6 ms·

Shell is an evil oil company. For example, they knew about climate change in 1986 already and kept it quiet[1]. But now they are pressured by public opinion, co

by whazor 6y ago

Shell is an evil oil company. For example, they knew about climate change in 1986 already and kept it quiet[1]. But now they are pressured by public opinion, court, government, and even shareholders to take action. Their PR propaganda is now to reduce CO2 as much as possible for fossil fuels and to develop alternatives. They are a key player in liquidised natural gas, which produces less CO2. Next they are engineering heavily in hydrogen production, which sucks for cars but will probably be nice for ships. [1] https://thecorrespondent.com/6285/shell-made-a-film-about-climate-change-in-1991-then-neglected-to-heed-its-own-warning/692663565-875331f6 https://thecorrespondent.com/6285/shell-made-a-film-about-cl...

tryonenow 6y ago
>Shell is an evil oil company No one "knew" about climate change in 1986. It took 20+ years of research to gather and analyze enough evidence to prove such an enormous claim, that humans had been inadvertently geoengineering the planet. Also shell employs tens of thousands of people - this myth comes from one internal communication that maybe a dozen eyes at most even saw.
- kolinko 6y ago
  The basic science behind climate change is relatively easy - we know co2 keeps infrared radiation, and by 1980s we saw how quickly co2 levels increase in the atmosphere. It’s widely asserted that Exxon knew about what they are doing back in 1970s. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
  - Roritharr 6y ago
    My main problem with this argument is that I'm not sure what the alternative should have looked like. Exxon having a "oh fuck" moment where they told their workers to stop working, their customers that there is no product to sell etc. seems something so extremely hard to pull off even if all of upper and middle-management wanted to do the right thing, I can't see how they could have. I always imagine what would happen if the "5G/Radio is bad for you" crowd was proven right by people at Nokia. What would a realistic while morally sound strategy have looked like?
    - kirrent 6y ago
      It's not so much that they continued operating. Everybody was still using their products after all and there was no alternative anyway. It's not even that they passively sat on it. It's that, in the same vein as the tobacco companies, they merchants of doubted us over the following decades, spending considerable amounts of money in questioning climate science and hindering action.
      - Roritharr 6y ago
        While being a heinous thing to do, the only devils-advocatey thing I can't refute is that there are no examples of the inverse, e.g. companies not trying to protect their businessmodel via despicable tactics for the greater good of humanity. If this is just an inherent condition of humans working together in groups, shouldn't we rather put the blame on the regulators for ignoring the science and accepting the bribes for this long?
  - tryonenow 6y ago
    There is nothing basic about climate science. You're talking about a massive, chaotic, nonlinear system. Case in point, from the article: >present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical Yet decades later that window continues to shift. This was an unverified theory in the 70s, and rightly so - we had spatially sparse measurements at the very tail end of a time series which naturally cycles on the order of hundreds to millions of years. For example a consensus has only recently formed that the oceans have been absorbing energy and delaying atmpspheric temperature rise. Finally, the sources for that Scientific American are InsideClimate and Greenpeace, which are at least as biased as any oil company, just in reverse. I know that oil companies are the Philip Morris du jure, but this article is just retroactive demonization.
  - pleeb 6y ago
    You can go back even further than that— here’s a clipping from 1912, warning the dangers of burning coal, “the effect may be considerable in a few centuries”. https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/ROTWKG19120814.2.56.5 https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/ROTWKG19120814....
jerome-jh 6y ago
I agree and they also killed the electric car once: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F No doubt they will try to kill it a second time or hinder sales it it diminishes there profit. In my country, we have some of the cheapest electricity in the world. Despite that it is barely advantageous financially to recharge an EV on the highway. It mostly depends on the efficiency of the EV and about half of them are less economical than IC vehicles in this setting, per magazine tests. Since charging on the highway is already a boottleneck (recharge time x number of charging stations x real estate), energy companies lose no customers by charging (no pun) a premium for it.
mxschumacher 6y ago
do you also consider those who consume oil and gas products as evil?
- yqx 6y ago
  They carry incomparable levels of responsibility
  - mxschumacher 6y ago
    please elaborate. I see lots of hate for oil companies, but not a lot for those who choose to fly a lot or drive gigantic cars. The F150 is America's best selling vehicle, passenger trains are basically unusable in North America, suburbia makes public transport impossible. We live in a consumerist society where virtually every product we own or use contains plastic or has been shipped from the other side of the world, but we lay blame on those who extract the oil. How convenient.
    - fulafel 6y ago
      Yes, wasting oil and causing excess emissions is unethical at the consumer level too. But let's not descend into whatabouism.
- acdha 6y ago
  Don’t you think there’s a difference between people making decisions based on propaganda and a system designed to subsidize certain outcomes and the people who setup that system and produced that propaganda because it was profitable? In much of the world, fossil fuel usage has been heavily subsidized and alternatives actively opposed. I would not blame anyone who bought the car their society made necessary anywhere near as much as the people who saw a problem and prevented it being addressed at far less cost than it will now take. When Exxon first learned global warming was happening, it was the 1970s – a carbon tax, renewable fuels, transit investments, etc. would have been so much cheaper back then – but not for them, so they heavily funded efforts to make the topic political, told everyone it wasn’t real and you shouldn’t feel a need to buy a fuel efficient vehicle, and successfully stymied action for half a century. I mean, the average SUV sold now gets much worse mileage than the car my dad bought to commute in the 80s - simply staying on that curve would have bought us a decade or two.

