public pressure to reopen them. For instance, if you had bought Arch Coal at its nadir when it went bankrupt for about $1.4 billion, you would've had control over 16% of America's coal supply. From what I can tell, billions of tons of coal. You could shut it down for pennies on the dollar versus any carbon sequestration scheme. Or buy up and close down export terminals (and revitalize the property around them if in urban areas, making back your money easily while crippling the profitability of coal mining in the US). If it was nationalized, it could as likely go the way of Venezuela, which has (until recently) actually extremely subsidized petroleum consumption. IMHO, government power should be used to tax these things what they're polluting (the stick), develop regulations while strongly subsidizing clean alternatives (the carrot). Nationalizing the oil industry and jacking up prices is just going to make people mad at you while enabling a successor to completely undo your work.
mikeash 7y ago
Remember this the next time someone tries to tell you that oil companies are just giving customers what they demand and that the companies themselves aren’t at fault.
- jefflombardjr 7y ago
  Relevant to your comment: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/152638001316881395 https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/15263800131... The individualization of environmental problems is a serious obstacle. "We need to stop buying and using plastic water bottles" needs to become "Pepsico and Coke need to stop producing trash."
murat124 7y ago
Former Exxon CEO and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson famously stated in 2013 during a meeting with Exxonmobil shareholders: "What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers"[1]. He explained, "As a species that’s why we’re all still here: we have spent our entire existence adapting. So we will adapt to this. It’s an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions." The idea that the humans will somehow adapt to this is the stupidest idea I've ever heard. Koch bros are pushing the same idea, on the evolutionary level, that humans will learn to live. To me humanity is already dead, we are eternally doomed. We just don't know it yet. It's better to realize and accept it[2], as if we're told we have cancer and our days are numbered. This is a very pessimistic approach, but it is an honest one and may help mitigate problems for future generations. [1] https://thinkprogress.org/exxon-ceo-what-good-is-it-to-save-the-planet-if-humanity-suffers-2befcd55f0b1/ https://thinkprogress.org/exxon-ceo-what-good-is-it-to-save-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/26/were-doomed-mayer-hillman-on-the-climate-reality-no-one-else-will-dare-mention https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/26/were-doo...
- karl11 7y ago
  Fortunately for the rest of us, that optimism has worked pretty well for thousands of years now. Besides, if you really believe we're doomed, what difference does it make to you what anyone thinks about anything?
  - sdwa 7y ago
    Why do you think it's appropriate to rely on blind optimism just because it's worked for us so far when the challenge we face is totally unprecedented as well as existential? Seems awfully careless to me.
  - lostmyoldone 7y ago
    Even if it were true, thousands of years is barely anything on any time scale that matters. Disregarding that, we've certainly not lived through thousands of years of global anthropogenic climate change, which is what this is all about. It's worth to remember that adaption doesn't necessarily equate survival in the way we tend to think about it, as dinosaurs adapted too. Humanity, at least on this planet, is already doomed. The sun will eventually consume us as a natural part of its life cycle. It's a very long time until that happens, but life here will eventually end. So as we're already doomed, should we then do nothing to prevent suffering and pain until then? It should be a rhetorical question, but apparently it isn't always. The argument can be made quite simple: As long as we continue to have children, or accept people having children, we have chosen - as a species - to not give up on them, and their descendants. Preserving a livable environment, and preferably much more than livable, is simply a duty springing from that fact. There is no need for any deep philosophy, to care for the environment is - essentially - a consequence of choices already made.
glandium 7y ago
AsapScience video on the subject: https://youtu.be/TbW_1MtC2So https://youtu.be/TbW_1MtC2So
Proven 7y ago
So what? Most people have no problem with that. What normal people challenge is: 1) Estimate of impact. If you breathe, you're bad for CO2 emissions. But should it matter? It's hard to imagine one should care about it. 2) the government's ability to cost effectively do something about it (that is, that ability equals exactly zero, while taxes required to pay for that theft and incompetence are higher than zero).
thunderrabbit 7y ago
This "entertains" me in a perverse way. I knew fossil fuels were harming the environment in 1978, and I was only a kid at the time. Exhaust stank, looked dirty. Doesn't take much to figure it out.
- frittig 7y ago
  Vaccines hurt, vegetables taste bad and taking drugs feels good. Your ideology is flawed.
  - ramblerman 7y ago
    Well, if you don't trust your senses at all, perhaps yours is too.
itry2develop 7y ago
You mean when global cooling was all the rage?
akerro 7y ago
No surprises here, also Shell knew that. Documents show they knew that in '80s, later they renew research in '90s: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=shell+knew+about+global+warming&t=ffab&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=shell+knew+about+global+warming&t=...
Haga 7y ago
If you solution boils down to "I want human nature to change" without concrete steps and behavior science papers to back your plan up, and a good cause, sideffects analysis - you are contributing as much solutions as socialism does to the economic debate. You are uttering noise and silencing those with real(istic) suggestions. Also you are all pushing totalitarian systems if you want to enforce drastic economic sanctions.
ptah 7y ago
How is this not illegal?
- mcv 7y ago
  They're rich and important?
jhellan 7y ago
We all knew. I learned about CO2 greenhouse warming in high school in 1974. At a lecture at the University of Trondheim, Norway, around 1980, (in)famous physicist Edward Teller joked that we of all people shouldn't be worried about global warming.
- mangecoeur 7y ago
