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A lot of comments here seem to be focusing on the fact that individuals use oil products beyond what is necessary for basic life and in fact do have some person

A lot of comments here seem to be focusing on the fact that individuals use oil products beyond what is necessary for basic life and in fact do have some personal responsibility. This seems to me to be missing the forest for the trees. Sometimes society ends up in a situation where we need things that are not sustainable, like oil or coal. Producing those unsustainable products to meet the demands of society does not make the producers solely responsible for any side effects. What is immoral is trying to artificially delay the transition to more sustainable alternatives or to socialize the costs of doing business. Oil companies have repeatedly run well funded PR campaigns with the explicit goal of discrediting arguments that more sustainable energy technology was necessary despite knowing them to be false. Similarly, they have lobbied hard to ensure that when the impacts of oil to the environment are larger than expected, society picks up the tab. This lets them be more reckless with our communal environmental resources.

glogla 5y ago
Well said. I will never understand why people protect oil companies. You know how in comic books there's always a villain going trying to DESTROY THE WORLD and it seems unrealistic and over the top? Oil companies are this villain in the real world. They are doing their best to kill off humanity, for short term profit.
- namanyayg 5y ago
  Big oil downvoted this. Jokes aside, I really don't see the reason for downvotes. Oil made our world what it is; but any company who still focuses on its profits while knowing alternatives exist that are better for the planet, and parallelly spending billions in PR, is downright evil. I'd even say it's much more evil than Facebook's or Google's privacy issues that HN bashes every week.
  - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    Well, I'd say it's a bit funny to call something evil when a lot of people would die if it disappeared tomorrow. It's very easy to criticise the costs of modern life when the 'evil' is displaced onto someone else. But the truth is, it's a much more morally grey area than we like to admit. And it's hard to opt out of this 'system', but not impossible - I'm sure the Amish would take converts, but not many people want to go that route. It's an appealing story to say that the O&G economy is the villain and all the people participating in it are innocent, but the truth is, we know how to live in bronze age societies. This 'evil system' doesn't stick around because it holds us prisoner, it sticks around because most of us prefer the lifestyle. And a story that absolves us of responsibility for participating seems like just another defence mechanism the system has built up.
    - glogla 5y ago
      > It's an appealing story to say that the O&G economy is the villain and all the people participating in it are innocent, but the truth is, we know how to live in bronze age societies. This 'evil system' doesn't stick around because it holds us prisoner, it sticks around because most of us prefer the lifestyle. And a story that absolves us of responsibility for participating seems like just another defence mechanism the system has built up. Normal people have much less choice than you imagine. Even in the rich western world, only the very affluent can buy electric car instead of gas one. Only the very affluent can afford apartments in city centers so they can walk instead of driving. Nobody can change where their electricity comes from, whether is it coal or renewables. Nobody can pick between grocery store that gets its supply in diesel trucks and second grocery store that gets its supply on electric trucks and trains powered by renewable electricity. There's no "planet non-destroying iphone" next to "planet destroying iphone" in the shop for you to decide between.
      - travisb 5y ago
        The problem is that the choice presented is not, and will never be, "planet non-destroying iphone" versus "planet destroying iphone". The choice is between "iphone" or "nothing". Understandably people choose "iphone", but that's doesn't negate that the choice exists. Yes it's very expensive to live a modern lifestyle with fewer direct O&G inputs. It's however really cheap to live a subsistence lifestyle in the middle of nowhere without all the environment wrecking conveniences; it's not near as comfortable though.
    - namanyayg 5y ago
      I see where you're going with this, but I disagree. Normal people want cars and planes and phones sure. But they don't really have any voice or choice in how the manufacturing is done, and they always want the cheapest options. Most don't even know what environmental issues the products or services they consume result in. They are intentionally deceived, kept uneducated, and lied to via sold media outlets and false advertising. Thus, it is responsibility of the powers that be to move in the direction which research suggests is the best for humanity's and the earth's long term existence. Politicians are supposed to do that via taxes and subsidies to promote environment-friendly options. But, the US has shown that it's easy for a old, selfish, and dumb politicians to sway the masses with false promises and grandiose oration. And the politicians, given that they have less than 20 years remaining on this earth, are happy to fill their pockets with more money than they can use rather than giving a fuck about the future. Secondly, the oil companies are supposed to have some sense and care for humanity