This nine-part history of Exxon’s engagement with the emerging science of climate change is the result of an eight months-long investigation conducted in 2015. The stories span four decades, and are based on primary sources, including internal company documents dating back to the late 1970s; interviews with former company employees; and other evidence published for the first time by ICN.
We found that decades ago, Exxon conducted cutting-edge climate research and then worked at the forefront of climate denial, manufacturing doubt about the scientific consensus that its own scientists had confirmed.
This series was named a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and earned national recognition from many other quarters.
The reports in your link start from 1977 and they are just summaries of public research. They are well done, but lots of people with engineering and/or physics training would be able to read published research and write summary reports.
The actual, original science is properly referenced in the end in "Bibliography" (pdf page 15).
I really don't find any "cutting edge research" in those reports. Maybe "cutting edge reading", if we think that being able to follow, read, understand and summarize published research was cutting edge in the late 1970s.
The idea that [4] is "cutting edge research" and comparable in quality to [1,2,3] is just laughable.
I’ve happened to meet a number of researchers employed by large oil companies over the years, including many involved in the result of memos like this: making research into carbon capture and other mitigations a top corporate priority. Are there optical/PR reasons for investing in this research? Absolutely. Have they also been engaging in the science in good faith, and genuine intent that… in a world where climate action is desired, and net emissions are something to optimize for, they can anticipate this by genuinely funding research, and having their own research projects already underway that can address anticipated challenges? Also absolutely true.
Now, I can’t speak for, say, lobbying efforts. But the scientists on the ground getting accused of the “deception” are some of the smartest, most caring, and highest-integrity people I’ve met. Entire labs of people working for decades to think: can we make our processes cleaner, at the same time we rise to the challenges of global demand.
We should be celebrating, not condemning, this work.
Scientists and economists are dime a dozen, they have to sing for their supper. For a few thousands dollars, scientists have written about benefits of smoking, lead is a gift from God, and tens of thousands of toxic substances, food additives, etc.
Carbon capture is fraud. You can EASILY stop carbon emissions by switching to EVs, which are cheaper to buy and operate. Instead Govts want to spend trillions on top the $7T dollars/year subsidies to help oil companies recover more oil.
The COP summits are held in fossil fuel countries and discuss carbon capture.
Shell Is Looking Forward The fossil-fuel companies expect to profit from climate change. I went to a private planning meeting and took notes: https://archive.is/15Dj4
Planting and growing trees is a form of carbon capture and it is one that has worked in Earth's history to bring CO2 levels down over the last millions of years from 7000ppm during the Cambrian Age to less than 700ppm.
You already know why that’s a confusing argument because you included the time scale yourself, but to say the obvious: I think we probably need to go a bit faster than “millions of years”.
EVs don't "easily stop" emissions in the US, since the American grid today is powered about 43% by natural gas and 15% by coal. Converting those sources has to happen too.
True, but the overall carbon reduction in owning an EV over its lifetime is still leagues lower; "Production-weighted average carbon footprints are 183 g CO2e/mi for BEVs; 351 g CO2e/mi for PHEVs; 445 g CO2e/mi for HEVs; and 521 g CO2e/mi for ICEVs." from [0] which does take into account the carbon-emitting percentage of the electrical grid.
Also, see Figure 4[1] in the study which states "Results demonstrate that, even under unfavorable conditions, BEVs still have a 30% lower life cycle carbon footprint."
The headline may be sensationalized but the memo you link (thank you) is plenty damning on it's own. It's under 2 pages and anyone can read it. The memo quite clearly understands that Exxon has made a lot of investment in carbon resources and is entirely centered around getting the value from those resources and fighting the necessary political battles along the way.
I would not celebrate this work, it's typical corporate boss-pleasing. It's not some exhortation towards clean energy.
> The memo, as linked in the OP, is here, and is worth reading, as it’s incredibly far from the sensationalized headline:
Having read both the memo and article, maybe there is a language barrier here, but how is it "incredibly far from the sensationalized headline"?
Maybe this comes down to how one defines "deception", but I have a hard time seeing it not apply here and don't see any hyperbole, overpromising or inaccuracy in the title given the memos writing. Certainly not "incredibly far", even if we split hairs on what raises to being "deception".
They are, unfortunately, being undermined by politics. I know someone who works on carbon capture facilities whose projects are being canceled because the incentives are being destroyed by the current presidential administration.
Oil and gas companies strongly lobby for Republicans they know will remove any incentive for them to need to worry about the environment.
> Have they also been engaging in the science in good faith, and genuine intent that… in a world where climate action is desired, and net emissions are something to optimize for, they can anticipate this by genuinely funding research, and having their own research projects already underway that can address anticipated challenges? Also absolutely true.
This is a claim that is very contrary to the prevailing view. If you wish others to be persuaded by this claim, I recommend that you provide some evidence for it, because on their own your statements are unconvincing.
> But the scientists on the ground getting accused of the “deception” are some of the smartest, most caring, and highest-integrity people I’ve met.
This is a strawman (and a weirdly strong appeal to emotion for unclear reasons).
The claim is that their scientists were loudly saying internally their PR campaigns and climate claims were false and contrary to their findings. Executives read these memos and chose to do these anyways.
For instance:
> The new disclosures in the Massachusetts case add to the evidence with excerpts from a deposition by an Exxon scientist who worked on the program.
> Asked whether a 2018 press release, which said Exxon anticipated “10,000 barrels of algae biofuel per day could be produced by 2025,” was misleading, the scientist said “yes,” adding, “All the clauses in there are patently false.”
edit: the single memo that you linked (actually one of many the article is discussing) is not supposed to be some smoking gun, it's useful to dispel any idea that there's a reasonable claim of ignorance on Exxon's part, and the date is especially notable: 1988. Basically any PR, legal, and lobbying work for at least 38 years is suspect because of what they actually knew.
Folks say cigarette companies are covering up that cigarettes cause cancer but the Tobacco Institute scientists I've met are funny, charming, and boy can they cook.
You don't get the accolades if you do your research into a corporate black hole created by NDA's. The study may as well not have ever happened at all. Science that isn't open is just contributing to the Machiavellian cycle of amoral corporatic behavior. Get back to me when this research doesn't come to light >50 years later as part of discovery in a court case.
Nobody will go to jail. The gubmint will give them trillions of dollars for carbon removal (PR campaign that the benevolent oil companies and Govt are working for them). They will give themselves awards for saving the planet and everyone else.
The captured carbon will be used for Enhanced Oil Recovery. Fossil fuel companies add a few trillion dollars in govt money, in addition to the $7T dollars in subsidies today (yale).
So this 1000 metric ton CO2 DAC plant could offset the activities of 100-400 vehicles in a year... minus the activities of the employees to get to the plant. That's what I wanna know. When are the workers going to stop driving 60 miles round trip to work? And how many need to be at work everyday at the plant? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38237920
Big Oil Helped Shape Stanford’s Latest Climate-Research Focus. Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability recently unveiled its first institutionwide research focus: greenhouse-gas removal. Taking tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere will be “essential” to limiting global warming, as a news release last month explained, and ideas will be marshaled from across the school to get it done. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35829500
No one is delegating their critical thinking to corporations, except professional climate catastrophe deniers, media "spokespeople" who are paid to repeat lies, and bought-and-paid-for politicians.
One of the most transformational things that could happen in politics would be a "misconduct through media" law, where promoting known lies, thinly packaged as entertainment, would be fined at some multiple of the actual harms caused.
I agree there's less delegating now in these areas, but these are mostly topics of the past. Which half truths are we swallowing now, unknowingly most of the time, spoonfed by corp propaganda?
The person who has to buy 3 gallons of gas to make a round trip to work is often suffering the consequences of other people’s (nimbys, congresspeople, traffic “engineers”) decisions, often made decades earlier.
Every time a home isn’t built in Berkeley, SF, or Oakland a car in Vacaville or Stockton gets its wings.
If a trillion-dollar company doesn’t want you to be mean to its computer, so be it. “The reality is that these models behave, or at least are supposed to behave, in the way that the model developers want them to behave,” Röttger, the former OpenAI red-teamer, told me. “And however the model developers come up with that set of principles, that is kind of for us, the consumers, to accept.”
The current party which holds 3 of 3 branches of the government that would be responsible for prosecuting such a crime is entirely behind the idea that climate change is a hoax.
And the party that's held 3 of 3 branches for twice as long over the past ~20 years, and at least 2 for 6/10 of those Congresses?
I'm not saying they're the bad guys. I'm saying that they had chances to do something, and didn't. They didn't care about implementing "The green dream or whatever they call it," even when they had a mandate, let alone punishing the people who made it a necessity by manipulating the public for several decades.
That’s one reason, but also just the impracticality of jailing everyone who was a shareholder at the time. Diffuse responsibility is also a very strong insulator.
Maybe it will yeet out all the "investors" who are just parking their money and aren't interested in what their investment is doing. Maybe that will help return the capital markets to serve their original purpose again.
