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Exxon made ‘breathtakingly’ accurate climate predictions in 1970s and 80s

217 points by helsinkiandrew 4y ago

thatguy0900 4y ago
In any just world the company would be dissolved and all of its resources taken and put towards fixing the problems it intentionally created, and the people that knew about this be held personally liable.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > the company would be dissolved and all of its resources taken and put towards fixing the problems it intentionally created, and the people that knew about this be held personally liable I get the second part. But what's the utility of the first over a fine? Are you suggesting nationalizing Exxon? Or liquidating it?
  - sjsdaiuasgdia 4y ago
    "all of its resources taken" would seem to require liquidation or putting those resources under a different management structure, possibly government directly or government appointed. What would Exxon be able to do once all of its resources have been repurposed? The company would be effectively dissolved even if not explicitly dissolved.
  - frgtpsswrdlame 4y ago
    Without defending their wording, I think the absolute best case for nationalizing a firm is one where the industry is based off of natural resources, vital to the public in the short term, and detrimental to the public in the long term.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    I think actually liquidating isn't so bad. Now and again nature strikes down a giant and a lot of other creatures benefit from it. It's actually a bit odd that when we invented corporations we didn't have some sort of catastrophe mechanism in there just to shake hands up now and again. I think society would find ways to become more resilient if we lived with possible corporate sudden death.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > liquidating isn't so bad You're guaranteeing either consolidation in an already oligopolistic sector, or a recession from the output drop caused by an inexperienced operator learning to scale to a major. > we didn't have some sort of catastrophe mechanism We do. They're fines and license revocations. Companies that can't afford their fines go bankrupt. Government gets cash; the stakeholders' clean up the mess. "Corporate death penalty" and related talking points are almost all about dismissing talk about bigger fines.
      - lordnacho 4y ago
        You're also guaranteeing that people will be able to try new things where the giant once stood. The real challenge is how to regulate the death rate.
    - lazyasciiart 4y ago
      The corporate death penalty. It's reasonable that nobody came up with it at the invention of the corporation, but America should absolutely have implemented one along with Citizens United.
    - jokethrowaway 4y ago
      We do, but corporations which are rich enough just bribe the government and gets bailouts or special treatments. If it was the people vs Exxon with private judges in private courts (judges which compete with one another on who's the best, not government officials with a comfy chair and a guaranteed lifetime of administering "justice"), it would be way harder to corrupt. That's why we need to decentralise our government power.
  - ARandomerDude 4y ago
    Without oil things would be pretty bad around here, to say the least.
  - acdha 4y ago
    Maybe not dissolved but fines aren't enough: if they're not big enough or likely enough, companies may take their chances and if they don't apply personally to the C-level some fraction of people will try to see if they can get rich and leave before the fine arrives. Perhaps that's something along the lines of turning them into highly-regulated public utilities. The big thing I'd focus on is basically real auditing & accountability: serious environmental assessments with full public disclosure, a blanket ban on political involvement so you avoid the case we have currently where someone [not inaccurately] thinks it's cheaper to give lobbyists $10M to avoid regulation which will cost them $100M, and criminal liability for anyone who knowingly tries to hide information or mislead the public.
pstuart 4y ago
Not at all shocking but still absolutely disgusting.
whatever1 4y ago
I don’t understand what was the expectation. For Big Oil to start campaigning against their own product? We have legislative bodies that we literally elect and pay to do this job. Let’s stop the hypocrisy and look ourselves in the mirror.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  It kind of smells of hypocrisy, it's comparable to when some italian authorities wanted to imprison scientists for not predicting earthquakes. Lots of scientists knew about it and didn't say anything, also earthquakes happen in earthquake zones.
- TinyRick 4y ago
  Problem is that Big Oil pays those politicians more.
  - whatever1 4y ago
    And all of the country elected to keep them in power
    - danuker 4y ago
      Here're the most-greased top 20. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/recips.php?ind=E01&cycle=2022&recipdetail=A&sortorder=U https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/recips.php?ind=E01&cy...
    - TinyRick 4y ago
      The voters in the 70s and 80s did, sure. But as this article explains, those voters were withheld crucial information that could have informed their voting choices. 2010 was the first election I was eligible to vote in, and in the past decade+ I (and many others) have not voted for pro-oil/coal/fracking/etc candidates. Yet we're the ones that are (and will continue to) live with the consequences of Big Oil's actions from decades ago.
      - 4y ago
shmerl 4y ago
They should pay for the damage they caused.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  start by never using plastic.
manv1 4y ago
[flagged]
- happytoexplain 4y ago
  I agree it's overused, but it might be early to jump on the reporter/journalist hate train on this particular issue, since it's extremely common for their critics to describe their reporting as "breathless", which is a nearly identical exaggeration.
  - ktyckgch 4y ago
    In this case the word is a direct quote from Geoffrey Supran. While the headline writer chose to emphasise it, the writer definitely didn't find it in a thesaurus.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  Sure after looking at data, I've lost my breath and felt my heart clench inside my chest like death itself reached in and grabbed hold. Mind you it wasn't climate data and more like "I've trashed the DB in prod" sort of thing.
- hansonkd 4y ago
  If you look past your snide remarks, breathtaking was a quote from Geoffrey Supran who is a Research Fellow in the History of Science at Harvard and has a PhD in Materials Science & Engineering. So i think that says more about your biases than anything about the reporters who have liberal arts degrees.
- itsibitzi 4y ago
  It's literally a quote in the article hence the quotation marks.
- turnsout 4y ago
  Just a reminder that journalists typically don't write their own headlines. You can blame copy editors for the "breathtaking" liberties they often take with the source material.
mschuster91 4y ago
