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Cigarettes only kill people. Oil saves more lives than it kills and it makes lives better for all of us. You can't just take the negatives and ignore all the p

• acollins1331 7y ago
  Sure, but lying about whether your product kills people is still a crime. They're not suing oil. They're suing Exxon for lying about it and funding lies.
  • ThomPete 7y ago
    Technically you might be able to make that claim, but I have a hard time understanding the point if it saves more people than it kills. Then at least morally I would question who is really in the right here.
    • acollins1331 7y ago
      I'll give you a hint: it's not the company that lied about whether their product kills people and paid others billions to do it as well. Exxon could've just been honest and oil would still have been sold and used and saved people, we could've just been using it more responsibly. But they lied, for profit.
    • jklinger410 7y ago
      Why are you hung up on a binary view of this? Do you think our current usage of oil is responsible? Do you think a corporation encouraging extensive oil use at all cost is the same thing as "oil saves lives?" It's not.
      • ThomPete 7y ago
        I think our current usage of oil is responsible yes and I think it's irresponsible to not use oil. There are no realistic alternatives to 99% of our current use of oil which includes more or less any product used in a modern civilization so unless you can point me to some alternatives I think you are the one who has the immoral position.
• enraged_camel 7y ago
  They not only withheld information about the negatives you mention, but they also sowed disinformation. Furthermore, nobody here is arguing that oil is all bad. Obviously it has been immensely beneficial to society. And yet, how is it that those benefits are privatized by these companies, and the negatives (costs) are externalized?
  • ThomPete 7y ago
    I was responding to the blanket claim in the parent that oil kills people. In my view it's not as simple as being claimed but I am sure technically there is a case here. The positives are also externalized. The internet wouldn't happen without fossil fuels yet it's not the oil companies who make the money on that. Many of our inventions wouldn't be possible without the ability of fossil fuels to make life easier and free up time for us, things that the oil companies does not benefit directly from. So I take issue with this idea that externalities are only negative, they are to a much larger extent beneficial in ways we don't even think about.
    • salawat 7y ago
      I think the legal and to an extent the root of moral outrage at issue, Thom, is the inherent fraud of the deceptive claims facilitated by diverting profit to corporations/agencies intended to poison-the-well of public discourse, combined with active suppression of any type of release of in-house research that provided evidence that the fossil fuel industry could have been contributing to climate change. It rubs some people (me at least) the wrong way when we try to say our policymaking is based on reasoned science, but not everyone is bringing all their chips to the table in good faith, and some are outright fabricating lies to keep the gravy train going, and keep the public guessing. I've actually enjoyed your posts mind, and find quite a bit to agree with in them. However, I don't necessarily think you're making a successful counterargument in the sense no one is condemning the oil/petrochem industry for doing what it's doing; it seems to be aimed more at bad behavior in terms of burying inconvenient science, and funding disinformation campaigns. That, at least, strikes me as worthy of its day in court, so at a minimum the public interest can be served by discovery. After all, they don't need to be found guilty for good to come of it.
• deegles 7y ago
  That can be true together with the allegations in the lawsuit. If a person robs a bank and donates it to charity it’s still a crime. Maybe it’s true that if oil companies hadn’t mislead everyone the world would be different today, but that doesn’t mean crimes should be excused “for the greater good.”
  • ThomPete 7y ago
    Sure I get the technical argument but in my view it makes things much more complex than simply arguing some technicality ill intent. Then again I don't know all the details, I smell an attempt at scoring political points though more than anything.
• jakelazaroff 7y ago
  > Oil saves more lives than it kills and it makes lives better for all of us. You can't just take the negatives and ignore all the positives. Let's revisit this statement in the next century and see if it holds up.
  • concordDance 7y ago
    Wouldn't we have starvation of the majority of the world's population without oil? I was under the impression that our industrial scale farming needed lots of energy and fuel.
    • blotter_paper 7y ago
      Wouldn't that depend on whether you take a human-centric or bio-centric view of the world's population? The loss of genetic data over this last century might be something we don't recognise the full implications of yet.
      • ThomPete 7y ago
        Nature does that all the time though. It would seem to me that the only thing for humans to do is to look at it from a human-centric view which would naturally involve some sort of bio-centric view. I for one is not ready to have a bio-centric view if it means I can't provide my kids with all the things that fossil fuels have provided and keep providing for them.
        • blotter_paper 7y ago
          > I for one is not ready to have a bio-centric view if it means I can't provide my kids with all the things that fossil fuels have provided and keep providing for them. Are you also unwilling to make those sacrifices for the sake of valuing the lives and experiences of humans in every other country as much as the lives and experiences of humans in your own country? I suspect most of us are, since we collectively buy phones made in horrible factory conditions which our own labor laws wouldn't tolerate. I agree that the "natural" thing to do is to value your own species above others, but I think that applies to subdivisions of humans as well, and it gets ugly. It's not a binary thing, human v.s. non-human, it's a set of behaviors on a continuum. We can recognise that we engage in such behavior while still using figures for pollution-related-deaths that include people who work in Foxconn factories, and I don't see why we shouldn't extend the same courtesy to whales. Whales are people too, maaaan.
