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When is the public going to realize the O&G industry is quite possibly the worst conglomerate that we have ever seen. We need to start taxing big oil and seek

• dimitrios1 5y ago
  > and seek restitution for their crimes against the world The first counterargument to this will be "sure just as soon as you give back all the things you have benefited from as a result of cheap energy and cheap plastics."
  • KozmoNau7 5y ago
    Society's past acceptance or ignorance of crimes does not absolve the gross polluters of responsibility for current and future crimes.
    • fallingknife 5y ago
      You mean the gross polluters like us who willingly buy and burn the oil companies products every day, right?
      • KozmoNau7 5y ago
        What's the alternative, what choice do we have, realistically? I ride my bicycle or walk for as many trips as possible, and take public transit. I don't own a car, instead I rent one when I absolutely have to. I buy/use as little single-use plastic as possible, I compost and sort whatever trash I do end up with. I've significantly reduced my meat intake and buy in-season groceries as much as possible. I buy second-hand whenever possible and keep things running for as long as possible. I repair everything I can, and only replace things whens they are irreparably broken. My desktop and laptop are both ~10 years old and still going strong. I live in a small apartment, I don't have AC, and I put on a hoodie rather than turning up the heat in winter. I use water-saving taps and shower heads, I use the shorter wash cycles on my washing machine and I line-dry all my clothes. The list goes on and on, you get the point. I try quite hard to reduce my own footprint. Sure, I could move to an off-grid cabin in the woods, but I'm not sure my footprint would actually be smaller from doing that. There is only so much consumers can do, when our entire economy is built upon the exploitation of natural resources and an almost complete disregard for negative externalities. Doing the best you realistically can as an individual is good and fine, but what we really need is harsh regulation of industry heavyweights, in order to force them to do better, as they have clearly proven to have no such motivation by themselves.
        • fallingknife 5y ago
          That's not my point. Mt point is that society was built the way it is to meet consumer demand. This is not something that was forced on us.
          • KozmoNau7 5y ago
            Consumer demand ceased to be primarily based on natural demand a long time ago. Pervasive marketing and advertising have successfully manufactured demand, by manipulation and creating a consumer fear of missing out on the latest and greatest shiny gadget. Breaking out of that pattern is borderline impossible. All because corporations only care about profit. Research into environmental impacts has been held back (and still is!) by corporate interests, because it's "bad for business" if consumers are too well informed. How can you make informed choices, when the information is censored and held back? Plus, "vote with your wallet" only works on a small scale. Regulation of gross polluters is what's actually needed to make real change.
    • pc86 5y ago
      If you're going to throw around rhetoric like that you better have a negative carbon footprint.
      • gonzo41 5y ago
        Well the are at least guilty of a moral crime from the point they knew. And that point was a while ago.
        • dimitrios1 5y ago
          If only issues fit so neatly into a well defined, black or white moral framework that everyone agrees with, life would be so much easier.
      • KozmoNau7 5y ago
        I will accept my less than a millionth of a percent of guilt, if all the fossil fuel companies fully accept their enormous guilt past, present and future, and actually do something to end their pollution and destruction of the environment.
    • gotostatement 5y ago
      the responses to this comment are the guy in the comic responding to "we should improve society somewhat" with "yet you participate in society. curious"
• SaltyBackendGuy 5y ago
  I was just talking about this last night with my SO. We both agreed that history will look back and see these companies being responsible for the destruction of humanity. I really hope that's not the case, however seems to be the course we're headed. Especially with the amount of people that _still_ think it's just not real or not a problem due to the years of "PR" (propaganda).
  • DoingIsLearning 5y ago
    The way things are going I suspect we will reach a tipping point where environmental organizations will start to have violent fringes and start to target carbon emitting corporate boards and C-levels. Probably falling into the same mechanics of radicalization/conversion you have seen before with Middle-eastern groups and more recently with far-right groups.
    • Schiendelman 5y ago
      Personally, I haven’t seen a better option to cause change.
    • beaconstudios 5y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eco-terrorism#Groups_accused https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eco-terrorism#Groups_accused There are already environmental extremists, they're quite a small fringe so far.