The idea that you can just magically park your money somewhere and it automagically generates numbers, zero risk (because the government always bails you out, directly or indirectly) and zero knowledge requirement has turned out to be incredibly corrosive to society.
This is a good way to diffuse responsibility away from the people whose choice it was to condemn the planet to 2-3C warming and onto the people whose choice was made for them by the first group. i.e. this is a good way to put me on trial and keep them out of the court.
I know this because BP coined the term "personal carbon footprint" in order to tell well-meaning liberals like me that we were personally responsible for global warming, and not the oil companies spending to make sure the only practical mode of transportation was individual vehicles burning petrochemicals for energy. Or, prior to that, the oil companies giving Greenpeace money to go heckle nuclear energy and set back the development of clean energy by decades[0].
Likewise, when we do eventually Nuremberg these oil fucks, they are going to throw this exact same argument back at us. They are going to argue that they were just responding to shareholder demand, that fiduciary duty in a for-profit corporation mandates CEOs and board members commit crimes against humanity if it would maximize profits. It doesn't, of course. It'd be insane to argue that corporations are legally obligated to break the law if it makes them a buck. Which, of course, means that there's already a historical record of Nazi-collaborating business owners who used the shareholder value argument specifically to get out of a hanging at Nuremberg. So let's not use that argument. The moral and legal culpability must be concentrated primarily in the people who had the power and made the decisions at the time, and not laundered through the mechanism of the market to an accountability sink.
Besides, are you really going to put everyone in America with a 401k on trial? That would actually be a really good pretext to putting America under martial law and stripping Americans of their rights[1].
[0] To be clear, PV solar is so cheap now it makes any other form of energy look expensive and useless - nuclear included. The point is specifically that we emitted 40 more years of carbon than we needed to because of this.
[1] Which, to be clear, is already happening, has been happening for decades, and is always happening unless you make continuous efforts to revalidate your rights through democratic means outside of merely voting.
The shareholders are literally the ones that paid for the deception and who benefitted from the deception. Why in the world would you punish the hit man but not the one who paid for the hit?
The shareholders did not pay for the deception, even though they benefitted from it. There is no legal precedence for this kind of action because we have an SEC that is meant to root out deception in public companies, that was gutted as a result of the current US administration.
If the law was "you need to hire your own private investigators and external auditors to find deception in all the companies you invest in", then yes, shareholder liability would be reasonable.
So if I give $1000 to Boris the loan shark, and he consistently returns 50% year over year, I’m blameless because I didn’t investigate?
Shareholder liability is the only way to prevent companies from tobacco/oil style abuse of externalities. You can execute the execs and it will make no difference, because the same shareholders are there incentivizing the same behaviors with the same massive salary/stock windfalls. Someone will take the money.
> There is no legal precedence for this kind of action because we have an SEC that is meant to root out deception in public companies, that was gutted as a result of the current US administration.
Trump took the gutting to an extreme, but antitrust and investor protection agencies have been gutted for decades. The only thing that will draw actual consequences is defrauding or otherwise hurting other rich people - Liz Holmes, Madoff, Epstein or the Dieselgate scandal. But screw over the little man? You'll probably get some sort of bonus.
Yeah, I guess it’s part of doing risk/reward like the taxes thing. It works for many but sometimes it gets ugly for few either by chance or social/political reasons and of course saying everybody does it it’s not helping. I think the Dieselgate was the same thing.
Another recent take is that you could go to jail or bankrupt for sharing some content or you could become billionaire/trillionaire torrenting the whole world. It’s more about the timing and leverage you build along the way.
That is the lawsuit that caused these documents to be released (there’s actually a cluster of such lawsuits; the Massachusetts one released these documents which they got in discovery)
I know this will be an unpopular opinion, but the number of politicians and other officials who would benefit from a successful case against one of these companies or even one of their executives is a mile long.
I don’t mean generic “throw someone in jail because we all agree they’re evil amirite” posturing, but actual cases against someone based on evidence of breaking a law. Any law. It doesn’t even have to result in jail time to be a political career builder. Saying you’ve pursued and won cases against a “bad” company or executives is a huge boon to anyone in this current political environment that is highly against establishments. It’s universal, from Elizabeth Warren campaigning on her actions against Wall St to the entire “drain the swamp” phenomenon.
Reading the actual memo, not the journalists trying to make articles out of it, reveals a little more about why there isn’t the classic smoking gun here, which is a much simpler explanation for why nobody is going to jail than assuming that money has bribed, paid off, and outlawyered everyone in the country who stands to benefit politically from going after a real crime.
This is reading American politics 100% wrong, like George Costanza "I should do the opposite of my instinct on everything" level wrong.
Who's getting punished for corruption these days? Is Elizabeth Warren the President? She ran once and was only used as a stalking horse to keep Bernie out, while finishing 3rd in her home state.
You completely ignored the other half of my example of the “drain the swamp” campaigning that got someone elected.
He didn’t actually do what he promised and his targets differed from Warren’s, but the weight of those anti-establishment vibes are real and underly a lot of what’s happening in American politics.
If you don’t see it, you are the one completely reading it wrong. You tried to cut out everything in my comment except for the Elizabeth Warren part and then you attacked that, but that was only an example to show that this sentiment is prominent in both major parties.
If it helps you understand it, remove Elizabeth Warren from my comment and the point remains valid.
I hear the sentiment that you're projecting but unfortunately it has no legs.
Nobody who chanted "drain the swamp" gives a shit at all about the unprecedented corruption we're seeing. It was always about cultural grievances. If their guy steals from the public, then they're winning.
Agreed. The business is dissolved, assets confiscated, and the board goes to jail.
And to preempt the inevitable comments about what happens to the employees: anyone who works for an oil or gas (or tobacco or social media or junk food, etc) company who's culture is so broken that it produces such planet- or society-wrecking egregious behaviour, is part of the problem and they know it. Find a new job doing something constructive.
The concept is thrown around a lot but the most obvious interpretation is that the company is shuttered, disbanded. So who suffers more, the executives who took the decisions and bail out with golden parachutes, the people who executed knowing the implications and got a bonus for it, or the many random employees and who knows how many more in the larger ecosystem who knew nothing more about it than you do?
The fix isn’t to kill the company, it’s to hold people directly accountable for decisions like this one. Unfortunately these are close to impossible to prove especially in the land of “best justice money can buy”.
The historical case of Enron and Arthur Andersen is instructive. No one from Andersen went to jail but it had to be argued up to the Supreme Court for their charges to be dismissed. The company was disbanded but the conviction against it was overturned afterwards. This is certainly some evidence for "killing the company" not being the right move.
Several Enron execs did go to jail: Kenneth Lay the chairman would have gone for 10+ years but died before sentencing, Jeff Skilling did 12 years, Causey did 5 years, Fastow did 5 years.
In the current environment of DOJ corruption I don't think this sort of thing would happen... unless the executives were conveniently non-supporters of the current President.
That’s seems ass-backwards though. If you want to punish Exxon because they contributed to global warming by satisfying the demand of billions of people for the energy embodied in fossil fuels, it seems like you should directly attack the thing you don’t want: extraction and combustion of fossil fuels.
Setting aside that demand is in no way an excuse - I take it you wouldn't come up with this justification for crack dealers - I want to kill Exxon for the specific thing this article is about.
In the (honestly, not that unlikely) event Shell has done similar, they, too should be killed.
Extraction and combustion of fossil fuels can (and IMO should!) be restricted as an orthogonal measure, but Exxon shouldn't be given the chance to reallocate its investments and pretend it never did what it did.
I don’t think selling street crack is a good thing and oppose everyone who is selling it (and to your last point in your upthread post, I wouldn’t worry about the supply chain players, because “who works to supply crack and doesn’t know that crack is probably not great for you?”)
I don’t pick and choose to punish one of the dealers more harshly than the others because that one dealer had some internal research that cast doubt as to the likelihood that he would, at some time in the future, achieve a workable solution to a healthier/safer crack substitute that he currently publicly claimed to be working on.
People seem to be conflating “this company didn’t publish everything it thought about everything” (a standard we don’t hold companies to in general) with “…and the topic was climate change, so off with the company…”
In what contexts is lying to the public a crime? The closest are laws against lying in police investigations or official proceedings, but otherwise it's not a jailable offense.
And all of this is before you get into the question of whether they lied or were engaging in motivated reasoning. During COVID we had anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, seemingly without clear commercial reasons to lie. Should those people be thrown in jail as well?
> In what contexts is lying to the public a crime?
This feels like a disingenuous question. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that claiming X isn't toxic, when you know that it is dangerous. Public health, frequency, scale of impact (more often, who is impacted that has resources to compete in court) et al are all considerations.
