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>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

>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....

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....