    • philips 5y ago
      You might enjoy Ministry of the Future which has a plot line along this type of thought. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future
  • apocalypstyx 5y ago
    > We both agreed that history will look back and see these companies being responsible for the destruction of humanity. History is predicated on at least a rough continuity of records. If the rupture of that continuity of records is bad enough, the concept of history ceases to exist. All we're left with is hunter gathers stumbling across the ruins of ancient 'cities of the gods'. So even the catharsis of imagining certain individuals or groups being vilified for eternity might be denied us.
• likecarter 5y ago
  Yeah, let’s only focus on the production problem. There is totally no demand for oil or plastics. I assume you are typing this on a laptop or cellphone that has plastic parts.
  • minikites 5y ago
    So you can't criticize society if you participate in society? Interesting.
    • beaconstudios 5y ago
      You can't build a society on oil and gas and then, now that we're experiencing the side effects, just be mad at the companies that provided this service. We all participated in this process. Apportioning blame isn't even particularly useful compared to just fixing the problem.
      • epistasis 5y ago
        We most certainly can be mad at them for intentionally deceiving the public and shareholders. It's one thing to provide a product honestly. It's another to provide a product dishonestly. This entire post is about the dishonesty, so just forgetting about that dishonesty and not addressing is seems odd.
        • refurb 5y ago
          When will tech’s reckoning come? Social media’s negative influence and incitement of violence? When we will start throwing engineers in prison who built these products knowing what they do?
          • minikites 5y ago
            Hopefully soon, but I'm not optimistic about that group ever facing consequences either.
          • 5y ago
• minikites 5y ago
  Our entire global economic system is predicated on companies never facing consequences for their actions. Given our astoundingly poor response to COVID, I don't think we're going to solve climate change. The human race has decided that selfishness and greed are virtues and this is the result.
  • lolive 5y ago
    Just when JavaScript was becoming bearable… #tooBad
    • Yoric 5y ago
      Well, on the upside, if our societies collapse, we're going to avoid the worst that IoT has promised us. #thinsilverlining
• refurb 5y ago
  And what responsibility will consumers bear? Have you gotten rid of your car? Or converted to electric? Stop buying plastic items?
  • jude- 5y ago
    "We should improve society somewhat" "And yet here you are participating in society. Curious. I am very intelligent."
    • wins32767 5y ago
      No? Pinning all the blame on one subgroup in society is not improving society somewhat, it will make it harder to actually make the concerted, collective efforts we need to make to solve the problem.
    • missedthecue 5y ago
      No, more like "I live an exceptionally wasteful lifestyle, pin all the blame on other groups, and deflect any responsibility for my direct participation in excess of what is needed for a reasonable standard of living."
  • fulafel 5y ago
    You are getting some jeers but many consumers have made big lifestyle choices like this because of feeling the responsibility, so it's not useless, even though it's limited compared to collective decisionmaking.
• kingsuper20 5y ago
  > When is the public going to realize the O&G industry is quite possibly the worst conglomerate that we have ever seen. From an ecological standpoint, I'd tend to agree. Without them, we'd still have a sub-one billion human population, the pollution level of the 18th C., plus you probably couldn't type that comment without winding up the computer first. With most of the easy EROI gone, you do have to wonder how humanity can crawl back up from it's next collapse.
  • bumby 5y ago
    Based on my layman’s knowledge, it does seem that fossil fuel energy companies have been bad-faith actors. Or, at the very least, reacted predictably to poorly aligned incentives. It reminds me of a Matt Damon quote from Syriana [1]. To a certain extent, that’s all of us. We are squandering one of the greatest resources to accelerate technology because it’s been so relatively easy to pull energy from the earth that we’ve been lulled into complacency. I sometimes wonder if our level of technological advancement would even be possible without fossil fuels. If not, and we don’t actively invest in means away from it, I also wonder if that advancement is just a flash-in-the-pan on the geological time scale. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AwQKhvweL2A https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AwQKhvweL2A
    • kingsuper20 5y ago
      >I sometimes wonder if our level of technological advancement would even be possible without fossil fuels. I don't. I'd say that fossil fuels were absolutely required. Admittedly there was a ramp-up due to water-powered manufacturing and steam engines run by throwing in chunks of wood.
