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I cannot blame them for investing in oil and gas. Oil and gas companies get a lot of bad press and maybe rightfully so, but the sad thing is that the politicia

I cannot blame them for investing in oil and gas. Oil and gas companies get a lot of bad press and maybe rightfully so, but the sad thing is that the politicians and the users of oil and gas are the main ones to blame. If no-one used oil and gas then there would be no oil companies anymore. Politicians have known for 20-30 years or more that CO2 causes global warming, but they have done nothing to limit the use of oil and gas. Absolutely nothing. Instead they want to blame the oil companies and bring them to court. At the same time they blame oil companies, they start to reduce taxes on oil/gas, they ask producing countries to produce more etc. It's nuts. There have been no major incentives for consumers to move away from big cars with big powerful engines, no incentives for car producers to build more fuel efficient cars. We could easily have had a car fleet today which consumed 20-30% less than it actually does and that without any major drawbacks in comfort and performance. And that without even transitioning to electric cars.

Bilal_io 4y ago
> the politicians and the users of oil and gas are the main ones to blame. If no-one used oil and gas then there would be no oil companies anymore. Sure we can blame politicians as they're supposed to legislate, but people have had no choices. The O&G companies are not blameless, they've been hoarding money and absolving themselves of any responsibility whenever there was a spill or any other catastrophic incident, they did nothing and continue to do nothing, and if they did it was the bare minimum.
adrianN 4y ago
Oil and Gas companies would deserve a lot less blame if they didn't spend so much money on disinformation campaigns and lobbying to delay more ambitions climate goals.
- Cederfjard 4y ago
  Exactly. It’s not as simple as them just serving an already existing demand. They use their very considerable resources to create and maintain that demand, to the furthest extent and for as long as possible.
danaris 4y ago
> I cannot blame them for investing in oil and gas. I can. As long as we treat money as paramount, and self-interest as the only valuable rationality, we will, as a society, continue down this road of self-destruction. We must rediscover our sense of collective responsibility if we are to avoid serious calamities within our lifetimes (at least, for those of us who are still no more than about middle-aged).
- DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y ago
  > our sense of collective responsibility Why isn’t that responsibility on consumers who pay the oil companies? People blame the oil companies at the same time they clamour over it’s products and hand over vast sums of cash. How much money do consumers give oil companies per year compared to investors like Warren Buffett?
  - danaris 4y ago
    First: This is a common tactic nowadays, attempting to deflect blame from the corporate behemoths who have drastically outsized control over our world by appealing to a sense of "individual responsibility". It is, unfortunately, a pretty easy sell in America, steeped as it is in Protestant ideals of exactly that. Now, the reason it's a problem—and the answer to your question—is that oil companies, among others (and more generally, the mega-wealthy and mega-corporations) have a massive amount of power in our world today. To pick a single example, Exxon-Mobil could, by making just a few carefully calculated decisions, reduce the total carbon footprint of our society by an appreciable fraction. The reason they don't is because, in the short term, that would mean giving up some degree of profit, in a system designed to encourage and reward maximizing profit at all costs, and in the long term, unless companies like them are able to completely replace their fossil-fuel operations with some other source of income, they will have to be closed down entirely (or almost entirely) in order to avoid a genuine climate catastrophe. But their power doesn't stop there. They have enough money to spend that they run massive advertising campaigns promoting bullshit things like "clean coal". They spend absurd amounts every year on lobbying, and on top of that, even if they stopped spending on lobbying tomorrow, they have enough politicians in their pockets in one way or another that they would still be able to effectively dictate their policy positions for years to come, regardless of the desires of their constituents. Again: that's all looking at one oil company, which, to a certain extent, acts as a single unit as far as decision-making goes—and though there are multiple actual human beings making those decisions, it's still only a small handful compared to the number of people their decisions affect. Let's contrast that with individuals. Any one individual can't make enough of a difference to the big oil companies by any of their actions to get them to change, nor can their decisions have remotely the same kind of impact on our overall carbon footprint. Furthermore, given the state of our society and economy today, for most people to be able to stop supporting fossil fuel companies entirely would mean effectively destroying their livelihoods. There are three big ways that most Americans today rely on fossil fuels (there are others, of course, but we'll look at these for simplicity's sake): Their car, their heat, and their power. Electric cars are still significantly more expensive than ICE cars, and even if every car owner in America were able to afford to replace theirs with a pure electric, there simply aren't enough such cars available to make that replacement overnight. Some houses are already fully heated purely electrically, and "geothermal"/heat pump systems are becoming much more affordable and widely available, but the cost of switching over is still fairly steep...and at least for now, "regular" electric heat costs significantly more in most areas than heating the same house the same amount with oil or gas. There are places in America where green power is more readily available than others—I'm fortunate enough to live in one; most of my power comes from hydroelectric sources, though there's still some fossil fuel in there. Most don't have that option, and don't have any obvious means of causing such options to become available. Most importantly, what all of this is sort of glossing over is that even if they had the options technically available to them, for most people, it would be deeply personally irresponsible of them to make the expenditures necessary to minimize their personal carbon footprints, because they would then be in vastly worse financial state (again, if they had the means to do so in the first place, which a huge percentage do not.) So what you are saying is effectively, "Why should we be demanding that the oil companies change their ways, leaving their executives with only a few hundred million in the bank to last them the rest of their lives? We should be demanding that the average American bankrupt themselves to achieve a much lower total reduction in carbon output, instead!" TL;DR: Consumers support the fossil fuel industry because there's effectively no choice. Oil executives have a very real choice in how they continue to devastate our ecosystem.