  This! I've noticed a pattern recently of headlines that person X or company Y "knew all the way back in the 70s/80s". The real tragedy is that we have delayed doing anything about it for so long, people are now "rediscovering" the original warnings as if they are historical revelations. As a quick refresher: the original climate deal, the Kyoto Protocol, was signed in 1992, by then everyone was well on board with the science. In fact, the climate negotiations were spun off from the convention on reducing CFCs (Vienna Convention of 1985), which are important greenhouse gases as well as being damaging to the ozone layer. It was thought (correctly) at the time that because CFCs were produced and used in a limited number of places, it would be much easier to resolve that problem and move the wider greenhouse gas negotiations into a separate treaty, which took another 7 years until 1992.
- chx 7y ago
  Teller warned the oil industry in 1959. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/01/on-its-hundredth-birthday-in-1959-edward-teller-warned-the-oil-industry-about-global-warming https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    I know Teller wanted to come across as calm and respectable so that people would take him seriously, but if he could look back now he would probably have acted like a deranged lunatic preaching in the streets about the dangers of carbon pollution. I also think the same of Carl Sagan. For all his wonderful and critical achievements, I bet if he could see how things turned out, he would have unquestioningly devoted his life to spreading awareness about climate change here on Earth instead of focusing on astronomy and nuclear war.
perfunctory 7y ago
World's richest 10% produce half of global carbon emissions [0] If my math is right, if the top decile reduced their emissions at least to the level of the second decide, the global emissions would fall by 30%. Dear HN crowd, I bet a fair share of us belongs to the top 10%, please reduce your emissions. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/worlds-richest-10-produce-half-of-global-carbon-emissions-says-oxfam https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/worlds-r...
- the_duke 7y ago
  This report only deals with "lifestyle related emissions", not total emissions. A large percentage of emissions is transportation, manufacturing, heating and electricity. While the rich will consume more, the effect on total emissions is much lower.
  - perfunctory 7y ago
    True. And to be honest I am not sure how lifestyle emissions are calculated. Does it include the cost of manufacturing and bringing goods to the market? Can't we argue that most emissions are ultimately lifestyle related?
soulofmischief 7y ago
I made a choice-based game a few months ago about dealing with the political realities of climate change, inspired by Sara Teasdale and Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains. You can play it online here: https://tinyurl.com/43softrains-v1-1 https://tinyurl.com/43softrains-v1-1 I have been considering pursuing funding for making similar choice-based games like this one and integrating them with classroom curriculums.
- the_duke 7y ago
  This is very cool! Is the code open source? I would love to have a translated version of this and encourage the younger members of my family to play it.
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    Glad you liked it. Here you go: https://github.com/bad-software/there-will-come-soft-rains https://github.com/bad-software/there-will-come-soft-rains What languages are you interested in seeing?
FrojoS 7y ago
Slightly tangential, but I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the political way forward for big countries: 1. Have a single CO2 budget for the whole country, with an aggressive, Hard to change roadmap of yearly reduction of said budget down to zero in the not too long future. 2. Estimate the CO2 footprint of every single product, incl. imports by one or several neutral organizations. This doesn’t have to be perfect as long as it attempts to be fair. 3. Tax every product according to this budget using supply/demand markets (certificates trading). 4. Redistribute the tax, especially to mitigate the hardship on low income households and domestic companies. In my mind, this would create a gigantic incentive for CO2 reduction for your citizens as well as domestic AND foreign companies. Crucially, it would not require any global agreement and consensus. Apart from perhaps renegotiation or canceling of trade agreements on the side of the country that implements the policy. Note, that you can replace CO2 by greenhouse gases or environmental impact in general. I just use it as a shorthandle. Very curious about your opinions.
- scroot 7y ago
  Could this result in moving to countries that don't have such policies, thereby allowing for increasing emissions (ie carbon tax havens)
  - perfunctory 7y ago
    Would have to tax imports from those countries as well
    - FrojoS 7y ago
      Exactly. And sure, some people might move away because of this issue. But unless people start starving a majority won’t leave their homes. They will just revoke the legislation.
    - psandersen 7y ago
      Pricing in externalities are the only good economic argument for tariffs I'm aware of... Carbon tax + tariffs in proportion to the lack of carbon taxes would be the most logical way of setting up a market-based solution to climate change.
merpnderp 7y ago
Aren’t the people who fought nuclear power in the 80’s just as culpable? Would there still be any coal plants running if we’d started to move to carbon free sources back then?
0x262d 7y ago
this is an example of what one could sarcastically describe as a "market failure"
- trophycase 7y ago
  When externalities aren't priced. It isn't a "free market"
  - 0x262d 7y ago
    does anyone who is opposed to planned markets ever talk about the information complexity of accounting for all externalities? genuine question.
bobowzki 7y ago
This was known around 1900
iconjack 7y ago
Also 1978: "International Team of Specialists Finds No End in Sight to 30‐Year Cooling Trend in Northern Hemisphere" [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1978/01/05/archives/international-team-of-specialists-finds-no-end-in-sight-to-30year.html https://www.nytimes.com/1978/01/05/archives/international-te...
stefek99 7y ago
It is a well-known fact, just wondering since when it is news? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...
stefek99 7y ago
This is a potential strategy to tackle it: https://genesis.re/wiki#Plan_B https://genesis.re/wiki#Plan_B (decentralized innovation as politics is too slow)