• Swenrekcah 7y ago
  You also can’t just take the positives and activly suppress all knowledge of the negatives, which is precisely what the oil companies did.
  • rmah 7y ago
    Um, to play devils advocate a bit... why can't you do that?
    • fnordfnordfnord 7y ago
      It's not polite.
    • pault 7y ago
      For the same reason you can't invent a new kind of pain killer and tell doctors and patients that it's less addictive than the existing alternatives, when you know for a fact that it is far more addictive.
      • fnordfnordfnord 7y ago
        The jury is still out on that one, no? As far as I know, the Sacklers et al remain free to walk the earth, and rich as ever.
      • beerandt 7y ago
        Except the (over-)reaction to that is on course to be a greater problem than the one it fixed. We've essentially outlawed painkillers overnight, leaving victims even worse off than before. Unless your primary goal was to kill the industry, and never really had the victims' best interests in mind at all.
        • blotter_paper 7y ago
          > Unless your primary goal was to kill the industry, and never really had the victims' best interests in mind at all. Taking a long view, one could argue that there will be less victims overall. This isn't to say that I'm in favor of making any drug illegal.
• deleted 7y ago
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• basilgohar 7y ago
  We're not talking about the benefits of the oil here. No one is disputing that fossil fuels have helped us advance as a society and brought about a lot of good. What is at issue here is the willful negligence and active deception campaign by the incredible profitable oil companies to bolster their profits by deceiving and outright lying to the public to avoid those risks. If this is not called out and punished, then it will be that much easier for the next great crime to happen, whether its face is tobacco, renewable energy, or fusion power. Getting to the core of the matter as well in what you raised, we can have our cake and eat it too. We can have technological advances and better quality of life without throwing away our children's future and doing irreversible (on human time scales) damage to our planet. But not without zero cost. I would argue that cost would and should hit the pockets of the most profitable companies in the world first, whose profit is largely on deferred or unaccounted-for externalities that have long been swept under the rug.
• fnordfnordfnord 7y ago
  Oil saves more lives than it kills Maybe. That alone does not mean we should continue to use oil when alternatives exist. >and it makes lives better for all of us. No, it does not. There are many impoverished communities on the planet who reap relatively little or no benefit from oil use and suffer disproportionate burdens from its production and use, example: Africans. > You can't just take the negatives and ignore all the positives. You can't just ignore the negatives, or the evolution of the circumstances. > the ability to keep an incubator running let alone the materials for creating Oil is useful for creating and running an incubator, or any number of modern inventions, but is definitely not necessary for all of those things.
  • ThomPete 7y ago
    I am talking about incubators for children not the company.
    • fnordfnordfnord 7y ago
      Yeah, a few bits of plastic, and some energy to power it. I got that.
      • ThomPete 7y ago
        It's not a few bits of plastic. It was the difference between whether my son who was born 10 weeks to early would both survive and be a normal kid or risk not survive and whether he would become normal.
        • fnordfnordfnord 7y ago
          >It's not a few bits of plastic. That's what the oil contributed. >It was the difference between whether my son who was born 10 weeks to early would both survive Appreciated, but oil is simply not a necessary component for that to happen. It may be currently the most convenient but not necessary.
          • 7y ago
• intended 7y ago
  And wouldn’t this be a nice discussion to have had, 30 years ago, without firms like Exxon and Fox destroying our ability to discuss this freely and honestly? And if we had realized 30 years ago that we were not happy with it, or that maybe we wanted to reduce our exposure wouldn’t we have had 30 years to change our infrastructure ? Wouldn’t the amount of emphasis on the Middle East changed? Mass transit would be a conversation 30 years more advanced. The trick in my argument is that 30 years ago we Knew that oil was problematic. And we saw good scientists avoid engaging with the paid shills and cranks arguing for oil and against global warming - because that would give them more credibility. Then we saw how that made no difference. Then scientists went on Fox hoping to have an honest discussion- and were slaughtered by dishonest arguments, fired by news anchors who were part of an ecosystem funded by Exxon and their ilk. We all collectively owe Exxon and it’s friends an accounting for their actions, which they knowingly took in bad faith. Because, it would have been nice to have this discussion 30 years ago.
  • fungicide 7y ago
    "senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000." https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
• gremlinsinc 7y ago
  So, if the entire planet is decimated by global warming in 200 years. Killing 9 billion plus, will you stick by those words, or do you simply deny global warming as a problem.