Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

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Why do we want to blame the oil companies? So the bad guy isn’t consumers? We need 100 million barrels of oil a day! Bottled war, plastic containers for takeout food, SUVs, …

40% of global electricity is from coal. That’s much worse than oil.

We burn more coal than ever.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/265507/global-coal-consu...

Let’s all watch Carl Sagan from 1985 and figure out how to solve this multi-generational problem.

https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI

He warned us not to use coal. Did we listen?

At the very least, we can buy ourselves a couple extra decades.

Update:

Got immediately downvoted so clearly I can’t respond.

Now I’m going to optimize my website so it uses less electricity then blog about which computer language uses less electricity.

Climate change is a form of bike shedding. We talk about a bunch of irrelevant ideas rather than addressing the real issues.

But hey, oil companies knew and didn’t tell us what we already knew. We’re off the hook!

Let’s keep sending climate change deniers to Washington:

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/climate-deniers-117...

I’ll bite. Regardless of how you feel about this, oil companies deserve extra blame because their scientists predicted climate change due to oil consumption, and were hushed up and the research never shared.

> were hushed up and the research never shared.

More than that, they used the time to prepare propaganda.

I had an initial negative reaction to this comment and tried to figure out why - I think the main reason is that you're putting the blame on individuals for systemic problems. I don't think any amount of individual people trying to be better is going to counteract the damage being done at scale by our large companies. There's definitely a bunch of issues where collective action can work great, but everyone at BP recycling isn't going to fix the next time they set the ocean on fire or get them to stop drilling for oil.

This feels kinda like other arguments I see for systemic problems where we blame individuals in the US - we have the most people in jail because they make bad decisions, we have the most shootings because those people are bad, we have so much obesity because people don't have self control, etc - but all these are happening across the population and not in other countries so the cause can't be the individual people, it has to be caused by the environment we're in.

As another argument that ignores the blame question altogether - it's just about how we can make the biggest impact the fastest. It's much easier to pass a law saying that makes it prohibitively expensive to be an oil company than it is to say people need to limit their driving more, and the downstream effect will be the same with less people using oil

> It's much easier to pass a law saying that makes it prohibitively expensive to be an oil company than it is to say people need to limit their driving more, and the downstream effect will be the same with less people using oil

I do not see why this would be the case. Politician who is advertising that they will vote against proposals to increase gas taxes would also advertise that they will vote against proposals to make being an oil company prohibitively expensive so that gas prices can go lower or stay low.

In the US, we still have a whole political party that removes drilling restrictions and is eager to install pipelines and do whatever is necessary to enable fossil fuel consumption, and they are a very popular party.

Agreed - I wasn't trying to say that this is actually a likely outcome, just that it makes more sense to hold companies accountable than individuals

So, oil and coal then. Unless you had a different point.

Pretty sure the point was that we should take personal responsibility for our actions.

Responsibility should be placed where it can actually change something.

Yes, when dealing with things in our own lives it's usually best to go with "at your own feet", not mater who the actors are, since the only person whose actions you can change are your own.

But as far as climate goes, we, the individuals (who happen to not be rich at the moment) have no power to change anything. So taking personal responsibility will change nothing.

Well, actually, people taking personal responsibility for the climate have possibly made it worse by redirecting the attention to themselves.

The obvious contrapositive to this is what happened during the pandemic: everyone stopped driving for a couple months and it had... Almost no impact. The curtain is pulled back now: the call for "individual responsibility" is exposed as cynical the PR tactic it is... Much like "plastic recycling". The fact is 1) Big corporations 2) Big corporations and 3) Big corporations in concert with the legislators they've captured are responsible for climate change. As an individual the most effective behavior you can exhibit to limit climate change is to vote with 1) Your Democracy while you still have it and more importantly 2) Your wallet.

I'm down. Let's start by making the oil companies take "personal" responsibility for the externalities they create, including the amount of warming they have caused (and that they know they have caused). Perhaps with a carbon tax.

Whether it's fair or not, personal responsibility has been very clearly pointed out and it's not changed anything. People are shitty and selfish, or sometimes just naive, and at their best, when they do everything they should, they are impotent.

Consumers are not just going to pull on their big boy pants and stop consuming, and we'll all live happily in a recovered ecosystem eating organic corn by candlelight. It has to be regulation on industry, and improvements to production (eg ditch coal power generation). Stop it where it matters, where impacts have the scale to actually matter.

I've been riding my bike to work this whole damn time! I think we're going to have to be a bit more ambitious.

Governments in the West make it a matter of explicit policy to increase consumption. That is what immigration rates are for, to prop up GDP, then every newcomer from the 3rd-world gets a larger carbon footprint overnight. It makes no sense to blame consumers for that.

If the serious consideration for those posturing starts and ends with consumption, then the consistent approach would be to oppose immigration. They do not, because it was never the point. Self-righteously indignation and signaling is.

Saying this with the awareness that both right-wing detractors and far-leftists like to target consumers/consumption, as for the latter it dovetails with their anti-Capitalism. Just look at the fusion energy thread from the other day, people are voicing concern that carbon-neutral and cheaper energy would lead to people buying more things. Westerners are struggling to get by, with purchasing power stagnating for years, and yet it's being projected they're practically drowning in useless stuff compared to their grandparents.

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