457 points by ajhaupt7 7y ago

caminante 7y ago

OP do you have a connection to the blog? I noticed your submission history favors it.

jchw 7y ago
Comment history has the answer for whatever that’s worth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753300
sk0g 7y ago
Seems like they work on it. Or used to. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753300
ajhaupt7 7y ago
Yep, I'm the author + developer -- hope there isn't a problem with posting your own content. I think there's value in it!
- throwaway66666 7y ago
  I (not a mod, just your a regular HN user) think it's perfectly fine to post your own content. As long as you don't spam it, and you don't post over-flattering headlines for it. And definitely way better than posting your content under a guise of an "unafilliated" friend. It will reach the front page and stay here only if it's good, so who cares if it came straight from the wolf's mouth. Also pretty creepy that people go down post comments history to check who it is and where you 're coming from. Eh.
  - jchw 7y ago
    I generally don’t look at post/comment history except out of general curiosity myself. It’s not like the stuff posted here is private, and it’s probably more permanent than most sites. I also post under effectively my real life identity. Could eventually regret that, but there’s definitely downsides to the alternative approaches to online identity too.
  - reitanqild 7y ago
    Not sure how to vote this: Totally agree with the first part. The second part describes a thing I regularily do as "pretty creepy". To clarify: before deciding to flag, downvote or vouch for someone I might have a look at their comment history to see if I am misunderstanding something. Also if someone posts something nice I look through their history to find more good comments. I don't think I'm the only one who does this and in fact I'd recommend it instead of blindly thinking "troll" and hit downvote and flag whenever one sees something one doesn't agree with.
    - throwaway66666 7y ago
      I did not mean to offend you. And I am sorry I used that terminology. To me it felt odd that if you reach the front page suddenly eyes are looking at your history and everything you have done. If you put yourself out there, suddenly eyes are watching everything. That seemed a bit scary (and again sorry for using emotional words), though of course makes sense why it happens. But in general, I fully agree with you. There are many reasons to do it, and perhaps it's even helpful when something is not clear and you want to understand better where someone is coming from, as you said. Apologies again.
      - reitanqild 7y ago
        > If you put yourself out there, suddenly eyes are watching everything. That seemed a bit scary (and again sorry for using emotional words), though of course makes sense why it happens. I'm painfully aware. Which is why I often use this account :-) > Apologies again. No need for that after you cleared it up. I might even have been too harsh myself. I actually prefer if there is some room for thought here and I might have read more into your original post than you intended.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      Downote is for comments that don't contribute positively to the discussion. Flagging is for more egregious violations of community guidelines. Whether a comment deserves either of those does not in any way depend on the commenter's posting history and to reference posting history in applying them is problematic in a manner akin to the ad hominem fallacy, in that it substitutes a general judgement of the source of an utterance when what is called for is a judgement on the utterance itself.
- eppsilon 7y ago
  Could you add an RSS feed of your posts?
  - ajhaupt7 7y ago
    Yeah definitely, I'll let you know when it's up there