Surprise, surprise. And yet, Big Oil continued to launch campaigns designed to deflect responsibility from companies and governments away to individual consumers, like BP's "carbon footprint" [1]. When will those responsible be held accountable for helping to advance the destruction of climate and the immense loss of life and property that climate change has brought? How can we explain to our children and grandchildren why we did nothing to hold them accountable? [1] https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sham/?europe=true https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh...
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  >When will those responsible be held accountable You have sown the revolving door and now you reap its harvest. Nobody will be held to account so long as the institutions that would be doing the holding have a massive overlap in relevant skills, subject matter and therefore, personnel (especially at the management levels where these sorts of decisions get made).
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    "You"? I was born in 1991, my generation certainly didn't invent that crap, that was all during the reign of the Boomers - who, to add insult to injury, keep occupying positions of power instead of resigning and retiring to let those rise who will actually have to live on this wreck of a planet the next fifty to seventy years (assuming no major war gets us all killed).
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > I was born in 1991, my generation certainly didn’t invent that crap, that was all during the reign of the Boomers The described problem is much older than the Boomers period of political dominance. For some reason, Millenials seem to think that “Boomers” are “everyone who existed before the Millenials”.
    - layer8 4y ago
      I’m pretty sure a similar subset within the younger generations will end up doing the same.
kingstoned 4y ago
It reminds me of tobacco industry. Check out this article: https://pandodaily.com/2015/06/30/tobacco-industry-will-kill-billion-people-century-read-how-they-plan-do-it https://pandodaily.com/2015/06/30/tobacco-industry-will-kill...
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Tobacco is a good one actually. A legendary statistician, IIRC Fisher(?), came up with a bunch of reasons why the statistics might not show causality. As in, how do we know it isn't just people who were at higher risk of dying that smoked? He had a whole bunch of these statistical critical thinking type objections that are all very valid from an epistemological point of view. Climate change actually has the same. There's a bunch of stats and a bunch of "yeah but what if" things that have been dealt with over the years.
  - wahern 4y ago
    > very valid from an epistemological point of view Philosophers can be dangerous creatures (if unwittingly), perhaps some of the most dangerous. It's incredible how you can draw a straight line from many of the most destructive political narratives (across the spectrum) to reasonable seeming scholarly papers and debates. There's a near universal consensus today regarding the horrible, unacceptable presumptions behind Social Darwinism and related theories from the turn of the 20th century. Mid-century philosophers, particularly structuralists and post-structuralists, led the charge in attacking those earlier theories. (By first identifying the underlying cultural presumptions, and then "deconstructing" them.) And yet you can draw a straight line from, say, Putin's whataboutism and ethnoreligious rhetoric--not to mention all the culture war narratives (from both the left and right)--straight to those philosophical ideas and debates--i.e. structuralism, post-structuralism, etc. I mean, Putin's rhetoric has always existed in some form, but those and other philosophical schools absolutely supercharged the rhetoric and its intellectual resilience. If there is no objective truth, and if even older moral pillars of Western philosophy, like the exaltation of individual dignity, can be just as illegitimate as any other principle, then Putin supporters can argue the legitimacy of his viewpoint and it would be dishonest to outright reject absolutely everything about it. (There are obvious and time-tested counterarguments, but they're in tension with favored moral norms in the West, such as victim culture. The left birthed victim culture, linking moral worth to membership of a persecuted minority, but the right has embraced it for all its worth.)
peatmoss 4y ago
In (public) high school, I had a physics teacher who showed his conservative politics pretty prominently. He was a great instructor, but had conspicuously placed religious books around the class room. "Teaching your students about God" was one title that I remember. Another feature of this class was being shown The Greening of Planet Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greening_of_Planet_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greening_of_Planet_Earth
agentultra 4y ago
The address Carl Sagan made in 1985 is well worth watching for those who remember those times and especially for those who weren't alive back then [0] People knew about this before you were born and decided their best interests were more important and they acted in wilful disregard for your life and the lives of everyone on this planet. They weren't ignorant. No facts were hidden from them that they could be forgiven for being misinformed. They knew with certainty what the science was revealing and spent money to discredit the science, cut funding to their own researchers, bought politicians, funded PR campaigns, and continued building their fossil fuel empires. Everything Carl Sagan said in that address has come to pass. It's wild to watch. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI
- melling 4y ago
  And Sagan knew coal usage would be a big problem, and yet it’s still a huge problem almost 40 years later. People wouldn’t know if coal power plants disappeared tomorrow, replaced by any other form of electricity
  - klyrs 4y ago
    Except for the ~40k employees of the coal industry[1], who are used as a scapegoat by the politicians (ahem, Manchin) who take the most ardent stands against modernization of our electrical infrastructure. And I'd bet that most of those employees' skills would transfer pretty directly to any other sort of mining. But it's just not that many people. We could cut them each a $1M check for the trouble, which is about 10 years worth of coal subsidies[2]. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/215790/coal-miningemployment-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/215790/coal-miningemploy... [2] https://en.as.com/en/2022/03/29/latest_news/1648510535_730791.html https://en.as.com/en/2022/03/29/latest_news/1648510535_73079...
    - LarryMullins 4y ago
      It's easy to claim coal miners could transition to another mining industry, but what mining industry in those regions could absorb that many miners? None I think. It's not as though a secession of coal mining would create a boom in other mining industries. > We could cut them each a $1M check for the trouble, which is about 10 years worth of coal subsidies[2]. Maybe if they were offered that deal for real, they'd take it. But without such a deal, can you really blame those workers for not wanting their careers erased in America of all places? Their families would become destitute and there would be little sympathy for them. Instead of a buyout, they'd receive little but 'learn to code' jeers. They'd be told they're expected to move away from the communities they've live in for generations, leave their families behind and scatter with the winds. I know this doesn't seem like a big deal to a forum full of rootless cosmopolitan tech workers who often live thousands of miles away from where they came from, myself included, but people don't often wish this sort of radical uncertainty and instability on themselves and their own families. So of course they elect politicians who advocate for their interests. If you think this is about politicians duping coal workers, you've got it backwards. The tail doesn't wag the dog.