Bilal_io 4y ago

> the politicians and the users of oil and gas are the main ones to blame. If no-one used oil and gas then there would be no oil companies anymore. Sure we can blame politicians as they're supposed to legislate, but people have had no choices. The O&G companies are not blameless, they've been hoarding money and absolving themselves of any responsibility whenever there was a spill or any other catastrophic incident, they did nothing and continue to do nothing, and if they did it was the bare minimum.

adrianN 4y ago

Oil and Gas companies would deserve a lot less blame if they didn't spend so much money on disinformation campaigns and lobbying to delay more ambitions climate goals.

Cederfjard 4y ago
Exactly. It’s not as simple as them just serving an already existing demand. They use their very considerable resources to create and maintain that demand, to the furthest extent and for as long as possible.

danaris 4y ago

> I cannot blame them for investing in oil and gas. I can. As long as we treat money as paramount, and self-interest as the only valuable rationality, we will, as a society, continue down this road of self-destruction. We must rediscover our sense of collective responsibility if we are to avoid serious calamities within our lifetimes (at least, for those of us who are still no more than about middle-aged).

DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y ago
> our sense of collective responsibility Why isn’t that responsibility on consumers who pay the oil companies? People blame the oil companies at the same time they clamour over it’s products and hand over vast sums of cash. How much money do consumers give oil companies per year compared to investors like Warren Buffett?
- danaris 4y ago
  First: This is a common tactic nowadays, attempting to deflect blame from the corporate behemoths who have drastically outsized control over our world by appealing to a sense of "individual responsibility". It is, unfortunately, a pretty easy sell in America, steeped as it is in Protestant ideals of exactly that. Now, the reason it's a problem—and the answer to your question—is that oil companies, among others (and more generally, the mega-wealthy and mega-corporations) have a massive amount of power in our world today. To pick a single example, Exxon-Mobil could, by making just a few carefully calculated decisions, reduce the total carbon footprint of our society by an appreciable fraction. The reason they don't is because, in the short term, that would mean giving up some degree of profit, in a system designed to encourage and reward maximizing profit at all costs, and in the long term, unless companies like them are able to completely replace their fossil-fuel operations with some other source of income, they will have to be closed down entirely (or almost entirely) in order to avoid a genuine climate catastrophe. But their power doesn't stop there. They have enough money to spend that they run massive advertising campaigns promoting bullshit things like "clean coal". They spend absurd amounts every year on lobbying, and on top of that, even if they stopped spending on lobbying tomorrow, they have enough politicians in their pockets in one way or another that they would still be able to effectively dictate their policy positions for years to come, regardless of the desires of their constituents. Again: that's all looking at one oil company, which, to a certain extent, acts as a single unit as far as decision-making goes—and though there are multiple actual human beings making those decisions, it's still only a small handful compared to the number of people their decisions affect. Let's contrast that with individuals. Any one individual can't make enough of a difference to the big oil companies by any of their actions to get them to change, nor can their decisions have remotely the same kind of impact on our overall carbon footprint. Furthermore, given the state of our society and economy today, for most people to be able to stop supporting fossil fuel companies entirely would mean effectively destroying their livelihoods. There are three big ways that most Americans today rely on fossil fuels (there are others, of course, but we'll look at these for simplicity's sake): Their car, their heat, and their power. Electric cars are still significantly more expensive than ICE cars, and even if every car owner in America were able to afford to replace theirs with a pure electric, there simply aren't enough such cars available to make that replacement overnight. Some houses are already fully heated purely electrically, and "geothermal"/heat pump systems are becoming much more affordable and widely available, but the cost of switching over is still fairly steep...and at least for now, "regular" electric heat costs significantly more in most areas than heating the same house the same amount with oil or gas. There are places in America where green power is more readily available than others—I'm fortunate enough to live in one; most of my power comes from hydroelectric sources, though there's still some fossil fuel in there. Most don't have that option, and don't have any obvious means of causing such options to become available. Most importantly, what all of this is sort of glossing over is that even if they had the options technically available to them, for most people, it would be deeply personally irresponsible of them to make the expenditures necessary to minimize their personal carbon footprints, because they would then be in vastly worse financial state (again, if they had the means to do so in the first place, which a huge percentage do not.) So what you are saying is effectively, "Why should we be demanding that the oil companies change their ways, leaving their executives with only a few hundred million in the bank to last them the rest of their lives? We should be demanding that the average American bankrupt themselves to achieve a much lower total reduction in carbon output, instead!" TL;DR: Consumers support the fossil fuel industry because there's effectively no choice. Oil executives have a very real choice in how they continue to devastate our ecosystem.