and not continue choosing options that damage the earth but instead should have started shifting to environmental friendly options when they became aware of the consequences of burning oil. But, again, they are happy to forget it all in return for some extra profits. Maybe it's because they know that if they stop selling oil, some other competitor will start. But if the top oil companies actually worked with the government to get oil restricted and promote renewables, they could actually have made a difference and at least taken a step in the right direction. But they didn't even try. It's really futile to share blame with the consumers, the world we live in does not give the average person any choice. And the average person is too damn tired with working a meaningless 8h+commute/day to even think or learn about these issues. The blame lies fully with the powers on top.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  The unmoral corporate and legal pressures and incentive structures they're in dictate that they do their best to earn short term profits. They are unconcerned whether their actions kill off humanity eventually, that's simply not a factor they're capable of caring about.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    Then we must destroy the very idea of a corporation. If it is truly impossible for a corporation to avoid fundamentally damaging human civilization in search of the almighty dollar, then we need to prevent those incentives from existing in the first place.
    - betterunix2 5y ago
      There is a better solution: the government reins in corporations that are creating a problem for the world. Once upon a time that was a non-controversial idea.
- papandada 5y ago
  There is a market for the products they supply at the price they offer, there is a demand for return on investment they provide in a global financial system (and just try to disconnect from that). I hate that companies are ruining the environment, I hate that companies are killing people with unsafe products, I hate that companies are mistreating workers, I hate that countries have bullied their way over indigenous peoples to "own" the country I live it, I hate that companies profit off of promoting things that destroy humanity as we used to know it. But I don't see there being a clear line between who is "good" and who is "bad". My own answer, which I expect will please very few, is that we do our best in the small sphere of influence we have to be loving toward all, and beg God to save us.
- slingnow 5y ago
  I see more and more of these types of comments that just go so far out there as to be absurd, and I'm glad they're downvoted. You have a long way to go to prove that this vague, evil entity called an "oil company" has a will of it's own, and that will is to destroy the world. My guess is that the will of this entity is to make money, and an unfortunate side-effect is that it damages the earths ecosystem. But then I'm not prone to ridiculous hyperbole.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    This type of "evil genius" is quite successful at brainwashing people though.
- jfengel 5y ago
  Honestly, I think most of it is culture war. The people who oppose oil companies are often the same people who take progressive views on a lot of other topics -- gay rights, gun control, pollution, etc. And that generates an almost knee-jerk opposition: anything they are for, we must be against. It's tribalism. If liberals are opposed to oil companies, than oil companies must be good. Then they'll be provided with arguments to support it, derived by think tanks and distributed via dedicated media, web sites, social media, etc. Those are generally pretty poor arguments, but it doesn't matter: they have a thing to say, and no particular interest in questioning it. So the whole thing ends up being shortcut by the longstanding culture war between left and right. Neither side has to do any thinking; the thinking is all done for them. It just so happens that the anti-oil-company side is having its thinking done by scientists, while the pro-oil-company side has its thinking done by professional propagandists, political strategists, and the occasional hand on the wheel from full-time troll farms.
  - betterunix2 5y ago
    "the longstanding culture war between left and right" ...by which you must mean the "culture war" that only the right wing seems to know or care about. It is not really "between" the left and right as much as it is a right-wing concept that people on the left almost universally roll their eyes at (or fall into the trap of actually responding to right-wing agitation). "Neither side has to do any thinking" Except that, as you point out, one side is responding to scientific results indicating a serious and growing problem, while the other is not. One side is thinking, or at worst dependent on a group of people who at least try to push their personal biases out of the way when they are thinking. The other side reflexively calls all of it some combination of "socialist," "hoax," or "government takeover," without even acknowledging the existence of a problem. Yes, I know the downvotes are coming for this, but the fact is that the Republican party has stopped even trying. You can be pro-oil-company and also be pro-reducing-carbon-emissions. Where are the Republican proposals to develop industrial-scale carbon capture to offset all those tailpipe and smokestack emissions? Carbon capture could have been an entirely new industry for oil companies to expand into, growing their businesses while reducing net carbon emissions. Instead Republicans lined up behind someone who declared climate change to be a Chinese hoax and stopped even suggesting alternatives to the Democrats' proposed solutions.