Humans act in their own self interest. Relying purely on individual self interest is a degenerate approach in public health issues. One of the many purposes of government, is to act in the collective interest. eg Typhoid Mary
The impression I get on this discussion is that (man-made) "climate change" is a nebulous distraction from concrete environmental problems we do agree on (like pollution, which may directly cause certain diseases), and on what we could do about such problems
as, for example when I've tried to look up what remedies are proposed for things like excess "carbon emissions", the ideas seem inconsistent and all over the place, suggesting there is not really direct proof of man changing the climate by human actions (for example, planting "1 trillion trees" was suggested; now people aren't sure if that will solve the problem or not)
I could also see corporations and government creating environmental problems (like "man-made climate change", if it's real) and then offering solutions they design, for their own profit (as it's often the same groups of people running these operations in practice; although, this position is somewhat irrational as the leaders of such entities would be effectively poisoning themselves)
Also, I gather the HN consensus position is that non-renewables are harmful and that we can simply switch to renewables to solve issues related to (man-made) climate change. While I do like renewables in theory, and they could possibly cut down on a pollution (?), other more dramatic environmentalists point out that even renewables are probably not sustainable at some point as we will have more people than we have resources to supply them with. Alternatively, many people defensive of non-renewables point out that a lot of catastrophic environmental predictions did not remotely come to fruition.
So to recap: "climate change" is kind of vague and probably a distraction from tangible environmental issues we do agree on, and renewables either are not a sufficient solution to the problem of scarce resources running out or alternatively are not necessary to adopt to solve different environmental problems (although the economics are there and they will probably be adopted for a lot of their affordable benefits in coming years).
(Lastly, it's ironic that the tech community here which is against the over-use of non-renewables is probably passively accepting of AI datacenters which have amped up their consumption of even non-renewables to fuel their operations.)
I welcome discussion on the topic as I take somewhat of an uncommitted neutral view of if climate change is a "thing" or not (I rather would like to see discussion of more concrete solvable environmental issues).
> Most of the lawsuits assert that oil companies should help pay the escalating costs being imposed on the public by climate-fueled extreme weather because they knew the risks their products posed but worked to publicly question climate science and stymie efforts to curb emissions.
"They knew the risks"
Everybody knew the risks. Climate science has been researched at universities and published openly.
If politicians have failed to regulate, and consumers have enjoyed the benefits of (relatively) cheap fuel and energy, why would the fossil energy companies be singled out as the culprits? People wanted the high material standard of living that comes from (relatively) abundant available energy, cheaper and plentiful food that comes from abundant nitrogen fertilizers (made from natural gas). We were all part of this.
The difference is that exxon knew the risks but spent time and effort to sow doubt. This is exactly like how tobacco companies tried to muddy the waters on health effects of tobacco use. The oil companies could have acknowledged the problems of burning fossil fuel but it took them almost 20 years to even admit climate change is real
The word "risk" implies there's a chance the water won't heat up when you put the pot on the stove. It absolutely will, it is, and we all knew it would.
The average American does not know it would. Over 70% of them reject the assertion that climate change is caused more by humans than just natural processes by themselves.
The question is: why?
If the answer is, even in part, "because of a propaganda campaign to convince them of this," then the people who have mounted the campaign deserve blame.
We all had every opportunity to know about climate change, many rejected those opportunities. Even those who know full well the reality of climate change and acknowledge it are still giving tens of thousands of dollars a year to fossil fuel companies and not losing too much sleep at night over it.
Propaganda only works when you're telling people what they want to hear, and nobody wants to hear about climate change. For everything that we stand for and believe in to hold merit climate change needs to be a farce.
I want to say we can't have it both ways, but actually we can. It just means our grandchildren can't have it any way.
The way you are thinking about this makes me think the eventual solution will be a black box label on the gas pump that says “Studies have shown that burning gasoline increases the risk of climate-change related weather events”
> lawsuits assert that oil companies should help pay the escalating costs being imposed on the public by climate-fueled extreme weather because they knew the risks their products posed
How would one even begin to adjudicate that? How do you determine which storm or what portion of a storm was caused by climate change, and how do you determine what portion of climate change was caused by Exxon’s CO2 emissions or whatever?
Sprow also recommended monitoring alternative energy technologies, including nuclear, solar and biofuels, to understand their viability as alternatives to fossil fuels or, eventually, for possible business development. Finally, he added, Exxon could look for “a research breakthrough” in one of these areas that would align with the company’s business.
That process is almost never applied to C corps except for certain financial fraud, while partnerships (like LLCs) are usually seen as proxies for their members, as in your example.
* There is a company that manufactures and sells cars that supposedly brake in front of pedestrians.
* The company is aware that the car's braking system is faulty.
* It runs a sophisticated public relations campaign campaign to convince buyers that cars can not run people over.
* Public evidence of its failed braking system emerges.
* It attempts to muddy the waters, cast doubt on the victims, and shift blame to drivers.
* You buy such a car and run someone over.
The car is a machine. It cannot be responsible. If you believed the company's lies, then you are the victim of a misinformation campaign, as is the person you have run over. If you did not believe the company's lies then depending on your intent, you, the company, and the people involved in obfuscating the truth about a faulty braking system may be responsible.
But in your example, responsibility for the misinformation campaign is assigned to the machine (the corporation itself) not the people (the execs who mounted the misinformation campaign).
My point is that the people (the “drivers” of the car company) should bear the responsibility; it should not be absorbed by the company.
There are other liabilities that should still be assigned to companies. I’m not advocating throwing away the idea of limiting liability.
Would you also like to know if there was an EV company or environmental group financed or sponsored astroturf campaign against ICE vehicles?
Frankly, I hope that both of those things happened, so that people could make their own minds up after an adversarial process. (We have one pure-EV and one ICE car (non-plug-in hybrid, but that's just ICE with extra equipment for marginal efficiency gains), because the cars have different use cases that they're good at. I'm very happy for the EV companies to tell me how much better EVs are than ICE cars; I'm also happy for ICE car companies to tell me how much better their cars are than EVs.)
It’s not like you can squash only PR campaigns that you happen to be misaligned with, so If you want your own biases to be able to communicated, you have to let others do the same.
> Would you also like to know if there was an EV company or environmental group financed or sponsored astroturf campaign against ICE vehicles?
I wouldn't care, because environmental groups aren't destroying the planet and covering it up (see also the article you're commenting on: "New Documents Add to Evidence in Climate Deception Case Against ExxonMobil").
> If you want your own biases to be able to communicated
Wanting to know if you're being lied to isn't a "bias".
I suspect that 38 years from now, future versions of us will look negatively upon Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and Sierra Club's opposition to fission reactors for electrical power generation, whether as a transitional approach to reducing fossil fuel combustion or longer-term base load generation. (Some current versions of us are looking negatively at that, but not all.)
You'd think the one place in the world where checks and balances would be understood would be the United States of America. What did anyone expect ExxonMobil to do? Release a public statement that terrible things were going to happen, shut down all operations, lay off everybody and switch off the lights. Why was the issue politicised so the two main parties could make sure it served their interests. How come institutions like the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine had to weather severe political pressure to silence them, instead of being taken seriously and something done sooner? It's not much of a system if it's so easy to derail.
The system got a series of lucky breaks for about a century: immense natural resources, and the European economies destroying each other. This obscured the deep flaws in the system and has made it practically impossible for Americans to see them. Quite the opposite: whenever the flaws manifest, we try to solve them my entrenching them further.
The checks and balances in the US were always rather fictional, but this particular failure mode of big corporations being able to cause vast amounts of harm and suffering, completely disproportionate to any benefits to the society, seems to be intrinsic in any state of matters where big corporations are allowed to exist at all.
However, there are certain aspects of the US society and political system that appear to be particularly well suited to the rise of big corps doing big evil things.
Big Oil has been an immense producer of _value_ to society. It is fossil fuels that has enabled so much of our modern world to be possible. Cheap, portable, effective and efficient production of energy at scale. My goodness. The ancients would be so jealous of what we have - and so confused by our reaction to what made it possible.
What an amazing achievement for the liberation of everyone.
Imagine how immensely well looked-upon they would be now if they had come public about it, with a long term transition plan. Imagine a world where executives had that kind of courage.
It's a real shame these institutions have been rendered ideologically indistinguishable from the activists who've been telling us constantly the world will end if we don't get rid of all oil in the next 5 years for the last decade and a half. "Boy who cried wolf" resulting from activist alarmism has done immense and possibly irreparable damage to the credibility of the scientific community.
Nobody really ever said the world will end in 5 years.
The message has basically always been "the climate is fragile and we're adding energy to that system, which will cause change in the climate"
The whole "the world will end in 5 years" is a really lame reaction that dismisses the messaging on purpose. It's what people use when they don't want to say, "I don't care" because saying that makes people feel/look bad or because they are "anti-hippie" or whatever phrase we wanna use.
I believe the OP was talking about scientists, not social media influencers.
Also the statement was not “we will all be dead in 5 years.” It was “this could wipe out humanity if we don’t make huge changes in 5 years.” Time frame was not stated.
I think it’s hyperbole, and that the realistic take is “if we continue to make this problem worse the cost will compound until it becomes an existential risk to civilization.” That’s not extinction, but it’s very bad.
It’s a bit like running up credit card bills, except that we don’t even know the interest rate.
The influencer was citing a scientist, and the hyperbole (delivered seriously) is the root cause of the "boy who cried wolf" effect that caused large swaths of the population to now dismiss basically all climate science, including the valid, rational, non-hyperbolic findings.