crispinb 7y ago

Not news of course, but worth restating. Credulous 'scepticism' about the fundamentals of the climate collapse threat has been largely driven by corporate propaganda campaigns. Those campaigns were themselves constructed by people who weren't 'sceptics' -- they believed AGM was happening -- but considered their short-term profitability more important. Climate collapse 'sceptics' were nearly all gulls.

modzu 7y ago
there has been plenty of genuine scepticism from within the scientific community (as there should be). what has happened is that it has become politicized such that the science is suffering for fear of being labeled a heretic. much of the research is published via the intergovernmental panel on climate change; well it's right there in the title. none of this is to say that there aren't also entities pushing propaganda (exxon, etc)
- logjammin 7y ago
  Example of investigators whose work has suffered for fear of being labeled a heretic?
  - modzu 7y ago
    Freeman Dyson
    - scotty79 7y ago
      He's a physicists. Why would he have any idea about climate? He's just a person with an opinion not a dissenting scientist. And if his work suffered as a result of voicing such opinion then it was only to be expected. If you voice stupid opinion regarding domain you know almost nothing about and prop it up with your work reputation it's only fair if that reputation takes a hit.
      - Youcandothis 7y ago

rorykoehler 7y ago

There are articles that are over 100 years old that point out fossil fuels cause climate change. Surely they knew far earlier than 1978?

dcl 7y ago
Those earlier articles made educated guesses that the greenhouse effect would eventually come in to play. Exxon attempted to model the effect to work out the possible impact.

bnolsen 7y ago

Having now been in China for several weeks this beating the drum trying to make americans feel guilty (and give power over to other people) is absolutely absurd. You want to control pollution the first places to start are china and india. The US in comparison produces negligible impact.

jordache 7y ago
US still accounts for double digit percentage of global greenhouse gas emissions.. so it's not a non-trivial amount
umanwizard 7y ago
Nonsense. The US produces more than double the CO2 per capita as China. As usual, total numbers are meaningless without scaling them by population. If China split into 100 independent states tomorrow, they wouldn't be a problem anymore by your metric, even if they produce exactly the same amount of CO2 as they do now. Fair comparison with roughly equal population: Europe, the US, and Australia combined vs. China. And the former group produces more CO2 than the latter.
- sparky_z 7y ago
  Surely, as far as the planet's concerned, the total numbers matter more than per capita. If, say, Andorra hypothetically had the largest per-capita numbers by an order of magnitude, that still wouldn't make them the biggest threat to the planet, nor would it Andorra the most effective place to target activism. Also, if you look at the trendlines, the US's per capita numbers are going down, while the China's and India's are going up with no signs of slowing. So is their population growth. The US is currently "taking care of itself" more or less, but China and India (already # 1 and #3 in total carbon numbers) are getting worse at a frightening pace. If we spend all of our energy focusing on the US, even if we're extraordinarily successful there, we'll look around in 20 years and see we lost progress globally. As though we didn't heed Amdahl's law and spent all of our time optimizing the wrong function. The most important thing we can do is find some way for China and (especially) India to grow their economies and pull their citizens out of poverty in a way that doesn't destroy the planet.