troyvit 5y ago
That's totally true, but it's also true that if we reined in consumption, altered our habits and focused on reusing more then we are doing two things. First, we're taking ownership for our responsibility in this whole mess (acknowledging that there are trees in this forest), and second we're hurting oil companies where it counts. If we don't consume they can't supply. If we wait for our governments to hold them to account we're not going to get anywhere.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  If we pushed up the cost of that consumption I'd be willing to bet we'd see it magically reduce.
- jkubicek 5y ago
  I don't think focusing on individual responsibility will work. In order to make a meaningful difference we need to make sure that a) everyone knows what the issues are and what changes need to be made b) everyone is willing to make the sacrifices necessary If we've learned anything from (the entire history of the human race) it's that people who know and care will shoulder the burden of making changes while those who don't will benefit from it all. If we want to make a dent in our fossil fuel consumption, we need meaningful action at the national and global scale by major political powers. Taxes, regulation, criminal consequences are the only way to move the needle. edit: dougmwne said it better than I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317665
  - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    That may be true, but refusing to make meaningful sacrifices before everyone else does is awful PR. Even if the only meaningful thing anyone can do is change public opinion, leading by example is still the most effective way of doing so. I really think the DeFi movement is the only group making any headway there, because reducing consumption is billed as a means to further one's own self-interest there.
lhorie 5y ago
I mean, if we're going to talk about forest and trees, consider that the whole "big oil lobbies governments" thing flies right in the face of the "democracy is the voice of the people" argument. If people collectively don't care to fight back at a legislative level against socialized costs, wouldn't that logically mean they're the ones ultimately responsible for their own predicament? Or more philosophically speaking, whose fault is it that people living under democratic rules don't challenge the efficacy of their governments? Or, perhaps more importantly, why? I think the problem with finger pointing is that it distracts from meaningful introspection. I think there are far deeper connections between oil and consumption than the "I do my part" crowd seems to realize, from the economics of the logistics industry, all the way down to the fundamental assumption that modern growth-oriented economics and consumption are even "normal" (compared to, say, how native tribes lived eons ago). In other words, merely being aware of the need for unsustainable resources in various cases doesn't fully detach us from the reality that the system we rely on to live is broken. Sometimes I contemplate the "weird" trees in this forest: people investing into off-grid living, or people stocking up bunkers, or isolated tribes in the middle of nowhere; and I wonder if thinking about regular society in terms of scalable homogeneous solutions isn't in a way similar to breeding cavendish bananas - highly optimized in one specific metric, but susceptible to being wiped out globally by a single unforeseen threat (or in our case, by one of the many potential global catastrophes that scientists have been warning about) If darwinism applies to civilizations, things ain't looking great for the vast majority of us precisely because we're stuck in a rut talking about ifs-and-buts instead of physically adapting to the logical end state of the trends we see in scientific data.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  This could be asteroid that kills us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action Concentrated interests (oil companies) tend to win in battles against diffuse interests (individuals and their descendants who are threatened by climate change.) An interesting corollary is that a "majority" oppressing a "minority" is not a going concern, but the opposite is. That is, black vs white in the United States vs. South Africa are entirely different things. (Think, 90% of the population can steal everything from 10% of the population and raise it's standard of living by about 10%. 10% of the population can steal 10% of the standard of living from the other 90% and double its own standard of living.)
nipponese 5y ago
I don't think it's pessimistic to say that as the "green" economy expands we are starting to see those same well-funded parties buying PR to selling snake oil or spreading fud. Energy is pretty hard to the average person to understand and energy+politics is almost impossible without some interest/background in foreign policy. https://www.kochind.com/stewardship/environmental-performance https://www.kochind.com/stewardship/environmental-performanc...
FrankenTan 5y ago
I agree. Also, sometimes if there exists no demand, corporations will spend a lot to create it such as fashion as mentioned\shown in https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-12/fast-fashion-turning-parts-ghana-into-toxic-landfill/100358702 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-12/fast-fashion-turning-... This is probably not be true for all markets or industries, of course, but I think that (and availability regarding prices) is relevant to not shifting it back onto individual consumer responsibility.