It will actually take a little while to tell if they were, in fact, crying wolf.
There is a lag between when carbon is released and when the effects of it peak. If we did stop all carbon emissions today, the effects of prior emissions would play out over the next 30ish years.
We’re injecting unprecedented amounts of thermal energy into planet-scale systems, and it is hard to predict second and third order effects.
Since it doesn't look like anyone has mentioned it yet: the book "Merchants of Doubt" covers this topic quite well.
It's frequently the same literal scientists arguing against the existence or severity or cause of things like cigarette-caused illnesses, acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, and yes, anthropogenic climate change. And there's a well-established playbook for how they do it too (exploit Fairness Doctrine, abuse inherent shape of scientific method, etc). Really a fascinating read if you care about this stuff.
1) Nuclear proponents (Fossil fuel people disguised as). They say we need to fund nuclear now because thats the only solution. We can't trust the Sun, because it ghosts often, falls sick and goes on vacations like its a European. They know it will never happen and if if its funded, will take at least 5 decades. Fossil fuel companies killed nuclear by fear mongering and funding 'environmental' groups, when it was a credible threat.
2) Commentors who shift the blame to people: "They asked for it, we produced it. They knew about climate change." Companies are just responding to what people want. Exxon is doing Gods work.
3) The carbon capture 'tech' evangelists. Just give big oil a few more trillions/year and they will direct air capture all the carbon molecules.
4) Carbon is good, trees need it (and some study showing something about trees and carbon)
5) Commentors who shift the blame to all of us. With some nonsense claim about their pension in Australia is now financially viable only because the pension fund (or SWF) invested in fossil fuels. We are all enjoying pensions because of fossil fuels.
> Frank Sprow of Exxon’s corporate research department warned his colleagues in an internal memo, “If a worldwide consensus emerges that action is needed to mitigate against Greenhouse gas effects, substantial negative impacts on Exxon could occur.”
This is a "fork found in kitchen" sort of discovery.
Shocking. The people who aim to benefit the most have done something to benefit? I would be surprised if any of the big fossil fuel industries have not been doing this for decades.
Rights on paper vs rights in the real world are different things.
On paper Americans have a lot of rights, but without $$$ to fight for those rights most people have no real rights. That's why like 94% of US court cases end in plea deals. Nobody can afford to go to trial.
It is not a mode of production problem. The people do have that power at the ballot box, and choose to give more power to corrupt leaders out of fear of the alternative.
> We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.
Unsurprisingly, liberal-aligned society has done a much better job of holding their own accountable than the side that moved Ghislaine Maxwell to "Club Fed", the most desirable federal prison in the US.
>It's like our generation has no desire to hold people accountable.
I don't think that's it at all, it's that capital has no desire to hold people like Epstein and company accountable. That's an uncomfortable place to be in, and so it doesn't get talked about.
Seems like good tech could solve some of the problems and root causes, no? We can ignore the relevant distributions of political power and propaganda and focus on the science the tech enables?
Solar + storage is on an exponential growth curve to largely entirely replace fossil fuels (coal mostly, but eventually natural gas) for electricity generation globally. It will take decades, but at this point the economics are undeniable. Which is in part why Texas (oil country) is blanketing with utility-scale solar farms. Energy businessmen have no particular ideological wedding to what will make them more money, and Solar is a far simpler business than oil.
Poster child, solar / batteries because the economics work.
A lot of the other stuff is harder to get rolling because economics. But in general energy production / storage since that feeds everything. Trump shutting down wind projects was the wrong choice.
The mycelium experiments are interesting. Plastic is so long lasting so any alternatives, I welcome.
3D printing. Maybe minor but it’s additive instead of subtractive so theoretically less waste. The old heads said 3D would never take over machining but I didn’t agree then and I don’t agree now. Maybe some applications but 3D is superior if we can get the right materials properties and costs.
I mean, you know the answer, surely? In the USA, the more money you have, the more power.
It's what leads to a sort of cheat code that the Bay Area investment scene has discovered - if you burn capital quickly enough to grow your revenue fast enough (even hamstringing profit to do so), and in doing so generate more investment interest and more capital attention, you eventually become Too Big To Fail, like Uber did, or the AI companies are doing now.
Of course, I don't see any counter points in the comments - why would I? It's hacker news.
I won't deny that weather changes. Indeed, I believe the expression is "as unpredictable as weather".
Here are my two counter points. First: for everyone who thinks to punish Exxon, you have a brillian solution available to you. Just don't drive, and don't use products manufactured with pertoleum. If you don't want weather to change and believe that you are doing it, just don't do it. Don't use gasoline or anything that uses gasoline in the supply chain.
Second: let's not be too lopsided, surely there are reasons to reward, not just to punish. Let's pay Exxon for every warm, sunny day without rain. Or with rain when we want it. If the weather is agreeable - let's give credit where it's due - to Exxon! If our maladies are caused by them, surely our vitality and wellness is caused by them too? I'll wait.
https://insideclimatenews.org/project/exxon-the-road-not-tak...
This nine-part history of Exxon’s engagement with the emerging science of climate change is the result of an eight months-long investigation conducted in 2015. The stories span four decades, and are based on primary sources, including internal company documents dating back to the late 1970s; interviews with former company employees; and other evidence published for the first time by ICN.
We found that decades ago, Exxon conducted cutting-edge climate research and then worked at the forefront of climate denial, manufacturing doubt about the scientific consensus that its own scientists had confirmed.
This series was named a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and earned national recognition from many other quarters.
> Exxon conducted cutting-edge climate research
I disagree.
This is where cutting edge academic research was already 10 years earlier:
[1] 1967: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/24/3/1520-04...
[2] 1969: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/8/3/1520-045...
[3] 1975: https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/warming_papers/manabe.19...
The reports in your link start from 1977 and they are just summaries of public research. They are well done, but lots of people with engineering and/or physics training would be able to read published research and write summary reports.
[4] Let's look at the first one: https://insideclimatenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Jam...
The actual, original science is properly referenced in the end in "Bibliography" (pdf page 15).
I really don't find any "cutting edge research" in those reports. Maybe "cutting edge reading", if we think that being able to follow, read, understand and summarize published research was cutting edge in the late 1970s.
The idea that [4] is "cutting edge research" and comparable in quality to [1,2,3] is just laughable.
The memo, as linked in the OP, is here, and is worth reading, as it’s incredibly far from the sensationalized headline:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28574283-searchresul...
I’ve happened to meet a number of researchers employed by large oil companies over the years, including many involved in the result of memos like this: making research into carbon capture and other mitigations a top corporate priority. Are there optical/PR reasons for investing in this research? Absolutely. Have they also been engaging in the science in good faith, and genuine intent that… in a world where climate action is desired, and net emissions are something to optimize for, they can anticipate this by genuinely funding research, and having their own research projects already underway that can address anticipated challenges? Also absolutely true.
Now, I can’t speak for, say, lobbying efforts. But the scientists on the ground getting accused of the “deception” are some of the smartest, most caring, and highest-integrity people I’ve met. Entire labs of people working for decades to think: can we make our processes cleaner, at the same time we rise to the challenges of global demand.
We should be celebrating, not condemning, this work.
Scientists and economists are dime a dozen, they have to sing for their supper. For a few thousands dollars, scientists have written about benefits of smoking, lead is a gift from God, and tens of thousands of toxic substances, food additives, etc.
Carbon capture is fraud. You can EASILY stop carbon emissions by switching to EVs, which are cheaper to buy and operate. Instead Govts want to spend trillions on top the $7T dollars/year subsidies to help oil companies recover more oil.
The COP summits are held in fossil fuel countries and discuss carbon capture.
Shell Is Looking Forward The fossil-fuel companies expect to profit from climate change. I went to a private planning meeting and took notes: https://archive.is/15Dj4
Edit: Adding abound's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50044917. The book is Merchants of Doubt.
> Carbon capture is fraud.
Planting and growing trees is a form of carbon capture and it is one that has worked in Earth's history to bring CO2 levels down over the last millions of years from 7000ppm during the Cambrian Age to less than 700ppm.
You already know why that’s a confusing argument because you included the time scale yourself, but to say the obvious: I think we probably need to go a bit faster than “millions of years”.
To capture 10% of daily emissions we need to plant like 20 million trees per day.
EVs don't "easily stop" emissions in the US, since the American grid today is powered about 43% by natural gas and 15% by coal. Converting those sources has to happen too.
> Converting those sources has to happen too.
True, but the overall carbon reduction in owning an EV over its lifetime is still leagues lower; "Production-weighted average carbon footprints are 183 g CO2e/mi for BEVs; 351 g CO2e/mi for PHEVs; 445 g CO2e/mi for HEVs; and 521 g CO2e/mi for ICEVs." from [0] which does take into account the carbon-emitting percentage of the electrical grid.
Also, see Figure 4[1] in the study which states "Results demonstrate that, even under unfavorable conditions, BEVs still have a 30% lower life cycle carbon footprint."