LatteLazy 4y ago
Oh great, we're at the "pretend we didn't know and blame the people who sold us the gun" stage of refusing to admit we don't actually care. Let's all comment about how bad OTHER people are for letting us be so shitty to show how moral we are in theory while continuing inexcusable and intentional behaviour in practice.
V__ 4y ago
I don't want to wish someone the worst. But I wouldn't loose one second of sleep if all those people involved in delaying climate action got some karmic justice.
- kodyo 4y ago
  [flagged]
- ars 4y ago
  The only kind of climate action possible in those days was nuclear power. If you go check who actually delayed nuclear deployment you will discover it was environmentalists.
  - _visgean 4y ago
    There was plenty of action possible; building more railways, different city design less dependent on car travel and maybe publishing their own research instead of burying it for 40 years...
    - ars 4y ago
      Cars are around 10% of total energy usage, this would have only minimal impact. I agree about the research, but that's unrelated to the point I was making.
      - kitkat_new 4y ago
        cycling, going vegan, renewables
        yreg 4y ago
        Yes, and we can also not use plastic straws and eat seasonal vegetable, but it doesn't change that much compared to the amount of fossils we needlessly burn.
  - anakaine 4y ago
erulabs 4y ago
I've chatted with a few folks who have spent their entire lives working in climate science while being employed by the oil industry. They're some of the most moderate, intelligent, considered people I've ever talked to. And most people hear "a climate scientist who works for an oil company" and assumes they're the worst sort - a profiteer or a liar or a complicit drone. They're not leadership - they don't get to decide what is to be done with their conclusions - but they're not all evil. Now... the leadership folks who commissioned these predictions and then ignored them... That's another matter!
- fwungy 4y ago
  International oil companies are a small piece of the production pie. Even if they all shut down it's the state oil companies that do the bulk of the production.
  - shawnb576 4y ago
    OK well then, we'd better not do anything about it! <s/> I don't think this is strictly true. Oil production is not fully fungible due to all kinds of issues including sanctions and production capacity. But this is also a strawman - this isn't saying "we should shut them all down" or even begging that question. At a minimum it's saying "there were people and companies who intentionally chose to mislead the public on a potentially existential issue - perhaps there should be some reckoning for that?"
    - fwungy 4y ago
      https://www.aei.org/economics/environmental-energy-economics/energy-fact-of-the-week-state-owned-oil-reserves-dwarf-private-companies/ https://www.aei.org/economics/environmental-energy-economics... I never said don't do anything. What I believe is that we need to balance carbon elimination w/ carbon mitigation and not put all our eggs in the elimination basket. We've got one chance to do this right.
      - smackeyacky 4y ago
fwungy 4y ago
State oil companies dwarf the international producers like Exxon by a factor of 10-20, depending on how you count. All the wonderful carbon free schemes ignore the fact that these state owned oil companies hold trillions in oil wealth in reserves. How do you get these states (e.g. Putin/Russia) to walk away from that money? This is why we need to think about mitigation strategies a lot harder.
- tablarasa 4y ago
  Offer a cheaper alternative and you don't have to worry about what they think
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  If you look at historical cumulative CO2 emissions: the US utterly dominates, with (Western) Europe coming in second place. It’s only in the past few years that other countries begin to catch up. At the time these early climate studies were done, the US and its European allies had the wealth to consume and burn that oil; we also had the wealth and scientific capability to develop lower-emitting technologies. We, as a society, chose not to do either of those things. We made that decision during a time when it might have made a huge difference to our lives today. This decision was largely influenced by the actions of US non-state-owned oil companies, who were instrumental in preventing such policy decisions via lobbying, withholding evidence, and deliberate strategies to muddy the debate by funding climate denial PR. I’m sure the state-owned oil companies of Venezuela and the USSR/Russia deserve some blame as well for pumping and selling the oil (mostly to the West where our economies burned it), but I think pinning the blame right here in the US is pretty accurate. PS This is the second or third company in this thread that tries to blame the deeply unethical actions of these oil companies on “foreign state-owned oil companies” and it’s such a specific and bizarre defense that I tend to wonder if some Exxon-funded PR office has been pushing that line.
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
If the species was a human, it would by now be institutionalized for self-harm while delusional, but well, there is no warden to put us into a zoo and govern affairs, so there is that. Instead we basically have a species, that is the equivalent of a homeless drug addict on the tenderloin, soiling its own future. A good start would be to honestly communicate this as the starting point of every debate. Then evaluate what can be done, without retardations setting in, in the range of the limitations. How much of the day can be used, without withdrawl syndroms. How can delusions be crafted into something that moves the species forward towards a reasonable goal? What has to go, even if it hurts temporary and the "other hand" wants to prevent it? As in, is it okay, to call for a first strike policy on someone who wants to assasinate you in 3 generations? Can terrarism against terrorism be legit as self-defense? https://www.amazon.de/How-Blow-Up-Pipeline-Learning/dp/1839760257 https://www.amazon.de/How-Blow-Up-Pipeline-Learning/dp/18397...
- boeingUH60 4y ago
  Are you advocating blowing up a pipeline? Won’t even get into the morality of that, but that’s a nice way to get yourself killed or spend decades in prison for terrorism.
  - chmod775 4y ago
    Would they be a hero or a villain? If the action would make them a hero, are there reasons they shouldn't do it anyway? Common reply to the latter is that people may be misguided in what constitutes a heroic selfless action and shouldn't take matters into their own hands. This philosophical debate is as old as time itself.
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    I don't advocate violence, but realistically a peaceful resolution will take time. We don't have time.