glogla 5y ago

Well said. I will never understand why people protect oil companies. You know how in comic books there's always a villain going trying to DESTROY THE WORLD and it seems unrealistic and over the top? Oil companies are this villain in the real world. They are doing their best to kill off humanity, for short term profit.

namanyayg 5y ago
Big oil downvoted this. Jokes aside, I really don't see the reason for downvotes. Oil made our world what it is; but any company who still focuses on its profits while knowing alternatives exist that are better for the planet, and parallelly spending billions in PR, is downright evil. I'd even say it's much more evil than Facebook's or Google's privacy issues that HN bashes every week.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  Well, I'd say it's a bit funny to call something evil when a lot of people would die if it disappeared tomorrow. It's very easy to criticise the costs of modern life when the 'evil' is displaced onto someone else. But the truth is, it's a much more morally grey area than we like to admit. And it's hard to opt out of this 'system', but not impossible - I'm sure the Amish would take converts, but not many people want to go that route. It's an appealing story to say that the O&G economy is the villain and all the people participating in it are innocent, but the truth is, we know how to live in bronze age societies. This 'evil system' doesn't stick around because it holds us prisoner, it sticks around because most of us prefer the lifestyle. And a story that absolves us of responsibility for participating seems like just another defence mechanism the system has built up.
  - glogla 5y ago
    > It's an appealing story to say that the O&G economy is the villain and all the people participating in it are innocent, but the truth is, we know how to live in bronze age societies. This 'evil system' doesn't stick around because it holds us prisoner, it sticks around because most of us prefer the lifestyle. And a story that absolves us of responsibility for participating seems like just another defence mechanism the system has built up. Normal people have much less choice than you imagine. Even in the rich western world, only the very affluent can buy electric car instead of gas one. Only the very affluent can afford apartments in city centers so they can walk instead of driving. Nobody can change where their electricity comes from, whether is it coal or renewables. Nobody can pick between grocery store that gets its supply in diesel trucks and second grocery store that gets its supply on electric trucks and trains powered by renewable electricity. There's no "planet non-destroying iphone" next to "planet destroying iphone" in the shop for you to decide between.
    - travisb 5y ago
      The problem is that the choice presented is not, and will never be, "planet non-destroying iphone" versus "planet destroying iphone". The choice is between "iphone" or "nothing". Understandably people choose "iphone", but that's doesn't negate that the choice exists. Yes it's very expensive to live a modern lifestyle with fewer direct O&G inputs. It's however really cheap to live a subsistence lifestyle in the middle of nowhere without all the environment wrecking conveniences; it's not near as comfortable though.
  - namanyayg 5y ago
    I see where you're going with this, but I disagree. Normal people want cars and planes and phones sure. But they don't really have any voice or choice in how the manufacturing is done, and they always want the cheapest options. Most don't even know what environmental issues the products or services they consume result in. They are intentionally deceived, kept uneducated, and lied to via sold media outlets and false advertising. Thus, it is responsibility of the powers that be to move in the direction which research suggests is the best for humanity's and the earth's long term existence. Politicians are supposed to do that via taxes and subsidies to promote environment-friendly options. But, the US has shown that it's easy for a old, selfish, and dumb politicians to sway the masses with false promises and grandiose oration. And the politicians, given that they have less than 20 years remaining on this earth, are happy to fill their pockets with more money than they can use rather than giving a fuck about the future. Secondly, the oil companies are supposed to have some sense and care for humanity and not continue choosing options that damage the earth but instead should have started shifting to environmental friendly options when they became aware of the consequences of burning oil. But, again, they are happy to forget it all in return for some extra profits. Maybe it's because they know that if they stop selling oil, some other competitor will start. But if the top oil companies actually worked with the government to get oil restricted and promote renewables, they could actually have made a difference and at least taken a step in the right direction. But they didn't even try. It's really futile to share blame with the consumers, the world we live in does not give the average person any choice. And the average person is too damn tired with working a meaningless 8h+commute/day to even think or learn about these issues. The blame lies fully with the powers on top.