0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-025-00032-4
1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-025-00032-4/figures/4
The headline may be sensationalized but the memo you link (thank you) is plenty damning on it's own. It's under 2 pages and anyone can read it. The memo quite clearly understands that Exxon has made a lot of investment in carbon resources and is entirely centered around getting the value from those resources and fighting the necessary political battles along the way.
I would not celebrate this work, it's typical corporate boss-pleasing. It's not some exhortation towards clean energy.
> The memo, as linked in the OP, is here, and is worth reading, as it’s incredibly far from the sensationalized headline:
Having read both the memo and article, maybe there is a language barrier here, but how is it "incredibly far from the sensationalized headline"?
Maybe this comes down to how one defines "deception", but I have a hard time seeing it not apply here and don't see any hyperbole, overpromising or inaccuracy in the title given the memos writing. Certainly not "incredibly far", even if we split hairs on what raises to being "deception".
They are, unfortunately, being undermined by politics. I know someone who works on carbon capture facilities whose projects are being canceled because the incentives are being destroyed by the current presidential administration.
Oil and gas companies strongly lobby for Republicans they know will remove any incentive for them to need to worry about the environment.
> Have they also been engaging in the science in good faith, and genuine intent that… in a world where climate action is desired, and net emissions are something to optimize for, they can anticipate this by genuinely funding research, and having their own research projects already underway that can address anticipated challenges? Also absolutely true.
This is a claim that is very contrary to the prevailing view. If you wish others to be persuaded by this claim, I recommend that you provide some evidence for it, because on their own your statements are unconvincing.
Self-deception is the first thing you must do to work for ExxonMobil and believe yourself, in 'good faith', to be working for the good of all.
> I can’t speak for, say, lobbying efforts.
Even easier to deceive yourself if you blind both eyes.
> But the scientists on the ground getting accused of the “deception” are some of the smartest, most caring, and highest-integrity people I’ve met.
This is a strawman (and a weirdly strong appeal to emotion for unclear reasons).
The claim is that their scientists were loudly saying internally their PR campaigns and climate claims were false and contrary to their findings. Executives read these memos and chose to do these anyways.
For instance:
> The new disclosures in the Massachusetts case add to the evidence with excerpts from a deposition by an Exxon scientist who worked on the program.
> Asked whether a 2018 press release, which said Exxon anticipated “10,000 barrels of algae biofuel per day could be produced by 2025,” was misleading, the scientist said “yes,” adding, “All the clauses in there are patently false.”
edit: the single memo that you linked (actually one of many the article is discussing) is not supposed to be some smoking gun, it's useful to dispel any idea that there's a reasonable claim of ignorance on Exxon's part, and the date is especially notable: 1988. Basically any PR, legal, and lobbying work for at least 38 years is suspect because of what they actually knew.
Folks say cigarette companies are covering up that cigarettes cause cancer but the Tobacco Institute scientists I've met are funny, charming, and boy can they cook.
You don't get the accolades if you do your research into a corporate black hole created by NDA's. The study may as well not have ever happened at all. Science that isn't open is just contributing to the Machiavellian cycle of amoral corporatic behavior. Get back to me when this research doesn't come to light >50 years later as part of discovery in a court case.
This is Upton Sinclair’s quote:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Alas, the comments evince how almost none of the commenters read the article.
So, who will go to jail?
That's rhetorical, obviously. The answer is absolutely nobody because money is the best insulator there is.
Nobody will go to jail. The gubmint will give them trillions of dollars for carbon removal (PR campaign that the benevolent oil companies and Govt are working for them). They will give themselves awards for saving the planet and everyone else.
The captured carbon will be used for Enhanced Oil Recovery. Fossil fuel companies add a few trillion dollars in govt money, in addition to the $7T dollars in subsidies today (yale).
Carbon capture tech a 'complete falsehood', says Fortescue Metals chairman: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373538
Honest Government Ad | Carbon Capture & Storage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZgoFyuHC8
So this 1000 metric ton CO2 DAC plant could offset the activities of 100-400 vehicles in a year... minus the activities of the employees to get to the plant. That's what I wanna know. When are the workers going to stop driving 60 miles round trip to work? And how many need to be at work everyday at the plant? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38237920
Out of the 27 commercially operational CCS projects worldwide, 21 inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs to force out petroleum: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36970085
Big Oil Helped Shape Stanford’s Latest Climate-Research Focus. Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability recently unveiled its first institutionwide research focus: greenhouse-gas removal. Taking tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere will be “essential” to limiting global warming, as a news release last month explained, and ideas will be marshaled from across the school to get it done. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35829500
More importantly, when will the common folk stop delegating critical thinking to these corporations?
It's really important uphold the law, but nothing really happens if the collective attitude won't change.
No one is delegating their critical thinking to corporations, except professional climate catastrophe deniers, media "spokespeople" who are paid to repeat lies, and bought-and-paid-for politicians.
One of the most transformational things that could happen in politics would be a "misconduct through media" law, where promoting known lies, thinly packaged as entertainment, would be fined at some multiple of the actual harms caused.
I agree there's less delegating now in these areas, but these are mostly topics of the past. Which half truths are we swallowing now, unknowingly most of the time, spoonfed by corp propaganda?
> More importantly, when will the common folk stop delegating critical thinking to these corporations?
When were the times when people didn’t outsource the critical thinking to others?
Never I think, it's time we started choosing not to.
Remember what is need not necessarily continue being so.
The person who has to buy 3 gallons of gas to make a round trip to work is often suffering the consequences of other people’s (nimbys, congresspeople, traffic “engineers”) decisions, often made decades earlier.
Every time a home isn’t built in Berkeley, SF, or Oakland a car in Vacaville or Stockton gets its wings.
The Center for Tobacco Studies is a top tier research organization. Nick wouldn’t deceive us. Look at that smile!
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/09/1145728/we-are-p...
lol. And we're worried about sycophantic AI.These people doomed humanity to make a buck. Jail would be too good for them.
Humanity isn't doomed. Worse, it's going to survive, and have to deal with the messes we made.
Humanity, possibly. Science and culture as we know it - absolutely not.
Lest you make them martys. Much better if we somehow turned them, used the one ring against them.
The current party which holds 3 of 3 branches of the government that would be responsible for prosecuting such a crime is entirely behind the idea that climate change is a hoax.
And the party that's held 3 of 3 branches for twice as long over the past ~20 years, and at least 2 for 6/10 of those Congresses?
I'm not saying they're the bad guys. I'm saying that they had chances to do something, and didn't. They didn't care about implementing "The green dream or whatever they call it," even when they had a mandate, let alone punishing the people who made it a necessity by manipulating the public for several decades.
That’s one reason, but also just the impracticality of jailing everyone who was a shareholder at the time. Diffuse responsibility is also a very strong insulator.
I'll settle for the executives and the board serving time.
Maybe how much time you serve correlates to how much money/stock/etc you have made?
Why would you jail every shareholder? You jail everyone who took part in the deception.
"Took part" should include those who knew about the deception and did nothing.
Maybe it will yeet out all the "investors" who are just parking their money and aren't interested in what their investment is doing. Maybe that will help return the capital markets to serve their original purpose again.
The idea that you can just magically park your money somewhere and it automagically generates numbers, zero risk (because the government always bails you out, directly or indirectly) and zero knowledge requirement has turned out to be incredibly corrosive to society.
Reaping the benefits of the deception is taking part.
No it’s not.
A 401k that market weights is not the same as an executive actively lying.
This is a good way to diffuse responsibility away from the people whose choice it was to condemn the planet to 2-3C warming and onto the people whose choice was made for them by the first group. i.e. this is a good way to put me on trial and keep them out of the court.
I know this because BP coined the term "personal carbon footprint" in order to tell well-meaning liberals like me that we were personally responsible for global warming, and not the oil companies spending to make sure the only practical mode of transportation was individual vehicles burning petrochemicals for energy. Or, prior to that, the oil companies giving Greenpeace money to go heckle nuclear energy and set back the development of clean energy by decades[0].
Likewise, when we do eventually Nuremberg these oil fucks, they are going to throw this exact same argument back at us. They are going to argue that they were just responding to shareholder demand, that fiduciary duty in a for-profit corporation mandates CEOs and board members commit crimes against humanity if it would maximize profits. It doesn't, of course. It'd be insane to argue that corporations are legally obligated to break the law if it makes them a buck. Which, of course, means that there's already a historical record of Nazi-collaborating business owners who used the shareholder value argument specifically to get out of a hanging at Nuremberg. So let's not use that argument. The moral and legal culpability must be concentrated primarily in the people who had the power and made the decisions at the time, and not laundered through the mechanism of the market to an accountability sink.
Besides, are you really going to put everyone in America with a 401k on trial? That would actually be a really good pretext to putting America under martial law and stripping Americans of their rights[1].
[0] To be clear, PV solar is so cheap now it makes any other form of energy look expensive and useless - nuclear included. The point is specifically that we emitted 40 more years of carbon than we needed to because of this.
[1] Which, to be clear, is already happening, has been happening for decades, and is always happening unless you make continuous efforts to revalidate your rights through democratic means outside of merely voting.
