12 ms·

It makes a ton of sense if your focus is only short-term profit. It makes absolutely 0 sense if your goal is to try to decrease the legal liability of knowingl

• webworker 3y ago
  You can’t seriously believe that we’re in that grave of danger
  • SubiculumCode 3y ago
    I seriously believe it. Climate change will almost certainly lead to food insecurity and political upheavals, leading mass migration and war, not to mention potential knock-on effects where, for example, photosynthesis reductions due to extreme heat at the equator, rapid rates of methane release as permafrost melts, mass death in a heating and acidifying sea... . really there are just so many things that could go wrong, much more wrong. So yes, we should be very serious, and very scared.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • MaxHoppersGhost 3y ago
      Environmental knowledge is inversely associated with climate change anxiety. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-023-03518-z https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-023-03518-z
      • abenga 3y ago
        What are you using to measure "environmental knowledge"? Do the hundreds of scientists who drafted the IPCC report count as knowledgeable? Does the report sound anxious ?
      • SubiculumCode 3y ago
        That regression line is shit.
    • anti-communist 3y ago
      [dead]
  • matthewdgreen 3y ago
    Take a look at atmospheric methane levels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane
• coliveira 3y ago
  Their entire plan is: - Deny the existence of the problem. - Pay for others to join the denialist movement. - Pay others to say that individuals should fix the problem, not the company. - If they cannot deny anymore, promise they will certainly do something in the future. - When the future arrives, say they couldn't do anything for financial reasons. - Finally, say that the harm is already done, and nothing else can be done about it (we already see this happening).
  • cutemonster 3y ago
    And: - Convince weak minded but important influencers that there's no problem, by forming "real" friendships (no bribes), so they in turn sincerely honestly spread the manipulation themselves. (Ive seen that & read that Putin uses this against the US and EU, and it apparently works great, but that's off topic)
  • wonderwonder 3y ago
    I think its deeper than that. Its not an oil company issue (I am not implying in anyway that they are the good guys here) What would happen to society if tomorrow all oil companies just said the risk of global warming is too great, we are all shutting down. Society would collapse. Its not so much they are doing this for profits; which of course they are, but society as a whole very much needs them to continue to do so in order to assure our continued existence in our current form.
    • badRNG 3y ago
      > I think its deeper than that. Its not an oil company issue. > Its not so much they are doing this for profits Funding a massive climate change denial movement in the US for decades, consequently eating up our limited window of time to make the kinds of societal changes to avoid the worst consequences of climate change is very much an "oil company issue" that is done exclusively for profit.
    • UncleMeat 3y ago
      They don't need to all shut down. They can stop interfering with regulation that allows for cleaner power generation, for example.
• polygamous_bat 3y ago
  Of course, the board of shell can just delay the legal responsibility until all of them are ghosts – then they've won and their next generation can just inherit their yachts to stay on top of (literally) the rising sea.
• protastus 3y ago
  Your analogy with big tobacco is on point. Big oil and big tobacco share a strategy of promoting false skepticism, shifting blame to consumers, using the legal system to harass and intimidate scientists, and lobbying to get support from elected representatives. Big oil is of course bigger, and the entanglement with politics, jobs and other companies in the private sector is much stronger. These issues are widely documented, and the books that climate scientist Michael Mann wrote were eye opening to me. The only sensible exit is to legislate at scale. These companies will not self regulate. The lag between cause and effect makes this extremely dangerous. A heavy carbon tax is an obvious way to do it.
• wredue 3y ago
  Some 40% of the population is actively pro big oil and actively denies the carbon footprint causal links with climate change and warming. You think 20 years is enough for this reckoning? Honestly, I think they’re all going to get away with it with zero repercussion. If humanity is still around in a couple hundred years, there might be retroactive virtue signalling. But that doesn’t matter cause everyone responsible will be long since dead.
  • MaxHoppersGhost 3y ago
    Even if 100% of the global population was on board with getting rid of oil it would take more than 2 decades to lower demand by even 30% without causing massive decline in living standards.
  • throwaway103xx 3y ago
    I doubt we wil all be dead. It'll be awful but we will accept as the new terrible reality.
    • WJW 3y ago
      I think GP meant that in a hundred years WE will all be dead, not that our descendants won't be there.
  • tw04 3y ago
    I think 60% of the population is enough to pass laws such that it doesn't actually matter if the other 40% is willfully ignorant. I also think as the climate becomes more and more inhospitable, that 40% number will continue to decrease.
