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What about "ExxonMobil 1" as name ? I think it would be clearer and be more impactful.
by dadoum 4y ago
What about "ExxonMobil 1" as name ? I think it would be clearer and be more impactful.
- melling 4y agoWhy do we want to blame the oil companies? So the bad guy isn’t consumers? We need 100 million barrels of oil a day! Bottled war, plastic containers for takeout food, SUVs, … 40% of global electricity is from coal. That’s much worse than oil. We burn more coal than ever. https://www.statista.com/statistics/265507/global-coal-consumption-in-oil-equivalent/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/265507/global-coal-consu... Let’s all watch Carl Sagan from 1985 and figure out how to solve this multi-generational problem. https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI He warned us not to use coal. Did we listen? At the very least, we can buy ourselves a couple extra decades. Update: Got immediately downvoted so clearly I can’t respond. Now I’m going to optimize my website so it uses less electricity then blog about which computer language uses less electricity. Climate change is a form of bike shedding. We talk about a bunch of irrelevant ideas rather than addressing the real issues. But hey, oil companies knew and didn’t tell us what we already knew. We’re off the hook! Let’s keep sending climate change deniers to Washington: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/climate-deniers-117th-congress/ https://www.americanprogress.org/article/climate-deniers-117...
- slothtrop 4y agoSo, oil and coal then. Unless you had a different point.
- AyyWS 4y agoPretty sure the point was that we should take personal responsibility for our actions.
- sputr 4y agoResponsibility should be placed where it can actually change something. Yes, when dealing with things in our own lives it's usually best to go with "at your own feet", not mater who the actors are, since the only person whose actions you can change are your own. But as far as climate goes, we, the individuals (who happen to not be rich at the moment) have no power to change anything. So taking personal responsibility will change nothing. Well, actually, people taking personal responsibility for the climate have possibly made it worse by redirecting the attention to themselves.
- dccoolgai 4y agoThe obvious contrapositive to this is what happened during the pandemic: everyone stopped driving for a couple months and it had... Almost no impact. The curtain is pulled back now: the call for "individual responsibility" is exposed as cynical the PR tactic it is... Much like "plastic recycling". The fact is 1) Big corporations 2) Big corporations and 3) Big corporations in concert with the legislators they've captured are responsible for climate change. As an individual the most effective behavior you can exhibit to limit climate change is to vote with 1) Your Democracy while you still have it and more importantly 2) Your wallet.
- powerhour 4y agoI'm down. Let's start by making the oil companies take "personal" responsibility for the externalities they create, including the amount of warming they have caused (and that they know they have caused). Perhaps with a carbon tax.
- ehnto 4y agoWhether it's fair or not, personal responsibility has been very clearly pointed out and it's not changed anything. People are shitty and selfish, or sometimes just naive, and at their best, when they do everything they should, they are impotent. Consumers are not just going to pull on their big boy pants and stop consuming, and we'll all live happily in a recovered ecosystem eating organic corn by candlelight. It has to be regulation on industry, and improvements to production (eg ditch coal power generation). Stop it where it matters, where impacts have the scale to actually matter. I've been riding my bike to work this whole damn time! I think we're going to have to be a bit more ambitious.
- slothtrop 4y agoGovernments in the West make it a matter of explicit policy to increase consumption. That is what immigration rates are for, to prop up GDP, then every newcomer from the 3rd-world gets a larger carbon footprint overnight. It makes no sense to blame consumers for that. If the serious consideration for those posturing starts and ends with consumption, then the consistent approach would be to oppose immigration. They do not, because it was never the point. Self-righteously indignation and signaling is. Saying this with the awareness that both right-wing detractors and far-leftists like to target consumers/consumption, as for the latter it dovetails with their anti-Capitalism. Just look at the fusion energy thread from the other day, people are voicing concern that carbon-neutral and cheaper energy would lead to people buying more things. Westerners are struggling to get by, with purchasing power stagnating for years, and yet it's being projected they're practically drowning in useless stuff compared to their grandparents.
- marincounty 4y ago
- jacksnipe 4y agoI’ll bite. Regardless of how you feel about this, oil companies deserve extra blame because their scientists predicted climate change due to oil consumption, and were hushed up and the research never shared.
- masklinn 4y ago> were hushed up and the research never shared. More than that, they used the time to prepare propaganda.
