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I really wonder what people at Exxon expected to happen in the long run? How did they imagine things would end? Climate change not happening, maybe? Climate cha

I really wonder what people at Exxon expected to happen in the long run? How did they imagine things would end? Climate change not happening, maybe? Climate change happening but nobody notices for some reason? There seems no decent outcome possible.

gameswithgo 6y ago
With them making a bunch of money and being able to relocate to where the climate would be ok. Worked out fine for them.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dalbasal 6y ago
It's not necessarily a question of long run. They're CEOs, not kings.
stagehn 6y ago
Public cost private benefit - externality, tragedy of the commons, etc
spaetzleesser 6y ago
For one they expected to be rich enough to not be impacted by climate change. If you can afford to move easily, climate change will not be a big deal for you. They can also play it both sides. You milk the current situation as much as possible while at the same time keeping an eye on alternatives. I think that's what's happening.
- Loughla 6y ago
  >You milk the current situation as much as possible while at the same time keeping an eye on alternatives. Whenever I see news releases about huge oil companies investing in alternatives, this is exactly what I see. Deny until you have no choice but to admit. Then get into the game and make even more money trying to fix what you broke. It's just, well, sociopathic behavior, from my perspective.
beervirus 6y ago
1. The models are wrong. Might as well keep making money. 2. The models are right, but I’ll be gone by the time anyone can prove it. Might as well keep making money.
unabst 6y ago
They're just buying time to make more money. And the way to maximize profit is to invest in what would keep most of your doors open right this moment. "An Inconvenient Truth" came out in 2006. It's already 2020. Politics is also key. The difference between Hillary and Trump must have also been huge.
Fnoord 6y ago
Extreme, destructive selfishness. I consider it a case of misanthropy [1]. Also, psychopathy is more common among CEOs (and finance in general) than average human beings. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misanthropy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misanthropy
sleepysysadmin 6y ago
I'm not an Exxon employee or anything similar. I'll play devils/exxon advocate. I expect I'll be voted down because no one is allowed to ever question climate change. Global warming was the old name; they changed it to climate change because that is happening. You cant deny climate change. Here's why: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/media/File:All_palaeotemps.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m... The climate clearly changes; back about 50 million years ago the world was 14 celcius warmer. It was fantastic on earth. Northern Canada/Russia is currently a unlivable wasteland; even trees can't grow up there but back then they sure did. Life thrived across the world. Overall all of science's predictions is that the warmer periods in those graphs were fantastic for life on Earth. For the last 50 million years the earth has drastically cooled down. This is why the name Global Warming has been ditched, because it's fundamentally wrong. Let's focus on the last 130,000 years. During the Eemian period the world was 3 celcius warmer than today. Then over the last 110,000 years it has cooled 8 celcius on average. The last glacial maximum being 20,000 years ago was the coldest Earth has been in a long time. Over the next 10,000 years up until the holocene period the earth warmed up 6 celcius. For an unknown reason over the last 10,000 years temperatures have been very uncharacterically stable. What you are seeing is the interglacial periods. What happens is the Earth gets very warm quickly, and then cools down slowly hitting a minimum and then spikes back up like the Eemian period. We should be spiking in temperature right now, but it's not. You then look at those predictions on the right hand side. The 2050 and 2100 year predictions but those are IPCC AR5 RCP8.5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_Pathway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_P... RCP8.5 is the prediction that over the next period of time that emissions INCREASE. This even at the time of publication in 2014 was thought to be quite untrue. It's expecting that we significantly discover much more coal and oil over the next century. The reality is that oil, coal, and gas run out sooner. We also have more data, RCP8.5 is absolutely not happening. They have since created RCP7 as the baseline but even that is not accurate. In fact RCP6 is not even legitimate. RCP4.5 is what is happening. If you overlay RCP4.5 onto that graph, it makes for a quite boring graph because it barely registers and looks pretty flat just like most of the holocene. That's us basically doing nothing. What's even more concerning is that we should expect a huge spike in temperature. Not human caused, but all part of the interglacial period system. The problem is that environmentalists are trying to blame humans for what is likely coming without our involvement. They wish to control our economic policies. That's all that is happening.