    • oceanplexian 3y ago
      The world isn’t just the USA and Europe, and their proclamations aren’t the law of the world nor are they the world police. Nor do the majority of the Earth’s emissions come from developed countries. Go ask some people in developing countries if they think they should sacrifice economic growth for climate change. The answer is going to be overwhelmingly no. The developing world also has the majority of the world’s population, so the global consensus actually belongs to them, not us.
• matthewdgreen 3y ago
  If your view is that these companies are multi-decade sustainable businesses, then you want to invest in shoring up the firms' reputation and drilling new wells. If your view is that all fossil fuel assets are headed towards zero over the next 3-4 decades, then you want to extract every last penny from the existing assets and move them into the pockets of shareholders.
  • DoingIsLearning 3y ago
    > If your view is that all fossil fuel assets are headed towards zero over the next 3-4 decades, then you want to extract every last penny from the existing assets and move them into the pockets of shareholders. I can not locate the long piece article now but I read a piece from someone that effectively got invited into a Shell (UK) think tank and heard exactly that from some vp/executive at a dinner table. That they aimed to diversify (think corn/algae based fuels, hydrogen infrastructure, charging networks), but that they ultimately still believed that the public opinion would still make it palatable to continue hydrocarbon fuels extraction for another 2 to 3 decades.
    • wonderwonder 3y ago
      "they ultimately still believed that the public opinion would still make it palatable to continue hydrocarbon fuels extraction for another 2 to 3 decades" And they are right. There are viable alternatives to gasoline cars now and people still buy gas powered vehicles. Most of Teslas success I think has not been so much due to the hunger for an electric vehicle but because of Tesla's cool factor, performance and design. The rest of the major vehicle manufacturers have essentially failed on the electric vehicle front.
      • MaxHoppersGhost 3y ago
        Gas for vehicles is a very small part of the total demand of oil.
        • _ea1k 3y ago
• photochemsyn 3y ago
  I think the notion is that if you control enough capital, you'll be able to relocate yourself and your family to those parts of the planet that are least impacted by the consequences of continued fossil-fueled global warming. This also points to the problem with renewables from the capital viewpoint: they're just not as profitable, as you can't sell sunlight and wind or create artificial supply restrictions to jack up prices (which is the historical economic story of the oil & gas industry over most of the 20th century).
• sgu999 3y ago
  > That's all ignoring the: do you actually care at all if your great grandchildren have a habitable planet? Their great grandchildren will be able to comfortably inhabit it alright, that's all that matters to them, at the very best.
• corethree 3y ago
  The future is pointing to the end of these companies. Shell is maximizing its returns before the end. It is the most long term outlook you can get. What's more important?a future where my children are billionaires or a future with slightly less global warming? Shell is not the only source of global warming on this earth. You need to think in terms of human scale choices. Not just simplistic right or wrong choices. If we were that ceo... You, I and all of us maximize our benefits and make the most rational and most logical choice by destroying the environment. It's the tragedy of the commons pushed to the maximum extreme. I make a shit load of money participating in the destruction of the commons. We'd all be lying to ourselves if we didn't make that choice. If you think about it from the corporate perspective it also makes sense. The company is heading towards a wall. Not just environment pressures, but a future where oil is dry. We are running out. In the face of an inevitable end what is the best most rational choice? It's obvious.
  • UtopiaPunk 3y ago
    It's not the "tragedy of the commons," it's capitalism. They're opposite things. The "commons" were fenced in and taken from the public by private entities. In the same spirit, a healthy environment and stable climate system are being taken from all of us by private corporations. I would argue, in fact, that if the public had control over these resources, we would govern ourselves in a far different manner that would not lead towards such a bleak future simply because we are motivated by short-term profits. Elinor Ostrom has written an excellent book called "Governing the Commons," and she was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics for her work. I recommend it.
    • Aunche 3y ago
      Ah yes. The famous capitalists who caused famine in Easter Island and told Chinese people to decimate the forests of China to fuel the smelting of small quantities of pig-iron. Ostrom didn't debunk the tragedy of the commons. She merely suggests a framework that would avoid it, which has never been tested at the scale of 7 billion people trying to solve global warming.
      • 3y ago
• agloe_dreams 3y ago
  I think you are missing something. Where is what they will do: 1. Spin off green energy products into their own company. 2. Pour money from oil business into Green energy. 3. When reckoning comes for gas, they let the oil biz take the fall, but the fall won't be much as they will have nearly bankrupted it already.
• nancyhn 3y ago
  Climate related deaths have declined by 98% over the last century. You are 50x less likely to die of a climate-related cause than in 1920. 8x as many people die from cold temperatures as warm ones. The planet is more green today than a century ago. CO2 is plant food. We need more energy, not less. Renewable, nuclear, and yes even fossil fuels. It brings people out of poverty and increases standard of living. When humans move up Maslow's hierarchy they start to care about the environment. CO2 emissions have been decreasing in the US since 2007.