by whazor 6y ago

tryonenow 6y ago

>Shell is an evil oil company No one "knew" about climate change in 1986. It took 20+ years of research to gather and analyze enough evidence to prove such an enormous claim, that humans had been inadvertently geoengineering the planet. Also shell employs tens of thousands of people - this myth comes from one internal communication that maybe a dozen eyes at most even saw.

kolinko 6y ago
The basic science behind climate change is relatively easy - we know co2 keeps infrared radiation, and by 1980s we saw how quickly co2 levels increase in the atmosphere. It’s widely asserted that Exxon knew about what they are doing back in 1970s. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
- Roritharr 6y ago
  My main problem with this argument is that I'm not sure what the alternative should have looked like. Exxon having a "oh fuck" moment where they told their workers to stop working, their customers that there is no product to sell etc. seems something so extremely hard to pull off even if all of upper and middle-management wanted to do the right thing, I can't see how they could have. I always imagine what would happen if the "5G/Radio is bad for you" crowd was proven right by people at Nokia. What would a realistic while morally sound strategy have looked like?
  - kirrent 6y ago
    It's not so much that they continued operating. Everybody was still using their products after all and there was no alternative anyway. It's not even that they passively sat on it. It's that, in the same vein as the tobacco companies, they merchants of doubted us over the following decades, spending considerable amounts of money in questioning climate science and hindering action.
    - Roritharr 6y ago
      While being a heinous thing to do, the only devils-advocatey thing I can't refute is that there are no examples of the inverse, e.g. companies not trying to protect their businessmodel via despicable tactics for the greater good of humanity. If this is just an inherent condition of humans working together in groups, shouldn't we rather put the blame on the regulators for ignoring the science and accepting the bribes for this long?
- tryonenow 6y ago
  There is nothing basic about climate science. You're talking about a massive, chaotic, nonlinear system. Case in point, from the article: >present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical Yet decades later that window continues to shift. This was an unverified theory in the 70s, and rightly so - we had spatially sparse measurements at the very tail end of a time series which naturally cycles on the order of hundreds to millions of years. For example a consensus has only recently formed that the oceans have been absorbing energy and delaying atmpspheric temperature rise. Finally, the sources for that Scientific American are InsideClimate and Greenpeace, which are at least as biased as any oil company, just in reverse. I know that oil companies are the Philip Morris du jure, but this article is just retroactive demonization.
- pleeb 6y ago
  You can go back even further than that— here’s a clipping from 1912, warning the dangers of burning coal, “the effect may be considerable in a few centuries”. https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/ROTWKG19120814.2.56.5 https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/ROTWKG19120814....

jerome-jh 6y ago

I agree and they also killed the electric car once: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F No doubt they will try to kill it a second time or hinder sales it it diminishes there profit. In my country, we have some of the cheapest electricity in the world. Despite that it is barely advantageous financially to recharge an EV on the highway. It mostly depends on the efficiency of the EV and about half of them are less economical than IC vehicles in this setting, per magazine tests. Since charging on the highway is already a boottleneck (recharge time x number of charging stations x real estate), energy companies lose no customers by charging (no pun) a premium for it.

mxschumacher 6y ago

do you also consider those who consume oil and gas products as evil?

yqx 6y ago
They carry incomparable levels of responsibility
- mxschumacher 6y ago
  please elaborate. I see lots of hate for oil companies, but not a lot for those who choose to fly a lot or drive gigantic cars. The F150 is America's best selling vehicle, passenger trains are basically unusable in North America, suburbia makes public transport impossible. We live in a consumerist society where virtually every product we own or use contains plastic or has been shipped from the other side of the world, but we lay blame on those who extract the oil. How convenient.
  - fulafel 6y ago
    Yes, wasting oil and causing excess emissions is unethical at the consumer level too. But let's not descend into whatabouism.
acdha 6y ago
Don’t you think there’s a difference between people making decisions based on propaganda and a system designed to subsidize certain outcomes and the people who setup that system and produced that propaganda because it was profitable? In much of the world, fossil fuel usage has been heavily subsidized and alternatives actively opposed. I would not blame anyone who bought the car their society made necessary anywhere near as much as the people who saw a problem and prevented it being addressed at far less cost than it will now take. When Exxon first learned global warming was happening, it was the 1970s – a carbon tax, renewable fuels, transit investments, etc. would have been so much cheaper back then – but not for them, so they heavily funded efforts to make the topic political, told everyone it wasn’t real and you shouldn’t feel a need to buy a fuel efficient vehicle, and successfully stymied action for half a century. I mean, the average SUV sold now gets much worse mileage than the car my dad bought to commute in the 80s - simply staying on that curve would have bought us a decade or two.