In any just world the company would be dissolved and all of its resources taken and put towards fixing the problems it intentionally created, and the people that knew about this be held personally liable.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> the company would be dissolved and all of its resources taken and put towards fixing the problems it intentionally created, and the people that knew about this be held personally liable I get the second part. But what's the utility of the first over a fine? Are you suggesting nationalizing Exxon? Or liquidating it?
- sjsdaiuasgdia 4y ago
  "all of its resources taken" would seem to require liquidation or putting those resources under a different management structure, possibly government directly or government appointed. What would Exxon be able to do once all of its resources have been repurposed? The company would be effectively dissolved even if not explicitly dissolved.
- frgtpsswrdlame 4y ago
  Without defending their wording, I think the absolute best case for nationalizing a firm is one where the industry is based off of natural resources, vital to the public in the short term, and detrimental to the public in the long term.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  I think actually liquidating isn't so bad. Now and again nature strikes down a giant and a lot of other creatures benefit from it. It's actually a bit odd that when we invented corporations we didn't have some sort of catastrophe mechanism in there just to shake hands up now and again. I think society would find ways to become more resilient if we lived with possible corporate sudden death.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > liquidating isn't so bad You're guaranteeing either consolidation in an already oligopolistic sector, or a recession from the output drop caused by an inexperienced operator learning to scale to a major. > we didn't have some sort of catastrophe mechanism We do. They're fines and license revocations. Companies that can't afford their fines go bankrupt. Government gets cash; the stakeholders' clean up the mess. "Corporate death penalty" and related talking points are almost all about dismissing talk about bigger fines.
    - lordnacho 4y ago
      You're also guaranteeing that people will be able to try new things where the giant once stood. The real challenge is how to regulate the death rate.
  - lazyasciiart 4y ago
    The corporate death penalty. It's reasonable that nobody came up with it at the invention of the corporation, but America should absolutely have implemented one along with Citizens United.
  - jokethrowaway 4y ago
    We do, but corporations which are rich enough just bribe the government and gets bailouts or special treatments. If it was the people vs Exxon with private judges in private courts (judges which compete with one another on who's the best, not government officials with a comfy chair and a guaranteed lifetime of administering "justice"), it would be way harder to corrupt. That's why we need to decentralise our government power.
- ARandomerDude 4y ago
  Without oil things would be pretty bad around here, to say the least.
- acdha 4y ago
  Maybe not dissolved but fines aren't enough: if they're not big enough or likely enough, companies may take their chances and if they don't apply personally to the C-level some fraction of people will try to see if they can get rich and leave before the fine arrives. Perhaps that's something along the lines of turning them into highly-regulated public utilities. The big thing I'd focus on is basically real auditing & accountability: serious environmental assessments with full public disclosure, a blanket ban on political involvement so you avoid the case we have currently where someone [not inaccurately] thinks it's cheaper to give lobbyists $10M to avoid regulation which will cost them $100M, and criminal liability for anyone who knowingly tries to hide information or mislead the public.

