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Comment by nightski | Hacker News Reader

"Big bad energy companies" is tiring. We demand the energy. Sure they should be held liable for lying. But it would be hard to convince me that if they did tell the truth things would of played out any different.

Energy is the life blood of our civilization.

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The physical safety of executives at places like Exxon is at least in part dependent on the fact that people like me have too much to lose. They don't just deserve blame. They deserve some kind of justice.

Nobody has made them invest in more and more infrastructure instead of alternative energy. Nobody made them pay public relations companies to spread FUD about climate science and mitigation. These people are guilty of crimes against humanity as far as I'm concerned.

Yes, the same way America is outsourcing most of our carbon emissions whenever we claim to be reducing them, it is tiring. However the fact that they continue to also poison us directly by evading or influencing environmental regulations and lie about that stuff too - I wish I could see a beatdown.

I think if disinformation about Global Warming hadn't been rampant since the 80s directly due to the actions of these companies, that would be great. We could have been talking about these goals decades ago, we wouldn't have presidents and other elected officials running on a campaign that it's fake and we shouldn't care.

I think hell would be too good for the people who knew about this issue and lied for decades about it to try to turn a buck, instead of just doing the obvious thing and investing in new energy technologies.

They knew about CC 40 years ago. Their response was to do the same as tobacco industry did: resist all evidence and misinform the public in favour of profits. If that hadn't happened, we would absolutely have been sharper with our response.

No. They knew about CC. in the 50's - their own engineers pointed out the problem and the dire repercussions it would have. Admittedly, those engineers had only just realized what physicists had known since the late 19th century.

No matter how you slice it, as you point out, they've known about the problem, they've lied about the problem, they've spent millions of dollars in a public deception campaign - and they've been doing it for decades.

Heck, we're still getting to the bottom of all the damage brought on by their adding tetraethyl lead to their gasoline. It's going to take even longer sorting out through all this mess. They'd just like us to forget about it and move along. That's not gonna happen.

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