gameswithgo 6y ago

With them making a bunch of money and being able to relocate to where the climate would be ok. Worked out fine for them.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dalbasal 6y ago

It's not necessarily a question of long run. They're CEOs, not kings.

stagehn 6y ago

Public cost private benefit - externality, tragedy of the commons, etc

spaetzleesser 6y ago

For one they expected to be rich enough to not be impacted by climate change. If you can afford to move easily, climate change will not be a big deal for you. They can also play it both sides. You milk the current situation as much as possible while at the same time keeping an eye on alternatives. I think that's what's happening.

Loughla 6y ago
>You milk the current situation as much as possible while at the same time keeping an eye on alternatives. Whenever I see news releases about huge oil companies investing in alternatives, this is exactly what I see. Deny until you have no choice but to admit. Then get into the game and make even more money trying to fix what you broke. It's just, well, sociopathic behavior, from my perspective.

beervirus 6y ago

1. The models are wrong. Might as well keep making money. 2. The models are right, but I’ll be gone by the time anyone can prove it. Might as well keep making money.

unabst 6y ago

They're just buying time to make more money. And the way to maximize profit is to invest in what would keep most of your doors open right this moment. "An Inconvenient Truth" came out in 2006. It's already 2020. Politics is also key. The difference between Hillary and Trump must have also been huge.

Fnoord 6y ago

Extreme, destructive selfishness. I consider it a case of misanthropy [1]. Also, psychopathy is more common among CEOs (and finance in general) than average human beings. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misanthropy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misanthropy

sleepysysadmin 6y ago

I'm not an Exxon employee or anything similar. I'll play devils/exxon advocate. I expect I'll be voted down because no one is allowed to ever question climate change. Global warming was the old name; they changed it to climate change because that is happening. You cant deny climate change. Here's why: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/media/File:All_palaeotemps.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m... The climate clearly changes; back about 50 million years ago the world was 14 celcius warmer. It was fantastic on earth. Northern Canada/Russia is currently a unlivable wasteland; even trees can't grow up there but back then they sure did. Life thrived across the world. Overall all of science's predictions is that the warmer periods in those graphs were fantastic for life on Earth. For the last 50 million years the earth has drastically cooled down. This is why the name Global Warming has been ditched, because it's fundamentally wrong. Let's focus on the last 130,000 years. During the Eemian period the world was 3 celcius warmer than today. Then over the last 110,000 years it has cooled 8 celcius on average. The last glacial maximum being 20,000 years ago was the coldest Earth has been in a long time. Over the next 10,000 years up until the holocene period the earth warmed up 6 celcius. For an unknown reason over the last 10,000 years temperatures have been very uncharacterically stable. What you are seeing is the interglacial periods. What happens is the Earth gets very warm quickly, and then cools down slowly hitting a minimum and then spikes back up like the Eemian period. We should be spiking in temperature right now, but it's not. You then look at those predictions on the right hand side. The 2050 and 2100 year predictions but those are IPCC AR5 RCP8.5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_Pathway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_P... RCP8.5 is the prediction that over the next period of time that emissions INCREASE. This even at the time of publication in 2014 was thought to be quite untrue. It's expecting that we significantly discover much more coal and oil over the next century. The reality is that oil, coal, and gas run out sooner. We also have more data, RCP8.5 is absolutely not happening. They have since created RCP7 as the baseline but even that is not accurate. In fact RCP6 is not even legitimate. RCP4.5 is what is happening. If you overlay RCP4.5 onto that graph, it makes for a quite boring graph because it barely registers and looks pretty flat just like most of the holocene. That's us basically doing nothing. What's even more concerning is that we should expect a huge spike in temperature. Not human caused, but all part of the interglacial period system. The problem is that environmentalists are trying to blame humans for what is likely coming without our involvement. They wish to control our economic policies. That's all that is happening.