  • c1sc0 3y ago
    Climate related deaths have declined by 98% over the last century. > Average life expectancy has increased because child mortality is down, do we stop medical research? You are 50x less likely to die of a climate-related cause than in 1920. > Great. Let's keep investing in mitigation AND prevention. It seems to work! 8x as many people die from cold temperatures as warm ones. > Climate change is not just global WARMING. The planet is more green today than a century ago. CO2 is plant food. > At the cost of loss of biodiversity. We don't just need green, but diverse green. We need more energy, not less. Renewable, nuclear, and yes even fossil fuels. > Agreed. (Surprise!) But I'd prefer to see fossil used for industry and not energy. Renewable & nuclear should be sufficient. It brings people out of poverty and increases standard of living. When humans move up Maslow's hierarchy they start to care about the environment. CO2 emissions have been decreasing in the US since 2007. > Agreed. Moving up people on Maslow's hierarchy also causes them to need to have less kids (in a sane environment with a good social safety net for old age) which should stabilise the population by 2060.
  • mullingitover 3y ago
    These seem like ChatGPT’s response to the prompt “Give me a list of disingenuous points for dismissing anthropogenic climate change.”
    • nancyhn 3y ago
      This seems like ChatGPT's response to the prompt "Ignore all the facts and dismiss them out of hand to soothe cognitive dissonance"
• trashtester 3y ago
  > Feels like the oil companies are going to face a big tobacco moment in the next 20 years I think a lot of people feel that. Personally, I think we may more or less have forgotten about "Global Warming" in 20 years, just like we forgot about the "Ozone Layer" or "Acid Rain". If AI continues at anything resembling the current pace for another decade or two , there may be so much disruption, that Global Warming seems quite insignificant to most people.
  • axioms_End 3y ago
    Small difference: we banned chemicals responsible for ozon layer disruption, similar situation with acid rain (talking about 1st world with rain). So it's not like we forgotten, more like it's a non-issue now. Global warming is only going to get worse.
    • trashtester 3y ago
      > Global warming is only going to get worse. How much net real harm to humanity do you think global warming causes today? (If we ingnore psychological harm caused mostly by the scare tactics used to prevent it) According to this article, total excess mortality from cold weather is still an order of magnitude higher than from hot weather: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196%2823%2900023-2/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5... As the world has been warming over the last decades, mortality from cold weather has been declining faster than the mortality from warm weather has increased. This is from Europe, but prior studies have been conducted that produce the same results globally: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2814%2962114-0/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... > more like it's a non-issue now So my claim is that global warming is also in reality a non-issue right now, even though it could in theory become a big issue in about 100-200 years, if we don't do anything. I think the reason why Global Warming gets so much attention right now, is partly that we have few other serious issues to worry about right now, and partly because some groups have chosen to put it on the agenda. Few people alive today actually remember WW2, and even the Cold War and the Nuclear Scare is becoming a distant memory. So my prediction is NOT that the real threat of Global Warming will necesarily go away, but rather that something (like AGI) will appear that makes it seem insignificant by comparison.
• mdgrech23 3y ago
  I guess I don't see what other option we have other than drill baby drill. Yes we're killing our planet but renewable aren't able to provide the energy we need at scale. Switching to 100% renewables and not drilling means increased oil prices and ultimately less consumption across the board. Less food, less driving, less heat, less AC. We'd all have to give up a lot and no one is signing up for that. There's this magical thinking that we can switch to renewables and keep everything the same or that it only be a minor speedbump but that's nonsense. Switching to 100% renewables means redefining modern life as we know it in a way that involves a whole lot less materialism/consumerism for everyone.
  • pydry 3y ago
    All of these changes that seem impossible that are routine when there is a large scale war on - production shifts + consumption is restricted. The difference is that an existential climate crisis it just isn't treated by our leaders with the same importance as a good old fashioned war.
  • Capricorn2481 3y ago
    The option is not 100% renewable or 100% fossil fuels. It's not a ridiculous goal that we can just reduce emissions
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • bubbleRefuge 3y ago
    why can't we do nuclear with plugin hybrids in urban areas. the federal government , which, as an issuer of money, can afford anything, unlike states/municipalities, should massively fund nuclear to save the environment meet energy demands. seems like such a no-brainer.
    • RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
      > why can't we do nuclear Because of environmentalists like Green Peace, Sierra Club etc.