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Comment by 23throwaway23 | Hacker News Reader

This argument often gets trotted out, but it's misleading. Imagine your grandparents were introduced to heroin and became addicted to it, and you built a society around celebrating and finding new ways to use heroin. Then your parents were hooked on heroin, and people may have found out that heroin actually isn't that good for you, but by this time, the heroin produces had amassed such wealth and power that they worked hard for 40 years to suppress and sow confusion around the science around.

Now you're born into a society of heroin consumers, and to some degree you're also addicted to it.

Is it the fault of the consumers that the world now runs on heroin? Especially considering that the heroin producers have known for 40 years, and have spent BILLIONS lying to the public and government?

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This is a bizarre comparison. Petroleum was pulled out of the ground because was useful from day one. It is the backbone of the economy because it is useful. Pretending that petroleum is and has always been a vile, evil thing is poorly considered revisionist nonsense (typed into a petroleum plastic keyboard)

Without petroleum, the world today looks a lot more like 1930 than it does 2020.

That's not what the argument is saying. We obviously didn't know the ill effects of the product when it first came out (think original Coke with cocaine).

Yes, it may have given us some material benefits, but now it is clear that it is hurtling the human race towards extinction (and likely much life on earth with it).

I suggest you are misreading the argument.

Which makes heroin a terrible analogy because it doesn't match up with the argument, except insomuch as it flatters the poster's sense of the evil Exxon as a 'pusher' of an evil product.

I don't follow. The burning of fossil fuels is risking human extinction. Sure, I can now fly from New York to Shanghai. But evidence increasing points that civilization and possibly humanity won't survive this benefit.

This has been known by Exxon for ~40 years, and they have worked to suppress and sow disinformation.

Can you elaborate? The response seems incoherent.

14% of global emissions is from all transportation. It's a poor example.

Most of it comes from electricity production, industry, and agriculture. I guess flying an airplane is an easy target. But it really shows the actual motives when someone holds it up as an example if how we're destroying the planet.

Worth noting: petroleum has been around for millenia: http://www.dnr.louisiana.gov/assets/TAD/education/BGBB/2/anc...

If you assume society is democratic, however, then knowing the facts matters - even if you end up behaving the same way. It's never a good thing to have a whole set of pressure groups funded by an industry trying to sow doubts about the long-term effects of that industry in contradiction of the facts.

There's a whole lot of unaddressed middle between "give up all oil and make the world look like 1930" and "wilfully hide the truth in order to give us 2020 tech."

How about, "As a democracy, have a debate about long-term problems with a core part of society in reasonable time to address them?

I bet you are thinking of things like furnaces, cars, planes, ships, etc.

But are you thinking about bottles, bags, flooring, roofing, insulation, clothes, etc?

The amount of products with oil uselessly baked in without concern to the environmental impact is incredible. Plastics have many great alternatives.

A defense of oil based on it's usefulness is not an excuse for the current state of oil usage. Stop it.

It has often been said that burning something as incredibly useful as oil is silly. And plastic is and will remain a core component of modern technology for a very long time. Of course with abundant energy we will make plastic from C02 in future, not oil. If civilisation survives the interesting times ahead.

Your argument neglects the fact that designing society around fossil fuels improved everyone’s lives exponentially and made the non-agrarian lifestyle not only possible but accessible to billions of people.

It’s not heroin, it’s more like some sort of intelligence drug with terrible side effects seen much later.

It’s a Faustian bargain we’ve all benefited from in innumerable ways.

The intent of the analogy is to make clear that consumers have little recourse over their "choice" to consume this material.

Lots can be said about the tradeoffs of industrial civilization. We now see that it is leading us to extinction.

It's like bacteria in a petri dish, for 50 years it accelerated our consumption of our limited resources and made the petri dish increasingly hostile to life within it.

We all know how the story of bacteria in a petri dish turns out.

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