The shareholders are literally the ones that paid for the deception and who benefitted from the deception. Why in the world would you punish the hit man but not the one who paid for the hit?
The shareholders did not pay for the deception, even though they benefitted from it. There is no legal precedence for this kind of action because we have an SEC that is meant to root out deception in public companies, that was gutted as a result of the current US administration.
If the law was "you need to hire your own private investigators and external auditors to find deception in all the companies you invest in", then yes, shareholder liability would be reasonable.
So if I give $1000 to Boris the loan shark, and he consistently returns 50% year over year, I’m blameless because I didn’t investigate?
Shareholder liability is the only way to prevent companies from tobacco/oil style abuse of externalities. You can execute the execs and it will make no difference, because the same shareholders are there incentivizing the same behaviors with the same massive salary/stock windfalls. Someone will take the money.
The economy would fall apart if that was how investments worked.
Imagine if money couldn't protect you from the consequences of your choices.
The absolute horror.
> There is no legal precedence for this kind of action because we have an SEC that is meant to root out deception in public companies, that was gutted as a result of the current US administration.
Trump took the gutting to an extreme, but antitrust and investor protection agencies have been gutted for decades. The only thing that will draw actual consequences is defrauding or otherwise hurting other rich people - Liz Holmes, Madoff, Epstein or the Dieselgate scandal. But screw over the little man? You'll probably get some sort of bonus.
Who is suggesting that every shareholder be jailed?
It's entirely possible that candidates who are not promising real consequences will be unelectable in the next democratic primaries.
This doesn't work when every candidate holds the same position.
History says it's like this for decades, centuries... Until it isn't. And then it's guillotines and chaos.
I fear the Children of Men style future we're stepping into.
I got admonished by a moderator here for using that word, be careful.
What word are you referring to? I’m missing something here.
Probably French style capital punishment
We don’t need the French, we can live stream executions now.
Yeah, I guess it’s part of doing risk/reward like the taxes thing. It works for many but sometimes it gets ugly for few either by chance or social/political reasons and of course saying everybody does it it’s not helping. I think the Dieselgate was the same thing.
Another recent take is that you could go to jail or bankrupt for sharing some content or you could become billionaire/trillionaire torrenting the whole world. It’s more about the timing and leverage you build along the way.
I wonder if governments will sue to recover climate mitigation costs
That is the lawsuit that caused these documents to be released (there’s actually a cluster of such lawsuits; the Massachusetts one released these documents which they got in discovery)
We're already in jail. Nobody is getting off this rock.
I didn't get the money, only the jail term. Nice.
PS: I like the way you think :D
Oil, the old AI.
Ideally, at least the board would do time and lose any rights holding such positions for a long time.
One of the chief architects of the coverup died recently - massively wealthy, no consequences, and a fortune passed on to his descendants.
Aren’t they claiming companies are people?
Doesn‘t Texas still have the death penalty?
1+1=…
I know this will be an unpopular opinion, but the number of politicians and other officials who would benefit from a successful case against one of these companies or even one of their executives is a mile long.
I don’t mean generic “throw someone in jail because we all agree they’re evil amirite” posturing, but actual cases against someone based on evidence of breaking a law. Any law. It doesn’t even have to result in jail time to be a political career builder. Saying you’ve pursued and won cases against a “bad” company or executives is a huge boon to anyone in this current political environment that is highly against establishments. It’s universal, from Elizabeth Warren campaigning on her actions against Wall St to the entire “drain the swamp” phenomenon.
Reading the actual memo, not the journalists trying to make articles out of it, reveals a little more about why there isn’t the classic smoking gun here, which is a much simpler explanation for why nobody is going to jail than assuming that money has bribed, paid off, and outlawyered everyone in the country who stands to benefit politically from going after a real crime.
This is reading American politics 100% wrong, like George Costanza "I should do the opposite of my instinct on everything" level wrong.
Who's getting punished for corruption these days? Is Elizabeth Warren the President? She ran once and was only used as a stalking horse to keep Bernie out, while finishing 3rd in her home state.
You completely ignored the other half of my example of the “drain the swamp” campaigning that got someone elected.
He didn’t actually do what he promised and his targets differed from Warren’s, but the weight of those anti-establishment vibes are real and underly a lot of what’s happening in American politics.
If you don’t see it, you are the one completely reading it wrong. You tried to cut out everything in my comment except for the Elizabeth Warren part and then you attacked that, but that was only an example to show that this sentiment is prominent in both major parties.
If it helps you understand it, remove Elizabeth Warren from my comment and the point remains valid.
I hear the sentiment that you're projecting but unfortunately it has no legs.
Nobody who chanted "drain the swamp" gives a shit at all about the unprecedented corruption we're seeing. It was always about cultural grievances. If their guy steals from the public, then they're winning.
Its time to finally bring in the corporate death penalty.
>Its time to finally bring in the corporate death penalty.
Corporations are made of people :-)
(Also: I agree.)
Agreed. The business is dissolved, assets confiscated, and the board goes to jail.
And to preempt the inevitable comments about what happens to the employees: anyone who works for an oil or gas (or tobacco or social media or junk food, etc) company who's culture is so broken that it produces such planet- or society-wrecking egregious behaviour, is part of the problem and they know it. Find a new job doing something constructive.
The concept is thrown around a lot but the most obvious interpretation is that the company is shuttered, disbanded. So who suffers more, the executives who took the decisions and bail out with golden parachutes, the people who executed knowing the implications and got a bonus for it, or the many random employees and who knows how many more in the larger ecosystem who knew nothing more about it than you do?
The fix isn’t to kill the company, it’s to hold people directly accountable for decisions like this one. Unfortunately these are close to impossible to prove especially in the land of “best justice money can buy”.
The historical case of Enron and Arthur Andersen is instructive. No one from Andersen went to jail but it had to be argued up to the Supreme Court for their charges to be dismissed. The company was disbanded but the conviction against it was overturned afterwards. This is certainly some evidence for "killing the company" not being the right move.
Several Enron execs did go to jail: Kenneth Lay the chairman would have gone for 10+ years but died before sentencing, Jeff Skilling did 12 years, Causey did 5 years, Fastow did 5 years.
In the current environment of DOJ corruption I don't think this sort of thing would happen... unless the executives were conveniently non-supporters of the current President.
Why can’t the shareholders collectively vote to jail the execs and install new leadership?
1) Shareholders can't put people in jail. 2) People generally don't act against their interest.
Shareholders can refer to the DOJ.
They could also sue in civil court. A director lying harms the company which is breach of fiduciary duty.
If you kill the company the shareholders can sue the management for damages
So first of all I agree, definitely hold the directly responsible accountable.
But it's not an either/or thing, we can just do both!
Because I'm sorry, but who works at Exxon and doesn't know its probably not great for our planet?
That’s seems ass-backwards though. If you want to punish Exxon because they contributed to global warming by satisfying the demand of billions of people for the energy embodied in fossil fuels, it seems like you should directly attack the thing you don’t want: extraction and combustion of fossil fuels.
Don’t kill Exxon and let Shell operate.
Setting aside that demand is in no way an excuse - I take it you wouldn't come up with this justification for crack dealers - I want to kill Exxon for the specific thing this article is about.
In the (honestly, not that unlikely) event Shell has done similar, they, too should be killed.
Extraction and combustion of fossil fuels can (and IMO should!) be restricted as an orthogonal measure, but Exxon shouldn't be given the chance to reallocate its investments and pretend it never did what it did.
I don’t think selling street crack is a good thing and oppose everyone who is selling it (and to your last point in your upthread post, I wouldn’t worry about the supply chain players, because “who works to supply crack and doesn’t know that crack is probably not great for you?”)
I don’t pick and choose to punish one of the dealers more harshly than the others because that one dealer had some internal research that cast doubt as to the likelihood that he would, at some time in the future, achieve a workable solution to a healthier/safer crack substitute that he currently publicly claimed to be working on.
People seem to be conflating “this company didn’t publish everything it thought about everything” (a standard we don’t hold companies to in general) with “…and the topic was climate change, so off with the company…”
In what contexts is lying to the public a crime? The closest are laws against lying in police investigations or official proceedings, but otherwise it's not a jailable offense.
And all of this is before you get into the question of whether they lied or were engaging in motivated reasoning. During COVID we had anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, seemingly without clear commercial reasons to lie. Should those people be thrown in jail as well?
> In what contexts is lying to the public a crime?
This feels like a disingenuous question. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that claiming X isn't toxic, when you know that it is dangerous. Public health, frequency, scale of impact (more often, who is impacted that has resources to compete in court) et al are all considerations.
Humans act in their own self interest. Relying purely on individual self interest is a degenerate approach in public health issues. One of the many purposes of government, is to act in the collective interest. eg Typhoid Mary
If you take the post-mortems on the psyops campaigns from our national adversaries at face-value then what they were doing was actually worse.