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
The unmoral corporate and legal pressures and incentive structures they're in dictate that they do their best to earn short term profits. They are unconcerned whether their actions kill off humanity eventually, that's simply not a factor they're capable of caring about.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  Then we must destroy the very idea of a corporation. If it is truly impossible for a corporation to avoid fundamentally damaging human civilization in search of the almighty dollar, then we need to prevent those incentives from existing in the first place.
  - betterunix2 5y ago
    There is a better solution: the government reins in corporations that are creating a problem for the world. Once upon a time that was a non-controversial idea.
papandada 5y ago
There is a market for the products they supply at the price they offer, there is a demand for return on investment they provide in a global financial system (and just try to disconnect from that). I hate that companies are ruining the environment, I hate that companies are killing people with unsafe products, I hate that companies are mistreating workers, I hate that countries have bullied their way over indigenous peoples to "own" the country I live it, I hate that companies profit off of promoting things that destroy humanity as we used to know it. But I don't see there being a clear line between who is "good" and who is "bad". My own answer, which I expect will please very few, is that we do our best in the small sphere of influence we have to be loving toward all, and beg God to save us.
slingnow 5y ago
I see more and more of these types of comments that just go so far out there as to be absurd, and I'm glad they're downvoted. You have a long way to go to prove that this vague, evil entity called an "oil company" has a will of it's own, and that will is to destroy the world. My guess is that the will of this entity is to make money, and an unfortunate side-effect is that it damages the earths ecosystem. But then I'm not prone to ridiculous hyperbole.
- imtringued 5y ago
  This type of "evil genius" is quite successful at brainwashing people though.
jfengel 5y ago
Honestly, I think most of it is culture war. The people who oppose oil companies are often the same people who take progressive views on a lot of other topics -- gay rights, gun control, pollution, etc. And that generates an almost knee-jerk opposition: anything they are for, we must be against. It's tribalism. If liberals are opposed to oil companies, than oil companies must be good. Then they'll be provided with arguments to support it, derived by think tanks and distributed via dedicated media, web sites, social media, etc. Those are generally pretty poor arguments, but it doesn't matter: they have a thing to say, and no particular interest in questioning it. So the whole thing ends up being shortcut by the longstanding culture war between left and right. Neither side has to do any thinking; the thinking is all done for them. It just so happens that the anti-oil-company side is having its thinking done by scientists, while the pro-oil-company side has its thinking done by professional propagandists, political strategists, and the occasional hand on the wheel from full-time troll farms.
- betterunix2 5y ago
  "the longstanding culture war between left and right" ...by which you must mean the "culture war" that only the right wing seems to know or care about. It is not really "between" the left and right as much as it is a right-wing concept that people on the left almost universally roll their eyes at (or fall into the trap of actually responding to right-wing agitation). "Neither side has to do any thinking" Except that, as you point out, one side is responding to scientific results indicating a serious and growing problem, while the other is not. One side is thinking, or at worst dependent on a group of people who at least try to push their personal biases out of the way when they are thinking. The other side reflexively calls all of it some combination of "socialist," "hoax," or "government takeover," without even acknowledging the existence of a problem. Yes, I know the downvotes are coming for this, but the fact is that the Republican party has stopped even trying. You can be pro-oil-company and also be pro-reducing-carbon-emissions. Where are the Republican proposals to develop industrial-scale carbon capture to offset all those tailpipe and smokestack emissions? Carbon capture could have been an entirely new industry for oil companies to expand into, growing their businesses while reducing net carbon emissions. Instead Republicans lined up behind someone who declared climate change to be a Chinese hoax and stopped even suggesting alternatives to the Democrats' proposed solutions.