Reedx 7y ago

> The accuracy of their predictions are chilling — they anticipated (in their "21st Century Study-High Growth Scenario") that in 2020 atmospheric CO2 levels would fall between 400 and 420 ppm. They also foresaw the accompanying sea level rise, melting of polar ice sheets, change of rainfall patterns, and agricultural failures. Wow. How does this compare to other predictions at the time?

sbarker 7y ago
Nostradamus.
Maarten88 7y ago
Maybe they were somewhat later, but Shell oil knew too. They did similar research and came to the same conclusions. Here is a video they made in 1991 warning about climate change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTlYYlRN0LY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTlYYlRN0LY

rdm_blackhole 7y ago

No surprises there. I don't understand why it took so long to uncover the truth. Even today, they are just playing the long game using the same tactics that the tobacco industry used and deny, deny and deny some more. Hopefully this company one day will be prosecuted.

perfunctory 7y ago
It's not hard to imagine that in the future there will be some kind of Nuremberg trials against people involved in deliberate climate disinformation campaigns.
- imtringued 7y ago
  The strategy is that you die before the pitchforks arrive.

crimsonalucard 7y ago

What do we expect? If your purpose in life was found to be a total lie. Do you bury the truth and deny it to yourself and the world? Or do you commit suicide? Every fossil fuel company is going to lie their pants off because that's what you and all other humans would do if they got into the same situation.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dunstad 7y ago
Where is option 3, come clean, change their ways and work to correct the damage? Why are 'lie' and 'kill themselves' more obvious?
- crimsonalucard 7y ago
  Option 3 is what people admire but it is not human behavior. Throughout history people and corporations have chosen to lie to themselves and others rather than accept a cold hard truth.
  - dunstad 7y ago
    Sounds like the profit motive has some significant issues.
reitanqild 7y ago
> Every fossil fuel company is going to lie their pants off because that's what you and all other humans would do if they got into the same situation. Speak for yourself. 1. A good number of people actually have a spine. I'd not say the majority "is good && have a spine" but enough that you are lying. 2. It doesn't help at all to spread the lie that everyone else lying. Speaking as someone who has been embarassingly honest, and who also admires his friend who came back and admitted he'd been laughing at me behind my back.
- crimsonalucard 7y ago

pier25 7y ago

It's terrible to think that maybe if Exxon and others didn't invest in lobbying and disinformation campaigns against climate change maybe humanity would have started acting 30 years earlier. It's 2019 and humanity is barely starting to think about acting. Global CO2 emissions keep growing as if we were in "business as usual". Humanity needs to realize the magnitude of the problem. Climate change is, by far, the biggest threat it has ever encountered and probably will ever encounter. The solution will require us to make radical changes to our lifestyle and our culture. For example, we can't keep having irrational leaders that ignore basic scientific facts.

1337shadow 7y ago
Weren't documentaries predicting a global climate cooling in 1978 ? In that context, did Exxon think they were saving the climate ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei-_SXLMMfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei-_SXLMMfo
- keithnz 7y ago
  They were predicting a mini ice age due to reduced solar activity. That is studied and incorporated in the climate models we have today.
- breakyerself 7y ago
  Even in the 70s most climate scientists were expecting human caused global warming. The cooling thing was more a media phenomenon. 1965 - 1979 there were a total of 7 scientific papers predicting a cooling climate. Compared to 42 predicting human caused global warming (Peterson 2008).
  - 1337shadow 7y ago
    Pretty interesting, thanks for answering. I wasn't even born, found a nice wiki link where scientists predicted cooling because of aerosol increase but the greenhouse effect was apparently published about in 1972 so they should have known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science#Scientists_increasingly_predict_warming,_1970s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_scie...

imagetic 7y ago

http://graphics.latimes.com/exxon-arctic/ http://graphics.latimes.com/exxon-arctic/

gedy 7y ago

Maybe no help from Exxon, but US per capita CO2 has been decreasing since 1978. But China and India have increased per capita, which is scary given their huge populations.