pstuart 4y ago

Not at all shocking but still absolutely disgusting.

whatever1 4y ago

I don’t understand what was the expectation. For Big Oil to start campaigning against their own product? We have legislative bodies that we literally elect and pay to do this job. Let’s stop the hypocrisy and look ourselves in the mirror.

stjohnswarts 4y ago
It kind of smells of hypocrisy, it's comparable to when some italian authorities wanted to imprison scientists for not predicting earthquakes. Lots of scientists knew about it and didn't say anything, also earthquakes happen in earthquake zones.
TinyRick 4y ago
Problem is that Big Oil pays those politicians more.
- whatever1 4y ago
  And all of the country elected to keep them in power
  - danuker 4y ago
    Here're the most-greased top 20. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/recips.php?ind=E01&cycle=2022&recipdetail=A&sortorder=U https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/recips.php?ind=E01&cy...
  - TinyRick 4y ago
    The voters in the 70s and 80s did, sure. But as this article explains, those voters were withheld crucial information that could have informed their voting choices. 2010 was the first election I was eligible to vote in, and in the past decade+ I (and many others) have not voted for pro-oil/coal/fracking/etc candidates. Yet we're the ones that are (and will continue to) live with the consequences of Big Oil's actions from decades ago.
    - 4y ago

shmerl 4y ago

They should pay for the damage they caused.