troyvit 5y ago

That's totally true, but it's also true that if we reined in consumption, altered our habits and focused on reusing more then we are doing two things. First, we're taking ownership for our responsibility in this whole mess (acknowledging that there are trees in this forest), and second we're hurting oil companies where it counts. If we don't consume they can't supply. If we wait for our governments to hold them to account we're not going to get anywhere.

nicoburns 5y ago
If we pushed up the cost of that consumption I'd be willing to bet we'd see it magically reduce.
jkubicek 5y ago
I don't think focusing on individual responsibility will work. In order to make a meaningful difference we need to make sure that a) everyone knows what the issues are and what changes need to be made b) everyone is willing to make the sacrifices necessary If we've learned anything from (the entire history of the human race) it's that people who know and care will shoulder the burden of making changes while those who don't will benefit from it all. If we want to make a dent in our fossil fuel consumption, we need meaningful action at the national and global scale by major political powers. Taxes, regulation, criminal consequences are the only way to move the needle. edit: dougmwne said it better than I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317665
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  That may be true, but refusing to make meaningful sacrifices before everyone else does is awful PR. Even if the only meaningful thing anyone can do is change public opinion, leading by example is still the most effective way of doing so. I really think the DeFi movement is the only group making any headway there, because reducing consumption is billed as a means to further one's own self-interest there.

lhorie 5y ago

I mean, if we're going to talk about forest and trees, consider that the whole "big oil lobbies governments" thing flies right in the face of the "democracy is the voice of the people" argument. If people collectively don't care to fight back at a legislative level against socialized costs, wouldn't that logically mean they're the ones ultimately responsible for their own predicament? Or more philosophically speaking, whose fault is it that people living under democratic rules don't challenge the efficacy of their governments? Or, perhaps more importantly, why? I think the problem with finger pointing is that it distracts from meaningful introspection. I think there are far deeper connections between oil and consumption than the "I do my part" crowd seems to realize, from the economics of the logistics industry, all the way down to the fundamental assumption that modern growth-oriented economics and consumption are even "normal" (compared to, say, how native tribes lived eons ago). In other words, merely being aware of the need for unsustainable resources in various cases doesn't fully detach us from the reality that the system we rely on to live is broken. Sometimes I contemplate the "weird" trees in this forest: people investing into off-grid living, or people stocking up bunkers, or isolated tribes in the middle of nowhere; and I wonder if thinking about regular society in terms of scalable homogeneous solutions isn't in a way similar to breeding cavendish bananas - highly optimized in one specific metric, but susceptible to being wiped out globally by a single unforeseen threat (or in our case, by one of the many potential global catastrophes that scientists have been warning about) If darwinism applies to civilizations, things ain't looking great for the vast majority of us precisely because we're stuck in a rut talking about ifs-and-buts instead of physically adapting to the logical end state of the trends we see in scientific data.

PaulHoule 5y ago
This could be asteroid that kills us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action Concentrated interests (oil companies) tend to win in battles against diffuse interests (individuals and their descendants who are threatened by climate change.) An interesting corollary is that a "majority" oppressing a "minority" is not a going concern, but the opposite is. That is, black vs white in the United States vs. South Africa are entirely different things. (Think, 90% of the population can steal everything from 10% of the population and raise it's standard of living by about 10%. 10% of the population can steal 10% of the standard of living from the other 90% and double its own standard of living.)

nipponese 5y ago

I don't think it's pessimistic to say that as the "green" economy expands we are starting to see those same well-funded parties buying PR to selling snake oil or spreading fud. Energy is pretty hard to the average person to understand and energy+politics is almost impossible without some interest/background in foreign policy. https://www.kochind.com/stewardship/environmental-performance https://www.kochind.com/stewardship/environmental-performanc...

FrankenTan 5y ago

I agree. Also, sometimes if there exists no demand, corporations will spend a lot to create it such as fashion as mentioned\shown in https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-12/fast-fashion-turning-parts-ghana-into-toxic-landfill/100358702 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-12/fast-fashion-turning-... This is probably not be true for all markets or industries, of course, but I think that (and availability regarding prices) is relevant to not shifting it back onto individual consumer responsibility.