EForEndeavour 7y ago
Both US population and absolute US greenhouse gas emissions have been growing over time. Population has simply grown proportionally faster than emissions. So yes, US emissions per capita have decreased over time, but total US emissions have been rising, and that's what affects climate.
- bendbro 7y ago
  Thanks only to immigration. US birth rate is well below replacement.
  - earenndil 7y ago
    Didn't used to be, though.
- gedy 7y ago
  I agree "per capita" can be misleading, but China and India are growing faster than the US, and China is outputting more CO2 than the US.
  - amanaplanacanal 7y ago
    China has a lot more people than the US, and they do a lot of the US's manufacturing too. Many people think that the US should not try to cut carbon emissions because China swamps us in this. I strongly disagree with that.
    - gedy 7y ago
      The thing is: we are cutting emissions, but it probably won’t save the planet, if China and India keep growing. The “fairness“ of per capita usage is a separate issue from climate change

cbHXBY1D 7y ago

Almost everyone on HN recognizes that climate change is an existential threat to (most) life on earth. There is less agreement on how to mitigate it's effects. One solution which I favor is nationalization of US oil companies. While hardly discussed in the US, it's a solution that is currently being discussed in the UK and has been done by many different countries, though usually because of the legacy of imperialism and colonialism. Overtime I have come to the realization free market solutions and incentives are incapable of spurring the changes needed to transition to a cleaner form of energy, especially with the short time scale we have before results are disastrous.

mc32 7y ago
So Venezuela nationalized their petroleum, I think Mexico did something similar. And Iran. I don’t see where those actions have kerbed the export or internal use of petroleum.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Goals there were different. Nationalizing those industries and using tariffs to stabilize at a higher price would accelerate adoption of better technology. You could implode demand for natural gas and fuel oil by raising prices and capturing profits to capitalize heat pump adoption in the northeast, for example.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    ...and you'd likely elect a populist in 4 years that would wrench open the spigots. Dramatically. Live. On cable news. I'm fully in favor of "keep it in the ground." But nationalization isn't necessarily the right way. In fact: if someone sufficiently wealthy were able to buy up certain strategic assets, they'd be able to resist public pressure to reopen them. For instance, if you had bought Arch Coal at its nadir when it went bankrupt for about $1.4 billion, you would've had control over 16% of America's coal supply. From what I can tell, billions of tons of coal. You could shut it down for pennies on the dollar versus any carbon sequestration scheme. Or buy up and close down export terminals (and revitalize the property around them if in urban areas, making back your money easily while crippling the profitability of coal mining in the US). If it was nationalized, it could as likely go the way of Venezuela, which has (until recently) actually extremely subsidized petroleum consumption. IMHO, government power should be used to tax these things what they're polluting (the stick), develop regulations while strongly subsidizing clean alternatives (the carrot). Nationalizing the oil industry and jacking up prices is just going to make people mad at you while enabling a successor to completely undo your work.

mikeash 7y ago

Remember this the next time someone tries to tell you that oil companies are just giving customers what they demand and that the companies themselves aren’t at fault.

jefflombardjr 7y ago
Relevant to your comment: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/152638001316881395 https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/15263800131... The individualization of environmental problems is a serious obstacle. "We need to stop buying and using plastic water bottles" needs to become "Pepsico and Coke need to stop producing trash."

murat124 7y ago

Former Exxon CEO and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson famously stated in 2013 during a meeting with Exxonmobil shareholders: "What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers"[1]. He explained, "As a species that’s why we’re all still here: we have spent our entire existence adapting. So we will adapt to this. It’s an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions." The idea that the humans will somehow adapt to this is the stupidest idea I've ever heard. Koch bros are pushing the same idea, on the evolutionary level, that humans will learn to live. To me humanity is already dead, we are eternally doomed. We just don't know it yet. It's better to realize and accept it[2], as if we're told we have cancer and our days are numbered. This is a very pessimistic approach, but it is an honest one and may help mitigate problems for future generations. [1] https://thinkprogress.org/exxon-ceo-what-good-is-it-to-save-the-planet-if-humanity-suffers-2befcd55f0b1/ https://thinkprogress.org/exxon-ceo-what-good-is-it-to-save-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/26/were-doomed-mayer-hillman-on-the-climate-reality-no-one-else-will-dare-mention https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/26/were-doo...