readthenotes1 4y ago
start by never using plastic.

manv1 4y ago

[flagged]

happytoexplain 4y ago
I agree it's overused, but it might be early to jump on the reporter/journalist hate train on this particular issue, since it's extremely common for their critics to describe their reporting as "breathless", which is a nearly identical exaggeration.
- ktyckgch 4y ago
  In this case the word is a direct quote from Geoffrey Supran. While the headline writer chose to emphasise it, the writer definitely didn't find it in a thesaurus.
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
Sure after looking at data, I've lost my breath and felt my heart clench inside my chest like death itself reached in and grabbed hold. Mind you it wasn't climate data and more like "I've trashed the DB in prod" sort of thing.
hansonkd 4y ago
If you look past your snide remarks, breathtaking was a quote from Geoffrey Supran who is a Research Fellow in the History of Science at Harvard and has a PhD in Materials Science & Engineering. So i think that says more about your biases than anything about the reporters who have liberal arts degrees.
itsibitzi 4y ago
It's literally a quote in the article hence the quotation marks.
turnsout 4y ago
Just a reminder that journalists typically don't write their own headlines. You can blame copy editors for the "breathtaking" liberties they often take with the source material.

mschuster91 4y ago

Surprise, surprise. And yet, Big Oil continued to launch campaigns designed to deflect responsibility from companies and governments away to individual consumers, like BP's "carbon footprint" [1]. When will those responsible be held accountable for helping to advance the destruction of climate and the immense loss of life and property that climate change has brought? How can we explain to our children and grandchildren why we did nothing to hold them accountable? [1] https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sham/?europe=true https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh...

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>When will those responsible be held accountable You have sown the revolving door and now you reap its harvest. Nobody will be held to account so long as the institutions that would be doing the holding have a massive overlap in relevant skills, subject matter and therefore, personnel (especially at the management levels where these sorts of decisions get made).
- mschuster91 4y ago
  "You"? I was born in 1991, my generation certainly didn't invent that crap, that was all during the reign of the Boomers - who, to add insult to injury, keep occupying positions of power instead of resigning and retiring to let those rise who will actually have to live on this wreck of a planet the next fifty to seventy years (assuming no major war gets us all killed).
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > I was born in 1991, my generation certainly didn’t invent that crap, that was all during the reign of the Boomers The described problem is much older than the Boomers period of political dominance. For some reason, Millenials seem to think that “Boomers” are “everyone who existed before the Millenials”.
  - layer8 4y ago
    I’m pretty sure a similar subset within the younger generations will end up doing the same.

kingstoned 4y ago

It reminds me of tobacco industry. Check out this article: https://pandodaily.com/2015/06/30/tobacco-industry-will-kill-billion-people-century-read-how-they-plan-do-it https://pandodaily.com/2015/06/30/tobacco-industry-will-kill...

lordnacho 4y ago
Tobacco is a good one actually. A legendary statistician, IIRC Fisher(?), came up with a bunch of reasons why the statistics might not show causality. As in, how do we know it isn't just people who were at higher risk of dying that smoked? He had a whole bunch of these statistical critical thinking type objections that are all very valid from an epistemological point of view. Climate change actually has the same. There's a bunch of stats and a bunch of "yeah but what if" things that have been dealt with over the years.
- wahern 4y ago
  > very valid from an epistemological point of view Philosophers can be dangerous creatures (if unwittingly), perhaps some of the most dangerous. It's incredible how you can draw a straight line from many of the most destructive political narratives (across the spectrum) to reasonable seeming scholarly papers and debates. There's a near universal consensus today regarding the horrible, unacceptable presumptions behind Social Darwinism and related theories from the turn of the 20th century. Mid-century philosophers, particularly structuralists and post-structuralists, led the charge in attacking those earlier theories. (By first identifying the underlying cultural presumptions, and then "deconstructing" them.) And yet you can draw a straight line from, say, Putin's whataboutism and ethnoreligious rhetoric--not to mention all the culture war narratives (from both the left and right)--straight to those philosophical ideas and debates--i.e. structuralism, post-structuralism, etc. I mean, Putin's rhetoric has always existed in some form, but those and other philosophical schools absolutely supercharged the rhetoric and its intellectual resilience. If there is no objective truth, and if even older moral pillars of Western philosophy, like the exaltation of individual dignity, can be just as illegitimate as any other principle, then Putin supporters can argue the legitimacy of his viewpoint and it would be dishonest to outright reject absolutely everything about it. (There are obvious and time-tested counterarguments, but they're in tension with favored moral norms in the West, such as victim culture. The left birthed victim culture, linking moral worth to membership of a persecuted minority, but the right has embraced it for all its worth.)