      • bumby 5y ago
        It does seem like much of society is predicated on burning things. I feel like we have an opportunity to change that paradigm should since the nuclear age began, but burning things is just so easy it makes us complacent
• zionic 5y ago
  Even if you don’t care about the climate/environment, the impact of petrochemicals on human health cannot be understated. They have filled our biosphere with carcinogens and endocrine disrupters for profit. It’s about more than just energy consumption, we need to eliminate the entire petrochemical industry.
  • bboylen 5y ago
    Nothing has expanded the human lifespan more than petrochemicals. A LOT of medicine/medical machines are made with petrochemicals
    • lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Not to mention the effects of individual plastic wrapping preventing pathogens from spreading as quickly or easily.
• tossaway332 5y ago
  Nuremberg trials for the O & G industry. A phrase I've seen thrown around by people who are angrier than I am. I suppose trials would be more fair than guillotines or summary executions.
  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I know plenty of non O & G industry people who would flip their shit if politicians proposed taxing O & G to reduce its use. Walk around your neighborhood and ask who would vote for the person that takes away their quarter acre lots, detached single family homes, F150s and SUVs, and tropical vacations. The effects of O & G industry have been widely known for decades, despite any attempt by O & G to obfuscate it or hide it. At this point, it is reasonable to assume the population of the developed world has decided that they might as well enjoy today today, and let tomorrow deal with tomorrow. It is also a classic prisoner’s dilemma on the global scale, so I expect no change going forward other than miraculous advancements in technology that let us have our cake and eat it too.
  • inglor_cz 5y ago
    O & G industry aren't dictators, though. People willingly buy and even demand their products. That is very different from coming to power and deciding to kill some outgroup out of hate.
    • KozmoNau7 5y ago
      Do we actually have a choice, a realistic way to opt out? Not to mention the massive advertising and marketing machine manipulating us for centuries into desiring the products of the oil and gas industry.
• aliasEli 5y ago
  And what about their shareholders? In the last part of the 20th century, Shell had multiple research programs into alternative energy. These were all axed under pressure from the shareholders.
  • OrvalWintermute 5y ago
    Big Energy are some of the largest researchers into renewable energy, and they will become more so with the influence of ESG. ESG is flexing more muscles than ever - look at what just happened to Exxon's board thanks to a fairly small hedge fund influencing shareholders to vote in a different direction. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/business/exxon-board-clean-energy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/business/exxon-board-clea...
• gameswithgo 5y ago
  On the one hand, on the issue of climate change they have behaved very very poorly overall. Spending huge sums of money that have not only misled people about climate change, but have intentionally harmed the public's perception of science generally. On the other hand fossil fuels are what fuel all of the growth and production of our modern world. Sadly the power they accumulated was not used responsibly, but then it rarely is.
  • Schiendelman 5y ago
    It’s arguable that the reason they have fueled growth is that they killed the competing industries that would have otherwise.
• s5300 5y ago
  They aren't. For the most part, everybody who ever would already does. Entire states livelihoods basically depended on said conglomerate for some time, even if it was an honestly fairly shitty livelihood. Like... you know how Utah is basically a Mormon/religion state? Well, the O&G industry is just about an all encompassing religion for some other states. Decades of time, generations of families, and billions of corporate dollars went into brainwashing these people into thinking O&G could do no wrong and anybody who said otherwise was effectively trying to take their religion from them. It is likely that nothing is going to change this any time soon. Psychology on a mass scale is insane. Just look at the Texas recycling campaigns.
• l33t2328 5y ago
  I don’t think we can solely blame big oil companies. People love gas powered planes and cars, and they love plastic even more. They choose to buy these things, and without them oil companies wouldn’t be profitable.
• ken47 5y ago
  I think many already realize how bad humanity's usage of oil has been for t0+100 humanity. And let's not even talk about t0+200 humanity. The ascendance of oil has been a relatively recent phenomenon in human history, and it's pretty safe to say that even with some of the brighter minds of humankind guiding its usage, we still managed to f things up pretty badly. The bigger picture seems to be that humanity isn't so good at managing itself. Perhaps a major advance in AI is the only potential salvation for this timeline.
  • anjel 5y ago
    ERP as a replacement for human governance perhaps?
• kybernetyk 5y ago
  >their crimes against the world like what? bringing us efficient and cheap fertilizers to stop world hunger? allowing for wide use of polymers? enabling modern drugs? lifting up our whole civilization from the steam age into the information age?