karl11 7y ago
Fortunately for the rest of us, that optimism has worked pretty well for thousands of years now. Besides, if you really believe we're doomed, what difference does it make to you what anyone thinks about anything?
- sdwa 7y ago
  Why do you think it's appropriate to rely on blind optimism just because it's worked for us so far when the challenge we face is totally unprecedented as well as existential? Seems awfully careless to me.
- lostmyoldone 7y ago
  Even if it were true, thousands of years is barely anything on any time scale that matters. Disregarding that, we've certainly not lived through thousands of years of global anthropogenic climate change, which is what this is all about. It's worth to remember that adaption doesn't necessarily equate survival in the way we tend to think about it, as dinosaurs adapted too. Humanity, at least on this planet, is already doomed. The sun will eventually consume us as a natural part of its life cycle. It's a very long time until that happens, but life here will eventually end. So as we're already doomed, should we then do nothing to prevent suffering and pain until then? It should be a rhetorical question, but apparently it isn't always. The argument can be made quite simple: As long as we continue to have children, or accept people having children, we have chosen - as a species - to not give up on them, and their descendants. Preserving a livable environment, and preferably much more than livable, is simply a duty springing from that fact. There is no need for any deep philosophy, to care for the environment is - essentially - a consequence of choices already made.

glandium 7y ago

AsapScience video on the subject: https://youtu.be/TbW_1MtC2So https://youtu.be/TbW_1MtC2So

Proven 7y ago

So what? Most people have no problem with that. What normal people challenge is: 1) Estimate of impact. If you breathe, you're bad for CO2 emissions. But should it matter? It's hard to imagine one should care about it. 2) the government's ability to cost effectively do something about it (that is, that ability equals exactly zero, while taxes required to pay for that theft and incompetence are higher than zero).

thunderrabbit 7y ago

This "entertains" me in a perverse way. I knew fossil fuels were harming the environment in 1978, and I was only a kid at the time. Exhaust stank, looked dirty. Doesn't take much to figure it out.

frittig 7y ago
Vaccines hurt, vegetables taste bad and taking drugs feels good. Your ideology is flawed.
- ramblerman 7y ago
  Well, if you don't trust your senses at all, perhaps yours is too.

itry2develop 7y ago

You mean when global cooling was all the rage?

akerro 7y ago

No surprises here, also Shell knew that. Documents show they knew that in '80s, later they renew research in '90s: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=shell+knew+about+global+warming&t=ffab&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=shell+knew+about+global+warming&t=...

Haga 7y ago

If you solution boils down to "I want human nature to change" without concrete steps and behavior science papers to back your plan up, and a good cause, sideffects analysis - you are contributing as much solutions as socialism does to the economic debate. You are uttering noise and silencing those with real(istic) suggestions. Also you are all pushing totalitarian systems if you want to enforce drastic economic sanctions.

ptah 7y ago

How is this not illegal?

mcv 7y ago
They're rich and important?

jhellan 7y ago

We all knew. I learned about CO2 greenhouse warming in high school in 1974. At a lecture at the University of Trondheim, Norway, around 1980, (in)famous physicist Edward Teller joked that we of all people shouldn't be worried about global warming.

mangecoeur 7y ago
This! I've noticed a pattern recently of headlines that person X or company Y "knew all the way back in the 70s/80s". The real tragedy is that we have delayed doing anything about it for so long, people are now "rediscovering" the original warnings as if they are historical revelations. As a quick refresher: the original climate deal, the Kyoto Protocol, was signed in 1992, by then everyone was well on board with the science. In fact, the climate negotiations were spun off from the convention on reducing CFCs (Vienna Convention of 1985), which are important greenhouse gases as well as being damaging to the ozone layer. It was thought (correctly) at the time that because CFCs were produced and used in a limited number of places, it would be much easier to resolve that problem and move the wider greenhouse gas negotiations into a separate treaty, which took another 7 years until 1992.
chx 7y ago
Teller warned the oil industry in 1959. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/01/on-its-hundredth-birthday-in-1959-edward-teller-warned-the-oil-industry-about-global-warming https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  I know Teller wanted to come across as calm and respectable so that people would take him seriously, but if he could look back now he would probably have acted like a deranged lunatic preaching in the streets about the dangers of carbon pollution. I also think the same of Carl Sagan. For all his wonderful and critical achievements, I bet if he could see how things turned out, he would have unquestioningly devoted his life to spreading awareness about climate change here on Earth instead of focusing on astronomy and nuclear war.