The impression I get on this discussion is that (man-made) "climate change" is a nebulous distraction from concrete environmental problems we do agree on (like pollution, which may directly cause certain diseases), and on what we could do about such problems
as, for example when I've tried to look up what remedies are proposed for things like excess "carbon emissions", the ideas seem inconsistent and all over the place, suggesting there is not really direct proof of man changing the climate by human actions (for example, planting "1 trillion trees" was suggested; now people aren't sure if that will solve the problem or not)
I could also see corporations and government creating environmental problems (like "man-made climate change", if it's real) and then offering solutions they design, for their own profit (as it's often the same groups of people running these operations in practice; although, this position is somewhat irrational as the leaders of such entities would be effectively poisoning themselves)
Also, I gather the HN consensus position is that non-renewables are harmful and that we can simply switch to renewables to solve issues related to (man-made) climate change. While I do like renewables in theory, and they could possibly cut down on a pollution (?), other more dramatic environmentalists point out that even renewables are probably not sustainable at some point as we will have more people than we have resources to supply them with. Alternatively, many people defensive of non-renewables point out that a lot of catastrophic environmental predictions did not remotely come to fruition.
So to recap: "climate change" is kind of vague and probably a distraction from tangible environmental issues we do agree on, and renewables either are not a sufficient solution to the problem of scarce resources running out or alternatively are not necessary to adopt to solve different environmental problems (although the economics are there and they will probably be adopted for a lot of their affordable benefits in coming years).
(Lastly, it's ironic that the tech community here which is against the over-use of non-renewables is probably passively accepting of AI datacenters which have amped up their consumption of even non-renewables to fuel their operations.)
I welcome discussion on the topic as I take somewhat of an uncommitted neutral view of if climate change is a "thing" or not (I rather would like to see discussion of more concrete solvable environmental issues).
> Most of the lawsuits assert that oil companies should help pay the escalating costs being imposed on the public by climate-fueled extreme weather because they knew the risks their products posed but worked to publicly question climate science and stymie efforts to curb emissions.
"They knew the risks"
Everybody knew the risks. Climate science has been researched at universities and published openly.
If politicians have failed to regulate, and consumers have enjoyed the benefits of (relatively) cheap fuel and energy, why would the fossil energy companies be singled out as the culprits? People wanted the high material standard of living that comes from (relatively) abundant available energy, cheaper and plentiful food that comes from abundant nitrogen fertilizers (made from natural gas). We were all part of this.
The difference is that exxon knew the risks but spent time and effort to sow doubt. This is exactly like how tobacco companies tried to muddy the waters on health effects of tobacco use. The oil companies could have acknowledged the problems of burning fossil fuel but it took them almost 20 years to even admit climate change is real
If people were happy to accept the risks then why obfuscate the risks?
The word "risk" implies there's a chance the water won't heat up when you put the pot on the stove. It absolutely will, it is, and we all knew it would.
The average American does not know it would. Over 70% of them reject the assertion that climate change is caused more by humans than just natural processes by themselves.
The question is: why?
If the answer is, even in part, "because of a propaganda campaign to convince them of this," then the people who have mounted the campaign deserve blame.
Indeed. Rampant innumeracy doesn’t help either :-(
We all had every opportunity to know about climate change, many rejected those opportunities. Even those who know full well the reality of climate change and acknowledge it are still giving tens of thousands of dollars a year to fossil fuel companies and not losing too much sleep at night over it.
Propaganda only works when you're telling people what they want to hear, and nobody wants to hear about climate change. For everything that we stand for and believe in to hold merit climate change needs to be a farce.
I want to say we can't have it both ways, but actually we can. It just means our grandchildren can't have it any way.
Why shouldn’t a company be responsible for the pollution and health impacts their products have?
It’s so basic
The way you are thinking about this makes me think the eventual solution will be a black box label on the gas pump that says “Studies have shown that burning gasoline increases the risk of climate-change related weather events”
You want alcohol companies pay hospital bills now? I don't mind, but that's an uphill battle.
Isn't that in parts why alcohol and tobacco are taxed at higher rates? That's a thing in many countries at least
> lawsuits assert that oil companies should help pay the escalating costs being imposed on the public by climate-fueled extreme weather because they knew the risks their products posed
How would one even begin to adjudicate that? How do you determine which storm or what portion of a storm was caused by climate change, and how do you determine what portion of climate change was caused by Exxon’s CO2 emissions or whatever?
Sprow also recommended monitoring alternative energy technologies, including nuclear, solar and biofuels, to understand their viability as alternatives to fossil fuels or, eventually, for possible business development. Finally, he added, Exxon could look for “a research breakthrough” in one of these areas that would align with the company’s business.
Truly damning stuff.
If I drive a car and run someone over, I am arrested, not the car.
A limited liability company is just a machine, as is a car. Yet somehow when you drive one you shift your responsibility to the vehicle.
This needs to be fixed.
In legal terms there is something called "piercing the corporate veil".
Classic example:
- guy owns a cab company
- he puts each cab in it's own LLC
- the idea is that if a cab hurts or kills someone, the liability stops at the cab and doesn't come back to him
Judges will say "that is not acceptable" and rule that the liability does indeed extend outside the single car LLC and should apply to the owner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil
That process is almost never applied to C corps except for certain financial fraud, while partnerships (like LLCs) are usually seen as proxies for their members, as in your example.
This is not how liability works.
* There is a company that manufactures and sells cars that supposedly brake in front of pedestrians. * The company is aware that the car's braking system is faulty. * It runs a sophisticated public relations campaign campaign to convince buyers that cars can not run people over. * Public evidence of its failed braking system emerges. * It attempts to muddy the waters, cast doubt on the victims, and shift blame to drivers. * You buy such a car and run someone over.
The car is a machine. It cannot be responsible. If you believed the company's lies, then you are the victim of a misinformation campaign, as is the person you have run over. If you did not believe the company's lies then depending on your intent, you, the company, and the people involved in obfuscating the truth about a faulty braking system may be responsible.
But in your example, responsibility for the misinformation campaign is assigned to the machine (the corporation itself) not the people (the execs who mounted the misinformation campaign).
My point is that the people (the “drivers” of the car company) should bear the responsibility; it should not be absorbed by the company.
There are other liabilities that should still be assigned to companies. I’m not advocating throwing away the idea of limiting liability.
My car almost got arrested last year for parking without my permit tag hung up.
An article from 2023, "Exxon Made 'Breathtakingly' Accurate Climate Predictions in 1970s and ’80s":
* https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/01/revealed-exx...
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/exxon-mobil-predicted-global...
From 2015, "Exxon knew of climate change in 1981, email says – but it funded deniers for 27 more years"
* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/08/exxon-cl...
Turns out Exxon's climate science is pretty good:
* https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063
I'd like to know if there was an oil industry financed or sponsored astroturf campaign to turn the American public against electric vehicles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car
It felt like that in the UK a couple of years ago. All of a sudden there was a mass of negative publicity about EV’s. Most of it was false.
There was a spate of memes here and there back in March, but to me they read as:
"Please don't turn away from oil now that its geopolitical risks are so plain to see."
Would you also like to know if there was an EV company or environmental group financed or sponsored astroturf campaign against ICE vehicles?
Frankly, I hope that both of those things happened, so that people could make their own minds up after an adversarial process. (We have one pure-EV and one ICE car (non-plug-in hybrid, but that's just ICE with extra equipment for marginal efficiency gains), because the cars have different use cases that they're good at. I'm very happy for the EV companies to tell me how much better EVs are than ICE cars; I'm also happy for ICE car companies to tell me how much better their cars are than EVs.)
It’s not like you can squash only PR campaigns that you happen to be misaligned with, so If you want your own biases to be able to communicated, you have to let others do the same.
> Would you also like to know if there was an EV company or environmental group financed or sponsored astroturf campaign against ICE vehicles?
I wouldn't care, because environmental groups aren't destroying the planet and covering it up (see also the article you're commenting on: "New Documents Add to Evidence in Climate Deception Case Against ExxonMobil").
> If you want your own biases to be able to communicated
Wanting to know if you're being lied to isn't a "bias".
I suspect that 38 years from now, future versions of us will look negatively upon Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and Sierra Club's opposition to fission reactors for electrical power generation, whether as a transitional approach to reducing fossil fuel combustion or longer-term base load generation. (Some current versions of us are looking negatively at that, but not all.)
You'd think the one place in the world where checks and balances would be understood would be the United States of America. What did anyone expect ExxonMobil to do? Release a public statement that terrible things were going to happen, shut down all operations, lay off everybody and switch off the lights. Why was the issue politicised so the two main parties could make sure it served their interests. How come institutions like the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine had to weather severe political pressure to silence them, instead of being taken seriously and something done sooner? It's not much of a system if it's so easy to derail.
It's not much of a system. It is easy to derail.
The system got a series of lucky breaks for about a century: immense natural resources, and the European economies destroying each other. This obscured the deep flaws in the system and has made it practically impossible for Americans to see them. Quite the opposite: whenever the flaws manifest, we try to solve them my entrenching them further.
The checks and balances in the US were always rather fictional, but this particular failure mode of big corporations being able to cause vast amounts of harm and suffering, completely disproportionate to any benefits to the society, seems to be intrinsic in any state of matters where big corporations are allowed to exist at all.