  • hallarempt 5y ago
    Like, knowingly turning the planet into an uninhabitable place, killing millions in the process, destroying huge tracts of property with impunity, knowing they were doing this _and hiding it_. If that isn't a crime, what is?
    • likecarter 5y ago
      They never did this. They just enabled you to run your diesel-generator during blackouts in California.
      • hallarempt 5y ago
        a) I don't have a diesel generator b) I am not in California c) I have never experienced a blackout d) Yes, the oil companies did all of that.
  • ArkanExplorer 5y ago
    Population of France 1891: 39.6 million 2020: 65 million 2100: 65 million Population of DR Congo 1891: 8.23 million 2020: 90 million (about 8 million rely on food aid to survive) 2100: 362 million Europe and the West can feed themselves without cheap fertilizer, they have done so for 200 years (about the time since the last major famine in France). Cheap fertilizer is just leading to unsustainable population explosions in the developing world, where the reproduction strategies of men (these are patriachal societies where women lack consistent access to education, contraception, abortion) will inevitably push the ecosystem to its limits. We are essentially in violation of the Prime Directive in terms of the free food, goods, technology we are giving some of these countries.
• gumby 5y ago
  > When is the public going to realize the O&G industry is quite possibly the worst conglomerate that we have ever seen. Ehh, I have more a nuanced view than that. The internal combustion engine clearly cleaned up cities and improved public health. Almost nothing we do today would be possible without a history of fossil fuels and and fossil derived products (hydrocarbon plastics, fertilizers etc). So I give them that and they are quite welcome to it. I don’t even blame them for wanting to expand the use of their product. The problem is they were the scaffolding on which we built a modern economy/society, and instead of dismantling the scaffolding we have allowed it to continue, and even encouraged it to metastasize. The fact that they knew there was a problem and covered it up rather than addressing it should be considered criminal, as it should have been with the tobacco companies. But that’s now how society functions, unfortunately. But to call it “the worst”… I don’t know. The East India Company and Big Slavery were unalloyed evil. The oil revolution is a mixed evil.
  • Schiendelman 5y ago
    The internal combustion engine was developed at about the same time as the electric car. Battery swapping already existed in the very late 1800s. The oil and gas industry delayed real research and development of electric vehicles for 100 years. Cities would have become even cleaner, much faster, if not for that industry.
    • gumby 5y ago
      > The oil and gas industry delayed real research and development of electric vehicles for 100 years. Do you mean proactively somehow (as with GM and some trollycars)? I find that hard to believe and would love to learn more. If you mean their very existence reduced incentives, well ok, but that’s simply path dependency and is the way life works. There were other pressures on battery improvement (portability: schlepping a heavy box of protons around is a lot of work!) so I have a hard time blaming the oil and gas industry for that. But as I said I’d like to learn more, if that were the case.
      • Schiendelman 5y ago
• jl6 5y ago
  O&G producers and investors must answer for the funding of climate change denial (which is a crime against humanity IMHO, and needs to be prosecuted in an international court), but the actual production of oil and gas is the fault of every man, woman and child who ever consumed a fossil-fuel-derived product. It is futile to bring a prosecution for everyday production and consumption of fossil products, because the defendant list would include everybody, but there is a specific, small group of actors who have knowingly poisoned attempts at collective action and are intentionally blocking the path towards a better world, and those people absolutely can be put on trial.
  • rytor718 5y ago
    I agree but unfortunately, the actual problem is we did not have and do not have a government willing to take responsibility for allowing this; for a total lack of public planning and a total dependency on such singular forms of energy for everything which has left us open to catastrophe. After all, its government regulation and policy which are ultimately responsible for making sure stuff like this doesn't happen. Or that if it does happen, it's part of how we plan our society so that we're prepared. There are far more delinquents in Washington, past and present, who were too busy lining their pockets to do their jobs. They get the bulk of the blame here. Companies and individuals will do whatever they can get away with. That's why we have laws. So while I'd like these companies to also fess up and be accountable for their role, nothing will change until we have a government who understands they've been complicit (and that includes a citizenry who will not vote for action on these issues). This is literally the function of government -- to make sure we have harvests year round, clean water, sanitation and clean air. And they have failed us the world over on this task.