- e_i_pi_2 4y agoI had an initial negative reaction to this comment and tried to figure out why - I think the main reason is that you're putting the blame on individuals for systemic problems. I don't think any amount of individual people trying to be better is going to counteract the damage being done at scale by our large companies. There's definitely a bunch of issues where collective action can work great, but everyone at BP recycling isn't going to fix the next time they set the ocean on fire or get them to stop drilling for oil. This feels kinda like other arguments I see for systemic problems where we blame individuals in the US - we have the most people in jail because they make bad decisions, we have the most shootings because those people are bad, we have so much obesity because people don't have self control, etc - but all these are happening across the population and not in other countries so the cause can't be the individual people, it has to be caused by the environment we're in. As another argument that ignores the blame question altogether - it's just about how we can make the biggest impact the fastest. It's much easier to pass a law saying that makes it prohibitively expensive to be an oil company than it is to say people need to limit their driving more, and the downstream effect will be the same with less people using oil
- lotsofpulp 4y ago> It's much easier to pass a law saying that makes it prohibitively expensive to be an oil company than it is to say people need to limit their driving more, and the downstream effect will be the same with less people using oil I do not see why this would be the case. Politician who is advertising that they will vote against proposals to increase gas taxes would also advertise that they will vote against proposals to make being an oil company prohibitively expensive so that gas prices can go lower or stay low. In the US, we still have a whole political party that removes drilling restrictions and is eager to install pipelines and do whatever is necessary to enable fossil fuel consumption, and they are a very popular party.
- e_i_pi_2 4y agoAgreed - I wasn't trying to say that this is actually a likely outcome, just that it makes more sense to hold companies accountable than individuals
- lotsofpulp 4y ago“Detached suburban SFH/SUV/pickup trucks/flights to tropical destination” might be too long of a name.
- scythe 4y agoThe great sin of neoliberal "environmental" politics is blaming individuals who basically follow the incentives laid our for them by the structure of the economy and not, say, corporate executives and private equity managers who suppressed research results and lobbied legislators to prevent public investments in transit, efficient housing and clean electricity.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoIt has been decades since the research has been publicly advertised. My whole life actually. There has been nothing stopping the US from implementing fossil fuel taxes to curb consumption, except it would sink any politician’s election, because people want cheap fuel. People want tropical vacations, big cars, and big houses with yards. People want to consume. Even right now, the single biggest political issue for voters is gas prices, and having to consume less. And who they can vote for so they do not have to consume less.
- dfxm12 4y agoIt has been decades since the research has been publicly advertised. Yes, there's plenty of blame to go around, but Ford has much better advertising and many more lobbying dollars than researchers. Hell, fewer and fewer compact cars are being made for the US market. By the time I need to buy a new car, all that's going to be available will be vehicles that are probably way heavier than what I want, let alone need. I don't want a vehicle like an F150 or a Bronco, I want a Fiesta (which has been discontinued). So while I can reuse bags, avoid plastic straws, raise my thermostat in the summer, etc. I can't buy a responsible car that isn't for sale. I can't move into a densely zoned neighborhood that doesn't exist. I can't take public transportation that doesn't exist. I don't get to pick how the food for sale in my super market was grown/transported to the store.
- bluescrn 4y agoMaybe name them after the private jets used by the ruling class to fly to climate conferences?
- pionar 4y agoMaybe not buy the cynical take when it contributes an iota of CO2 emissions?
- Aeolun 4y agoIn total, but is that still true when you adjust it for passenger miles traveled?
- bjourne 4y agoRoman Abramovich alone emits as much CO2 as over 5,000 Chinese people. https://luxurylaunches.com/celebrities/roman-abramovich-carbon-footprint.php https://luxurylaunches.com/celebrities/roman-abramovich-carb...
- leereeves 4y agoAnyone's actions, individually, contribute less than an iota of CO2 emissions. Does that give each of us license to do anything we want?
- kmlx 4y agoeven thou aviation is responsible for just 2%-4% of climate change?
- bluescrn 4y agoThis is why climate change is impossible to deal with - everything contributes 'just a tiny fraction' when broken down by industry and by country. Private jets may be a miniscule percentage of the total, but they're one of the most glaringly wasteful, and they're also setting a very bad example for the rest of us. Why should hundreds of millions of working class people accept that they're going to have to lose their cars (and therefore their jobs), their meat, and their ability to heat/cool their small homes while our leaders still use private jets even when travelling to discuss climate change policy? We need proposed solutions to climate change that don't look like a giant boot stomping on the face of the poor forever. The vast majority will never be able to afford Teslas or other neat-but-very-expensive green tech.
- bilsbie 4y agoWhat’s the evidence this comes from climate change? Like how was that proven? (I’m just curious, I didn’t mean to sin. I have my full faith in climate change.)
- bestouff 4y agoHow can this kind of argument can be on HN ? Go do your research, climate change is a proven science nowadays.
- bjourne 4y agoIf you live in western or northern Europe it is already obvious that the climate is getting warmer. Summers we previously thought were heat waves are now normal and winters with -5C to -10C days which were previously normal are now extremely cold. The change in the last 15 years has been very notable. But evidence? How can you prove that a smoker's lung cancer was caused by them smoking their entire life?
- snarf21 4y agoYeah, I was thinking we need something like Climate Heat Bomb Zoe not something that sounds innocuous like Heat Wave Zoe. There have always been "heat waves" but the severity and frequency of extreme weather events is all us and our consumption lifestyle.