perfunctory 7y ago

World's richest 10% produce half of global carbon emissions [0] If my math is right, if the top decile reduced their emissions at least to the level of the second decide, the global emissions would fall by 30%. Dear HN crowd, I bet a fair share of us belongs to the top 10%, please reduce your emissions. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/worlds-richest-10-produce-half-of-global-carbon-emissions-says-oxfam https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/worlds-r...

the_duke 7y ago
This report only deals with "lifestyle related emissions", not total emissions. A large percentage of emissions is transportation, manufacturing, heating and electricity. While the rich will consume more, the effect on total emissions is much lower.
- perfunctory 7y ago
  True. And to be honest I am not sure how lifestyle emissions are calculated. Does it include the cost of manufacturing and bringing goods to the market? Can't we argue that most emissions are ultimately lifestyle related?

soulofmischief 7y ago

I made a choice-based game a few months ago about dealing with the political realities of climate change, inspired by Sara Teasdale and Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains. You can play it online here: https://tinyurl.com/43softrains-v1-1 https://tinyurl.com/43softrains-v1-1 I have been considering pursuing funding for making similar choice-based games like this one and integrating them with classroom curriculums.

the_duke 7y ago
This is very cool! Is the code open source? I would love to have a translated version of this and encourage the younger members of my family to play it.
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  Glad you liked it. Here you go: https://github.com/bad-software/there-will-come-soft-rains https://github.com/bad-software/there-will-come-soft-rains What languages are you interested in seeing?

FrojoS 7y ago

Slightly tangential, but I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the political way forward for big countries: 1. Have a single CO2 budget for the whole country, with an aggressive, Hard to change roadmap of yearly reduction of said budget down to zero in the not too long future. 2. Estimate the CO2 footprint of every single product, incl. imports by one or several neutral organizations. This doesn’t have to be perfect as long as it attempts to be fair. 3. Tax every product according to this budget using supply/demand markets (certificates trading). 4. Redistribute the tax, especially to mitigate the hardship on low income households and domestic companies. In my mind, this would create a gigantic incentive for CO2 reduction for your citizens as well as domestic AND foreign companies. Crucially, it would not require any global agreement and consensus. Apart from perhaps renegotiation or canceling of trade agreements on the side of the country that implements the policy. Note, that you can replace CO2 by greenhouse gases or environmental impact in general. I just use it as a shorthandle. Very curious about your opinions.

scroot 7y ago
Could this result in moving to countries that don't have such policies, thereby allowing for increasing emissions (ie carbon tax havens)
- perfunctory 7y ago
  Would have to tax imports from those countries as well
  - FrojoS 7y ago
    Exactly. And sure, some people might move away because of this issue. But unless people start starving a majority won’t leave their homes. They will just revoke the legislation.
  - psandersen 7y ago
    Pricing in externalities are the only good economic argument for tariffs I'm aware of... Carbon tax + tariffs in proportion to the lack of carbon taxes would be the most logical way of setting up a market-based solution to climate change.

merpnderp 7y ago

Aren’t the people who fought nuclear power in the 80’s just as culpable? Would there still be any coal plants running if we’d started to move to carbon free sources back then?

0x262d 7y ago

this is an example of what one could sarcastically describe as a "market failure"

trophycase 7y ago
When externalities aren't priced. It isn't a "free market"
- 0x262d 7y ago
  does anyone who is opposed to planned markets ever talk about the information complexity of accounting for all externalities? genuine question.

bobowzki 7y ago

This was known around 1900

iconjack 7y ago

Also 1978: "International Team of Specialists Finds No End in Sight to 30‐Year Cooling Trend in Northern Hemisphere" [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1978/01/05/archives/international-team-of-specialists-finds-no-end-in-sight-to-30year.html https://www.nytimes.com/1978/01/05/archives/international-te...

stefek99 7y ago

It is a well-known fact, just wondering since when it is news? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...

stefek99 7y ago

This is a potential strategy to tackle it: https://genesis.re/wiki#Plan_B https://genesis.re/wiki#Plan_B (decentralized innovation as politics is too slow)