peatmoss 4y ago

In (public) high school, I had a physics teacher who showed his conservative politics pretty prominently. He was a great instructor, but had conspicuously placed religious books around the class room. "Teaching your students about God" was one title that I remember. Another feature of this class was being shown The Greening of Planet Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greening_of_Planet_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greening_of_Planet_Earth

agentultra 4y ago

The address Carl Sagan made in 1985 is well worth watching for those who remember those times and especially for those who weren't alive back then [0] People knew about this before you were born and decided their best interests were more important and they acted in wilful disregard for your life and the lives of everyone on this planet. They weren't ignorant. No facts were hidden from them that they could be forgiven for being misinformed. They knew with certainty what the science was revealing and spent money to discredit the science, cut funding to their own researchers, bought politicians, funded PR campaigns, and continued building their fossil fuel empires. Everything Carl Sagan said in that address has come to pass. It's wild to watch. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI

melling 4y ago
And Sagan knew coal usage would be a big problem, and yet it’s still a huge problem almost 40 years later. People wouldn’t know if coal power plants disappeared tomorrow, replaced by any other form of electricity
- klyrs 4y ago
  Except for the ~40k employees of the coal industry[1], who are used as a scapegoat by the politicians (ahem, Manchin) who take the most ardent stands against modernization of our electrical infrastructure. And I'd bet that most of those employees' skills would transfer pretty directly to any other sort of mining. But it's just not that many people. We could cut them each a $1M check for the trouble, which is about 10 years worth of coal subsidies[2]. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/215790/coal-miningemployment-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/215790/coal-miningemploy... [2] https://en.as.com/en/2022/03/29/latest_news/1648510535_730791.html https://en.as.com/en/2022/03/29/latest_news/1648510535_73079...
  - LarryMullins 4y ago
    It's easy to claim coal miners could transition to another mining industry, but what mining industry in those regions could absorb that many miners? None I think. It's not as though a secession of coal mining would create a boom in other mining industries. > We could cut them each a $1M check for the trouble, which is about 10 years worth of coal subsidies[2]. Maybe if they were offered that deal for real, they'd take it. But without such a deal, can you really blame those workers for not wanting their careers erased in America of all places? Their families would become destitute and there would be little sympathy for them. Instead of a buyout, they'd receive little but 'learn to code' jeers. They'd be told they're expected to move away from the communities they've live in for generations, leave their families behind and scatter with the winds. I know this doesn't seem like a big deal to a forum full of rootless cosmopolitan tech workers who often live thousands of miles away from where they came from, myself included, but people don't often wish this sort of radical uncertainty and instability on themselves and their own families. So of course they elect politicians who advocate for their interests. If you think this is about politicians duping coal workers, you've got it backwards. The tail doesn't wag the dog.

LatteLazy 4y ago

Oh great, we're at the "pretend we didn't know and blame the people who sold us the gun" stage of refusing to admit we don't actually care. Let's all comment about how bad OTHER people are for letting us be so shitty to show how moral we are in theory while continuing inexcusable and intentional behaviour in practice.

V__ 4y ago

I don't want to wish someone the worst. But I wouldn't loose one second of sleep if all those people involved in delaying climate action got some karmic justice.

kodyo 4y ago
[flagged]
ars 4y ago
The only kind of climate action possible in those days was nuclear power. If you go check who actually delayed nuclear deployment you will discover it was environmentalists.
- _visgean 4y ago
  There was plenty of action possible; building more railways, different city design less dependent on car travel and maybe publishing their own research instead of burying it for 40 years...
  - ars 4y ago
    Cars are around 10% of total energy usage, this would have only minimal impact. I agree about the research, but that's unrelated to the point I was making.
    - kitkat_new 4y ago
      cycling, going vegan, renewables
      - yreg 4y ago
        Yes, and we can also not use plastic straws and eat seasonal vegetable, but it doesn't change that much compared to the amount of fossils we needlessly burn.
- anakaine 4y ago

erulabs 4y ago

I've chatted with a few folks who have spent their entire lives working in climate science while being employed by the oil industry. They're some of the most moderate, intelligent, considered people I've ever talked to. And most people hear "a climate scientist who works for an oil company" and assumes they're the worst sort - a profiteer or a liar or a complicit drone. They're not leadership - they don't get to decide what is to be done with their conclusions - but they're not all evil. Now... the leadership folks who commissioned these predictions and then ignored them... That's another matter!