However, there are certain aspects of the US society and political system that appear to be particularly well suited to the rise of big corps doing big evil things.
Big Oil has been an immense producer of _value_ to society. It is fossil fuels that has enabled so much of our modern world to be possible. Cheap, portable, effective and efficient production of energy at scale. My goodness. The ancients would be so jealous of what we have - and so confused by our reaction to what made it possible.
What an amazing achievement for the liberation of everyone.
Imagine how immensely well looked-upon they would be now if they had come public about it, with a long term transition plan. Imagine a world where executives had that kind of courage.
Like Al Gore? People love him I think
It's a real shame these institutions have been rendered ideologically indistinguishable from the activists who've been telling us constantly the world will end if we don't get rid of all oil in the next 5 years for the last decade and a half. "Boy who cried wolf" resulting from activist alarmism has done immense and possibly irreparable damage to the credibility of the scientific community.
Nobody really ever said the world will end in 5 years.
The message has basically always been "the climate is fragile and we're adding energy to that system, which will cause change in the climate"
The whole "the world will end in 5 years" is a really lame reaction that dismisses the messaging on purpose. It's what people use when they don't want to say, "I don't care" because saying that makes people feel/look bad or because they are "anti-hippie" or whatever phrase we wanna use.
For over 50 years we've been hearing dire predictions about climate catastrophes, none of which have come true.
https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-poca...
>Nobody really ever said the world will end in 5 years.
You mean besides the most recognizable / well known climate activist on earth?
"A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years."
- Greta Thunberg (June 21st, 2018)
https://web.archive.org/web/20230307215203/https://twitter.c...
I believe the OP was talking about scientists, not social media influencers.
Also the statement was not “we will all be dead in 5 years.” It was “this could wipe out humanity if we don’t make huge changes in 5 years.” Time frame was not stated.
I think it’s hyperbole, and that the realistic take is “if we continue to make this problem worse the cost will compound until it becomes an existential risk to civilization.” That’s not extinction, but it’s very bad.
It’s a bit like running up credit card bills, except that we don’t even know the interest rate.
The influencer was citing a scientist, and the hyperbole (delivered seriously) is the root cause of the "boy who cried wolf" effect that caused large swaths of the population to now dismiss basically all climate science, including the valid, rational, non-hyperbolic findings.
It will actually take a little while to tell if they were, in fact, crying wolf.
There is a lag between when carbon is released and when the effects of it peak. If we did stop all carbon emissions today, the effects of prior emissions would play out over the next 30ish years.
We’re injecting unprecedented amounts of thermal energy into planet-scale systems, and it is hard to predict second and third order effects.
I have kids/I really hope they were crying wolf.
Norway's econony and wealth is primarily from fossil fuels. Shouldn't the government be sued as well?
Since it doesn't look like anyone has mentioned it yet: the book "Merchants of Doubt" covers this topic quite well.
It's frequently the same literal scientists arguing against the existence or severity or cause of things like cigarette-caused illnesses, acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, and yes, anthropogenic climate change. And there's a well-established playbook for how they do it too (exploit Fairness Doctrine, abuse inherent shape of scientific method, etc). Really a fascinating read if you care about this stuff.
A few kinds of commentors reliably show up:
1) Nuclear proponents (Fossil fuel people disguised as). They say we need to fund nuclear now because thats the only solution. We can't trust the Sun, because it ghosts often, falls sick and goes on vacations like its a European. They know it will never happen and if if its funded, will take at least 5 decades. Fossil fuel companies killed nuclear by fear mongering and funding 'environmental' groups, when it was a credible threat.
2) Commentors who shift the blame to people: "They asked for it, we produced it. They knew about climate change." Companies are just responding to what people want. Exxon is doing Gods work.
3) The carbon capture 'tech' evangelists. Just give big oil a few more trillions/year and they will direct air capture all the carbon molecules.
4) Carbon is good, trees need it (and some study showing something about trees and carbon)
5) Commentors who shift the blame to all of us. With some nonsense claim about their pension in Australia is now financially viable only because the pension fund (or SWF) invested in fossil fuels. We are all enjoying pensions because of fossil fuels.
All I’ll say is… see Digger before it leaves theaters
> Frank Sprow of Exxon’s corporate research department warned his colleagues in an internal memo, “If a worldwide consensus emerges that action is needed to mitigate against Greenhouse gas effects, substantial negative impacts on Exxon could occur.”
This is a "fork found in kitchen" sort of discovery.
Shocking. The people who aim to benefit the most have done something to benefit? I would be surprised if any of the big fossil fuel industries have not been doing this for decades.
Corporations have more rights than people. Money wins again.
You don't have the right to spread false information?
Rights on paper vs rights in the real world are different things.
On paper Americans have a lot of rights, but without $$$ to fight for those rights most people have no real rights. That's why like 94% of US court cases end in plea deals. Nobody can afford to go to trial.
I would get sued and lose?
Conspiracy people are like "nono, the government is lying to you", but really it was the corporations that make money all along.
Why is it when these types of releases happen, it seems like the perpetrators seem to get away with it?
This release, Epstein files, Panama papers, etc.
It's like our generation has no desire to hold people accountable.
Our generation? This is a mode of production problem, we have no real power, the perpetrators do.
Just say you don't care and move on.
The people, and the consumers, have absolute control but seemingly choose to believe they don't.
This self defeated mantra of "we have no power" is exactly what keeps us from enacting change.
It is not a mode of production problem. The people do have that power at the ballot box, and choose to give more power to corrupt leaders out of fear of the alternative.
> We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr
The Epstein Files and Panama Papers both have had significant repercussions against people in power outside of the US.
Fair callout. The past few years have really fortified the media bubble for us in the US.
Some in the US as well, but it seems to skew towards wealthy (Gates) and universities, and not politicians.
Unsurprisingly, liberal-aligned society has done a much better job of holding their own accountable than the side that moved Ghislaine Maxwell to "Club Fed", the most desirable federal prison in the US.
>It's like our generation has no desire to hold people accountable.
I don't think that's it at all, it's that capital has no desire to hold people like Epstein and company accountable. That's an uncomfortable place to be in, and so it doesn't get talked about.
Capital has plenty of desire to hold it accountable, to sustain the system. Capital is not a unified group of interests; many of them favor justice.
The people do have significant power at the ballot box, and chose to give more power to corrupt leaders out of fear of the alternative.
Let's talk about it.
Not on this forum! This forum is for TECH! And tech is apolitical. lol.
Seems like good tech could solve some of the problems and root causes, no? We can ignore the relevant distributions of political power and propaganda and focus on the science the tech enables?
Absolutely. Good tech and not working for FAANGs / big VC and yet…
Political discourse is a non starter here and everyone will continue to work for abusive companies. Gotta pay for those vacations.
Take that as a given and background noise.
What do you think is one tech deployment today that can help start to mitigate climate change?
Solar + storage is on an exponential growth curve to largely entirely replace fossil fuels (coal mostly, but eventually natural gas) for electricity generation globally. It will take decades, but at this point the economics are undeniable. Which is in part why Texas (oil country) is blanketing with utility-scale solar farms. Energy businessmen have no particular ideological wedding to what will make them more money, and Solar is a far simpler business than oil.
Poster child, solar / batteries because the economics work.
A lot of the other stuff is harder to get rolling because economics. But in general energy production / storage since that feeds everything. Trump shutting down wind projects was the wrong choice.
The mycelium experiments are interesting. Plastic is so long lasting so any alternatives, I welcome.
3D printing. Maybe minor but it’s additive instead of subtractive so theoretically less waste. The old heads said 3D would never take over machining but I didn’t agree then and I don’t agree now. Maybe some applications but 3D is superior if we can get the right materials properties and costs.
Hbu?
No, your neighbours decided that all corporate malfeasance was approved if it gets them a cheaper egg.
I mean, you know the answer, surely? In the USA, the more money you have, the more power.
It's what leads to a sort of cheat code that the Bay Area investment scene has discovered - if you burn capital quickly enough to grow your revenue fast enough (even hamstringing profit to do so), and in doing so generate more investment interest and more capital attention, you eventually become Too Big To Fail, like Uber did, or the AI companies are doing now.
I would call it anti-climate-deception-deception.
Of course, I don't see any counter points in the comments - why would I? It's hacker news.
I won't deny that weather changes. Indeed, I believe the expression is "as unpredictable as weather".
Here are my two counter points. First: for everyone who thinks to punish Exxon, you have a brillian solution available to you. Just don't drive, and don't use products manufactured with pertoleum. If you don't want weather to change and believe that you are doing it, just don't do it. Don't use gasoline or anything that uses gasoline in the supply chain.
Second: let's not be too lopsided, surely there are reasons to reward, not just to punish. Let's pay Exxon for every warm, sunny day without rain. Or with rain when we want it. If the weather is agreeable - let's give credit where it's due - to Exxon! If our maladies are caused by them, surely our vitality and wellness is caused by them too? I'll wait.