fwungy 4y ago
International oil companies are a small piece of the production pie. Even if they all shut down it's the state oil companies that do the bulk of the production.
- shawnb576 4y ago
  OK well then, we'd better not do anything about it! <s/> I don't think this is strictly true. Oil production is not fully fungible due to all kinds of issues including sanctions and production capacity. But this is also a strawman - this isn't saying "we should shut them all down" or even begging that question. At a minimum it's saying "there were people and companies who intentionally chose to mislead the public on a potentially existential issue - perhaps there should be some reckoning for that?"
  - fwungy 4y ago
    https://www.aei.org/economics/environmental-energy-economics/energy-fact-of-the-week-state-owned-oil-reserves-dwarf-private-companies/ https://www.aei.org/economics/environmental-energy-economics... I never said don't do anything. What I believe is that we need to balance carbon elimination w/ carbon mitigation and not put all our eggs in the elimination basket. We've got one chance to do this right.
    - smackeyacky 4y ago

fwungy 4y ago

State oil companies dwarf the international producers like Exxon by a factor of 10-20, depending on how you count. All the wonderful carbon free schemes ignore the fact that these state owned oil companies hold trillions in oil wealth in reserves. How do you get these states (e.g. Putin/Russia) to walk away from that money? This is why we need to think about mitigation strategies a lot harder.

tablarasa 4y ago
Offer a cheaper alternative and you don't have to worry about what they think
matthewdgreen 4y ago
If you look at historical cumulative CO2 emissions: the US utterly dominates, with (Western) Europe coming in second place. It’s only in the past few years that other countries begin to catch up. At the time these early climate studies were done, the US and its European allies had the wealth to consume and burn that oil; we also had the wealth and scientific capability to develop lower-emitting technologies. We, as a society, chose not to do either of those things. We made that decision during a time when it might have made a huge difference to our lives today. This decision was largely influenced by the actions of US non-state-owned oil companies, who were instrumental in preventing such policy decisions via lobbying, withholding evidence, and deliberate strategies to muddy the debate by funding climate denial PR. I’m sure the state-owned oil companies of Venezuela and the USSR/Russia deserve some blame as well for pumping and selling the oil (mostly to the West where our economies burned it), but I think pinning the blame right here in the US is pretty accurate. PS This is the second or third company in this thread that tries to blame the deeply unethical actions of these oil companies on “foreign state-owned oil companies” and it’s such a specific and bizarre defense that I tend to wonder if some Exxon-funded PR office has been pushing that line.

aaron695 4y ago

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qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

If the species was a human, it would by now be institutionalized for self-harm while delusional, but well, there is no warden to put us into a zoo and govern affairs, so there is that. Instead we basically have a species, that is the equivalent of a homeless drug addict on the tenderloin, soiling its own future. A good start would be to honestly communicate this as the starting point of every debate. Then evaluate what can be done, without retardations setting in, in the range of the limitations. How much of the day can be used, without withdrawl syndroms. How can delusions be crafted into something that moves the species forward towards a reasonable goal? What has to go, even if it hurts temporary and the "other hand" wants to prevent it? As in, is it okay, to call for a first strike policy on someone who wants to assasinate you in 3 generations? Can terrarism against terrorism be legit as self-defense? https://www.amazon.de/How-Blow-Up-Pipeline-Learning/dp/1839760257 https://www.amazon.de/How-Blow-Up-Pipeline-Learning/dp/18397...

boeingUH60 4y ago
Are you advocating blowing up a pipeline? Won’t even get into the morality of that, but that’s a nice way to get yourself killed or spend decades in prison for terrorism.
- chmod775 4y ago
  Would they be a hero or a villain? If the action would make them a hero, are there reasons they shouldn't do it anyway? Common reply to the latter is that people may be misguided in what constitutes a heroic selfless action and shouldn't take matters into their own hands. This philosophical debate is as old as time itself.
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  I don't advocate violence, but realistically a peaceful resolution will take time. We don't have time.