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Comment by vyvyy | Hacker News Reader

> It explains why the public gets angry at climate protestors instead of the oil executives who've ruined their future.

The public tend to get annoyed at these protestors because their protests are ineffective and disrupt everyday working people. If the protestors brought their protests to the oil executives, I expect they'd be much more widely accepted.

> It explains how university students have somehow wound up as the villains in so many people's eyes, instead of the governments sponsoring and committing genocide.

If this is referring to Gaza, not everyone holds the view that Israel is committing genocide. Many see it as a justified response to a large-scale terrorist attack by Hamas. And either way, the students' protests aren't effective either. It does nothing to affect the actual conflict, just annoys students who are there to study.

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N=1, but I disagree with these protests simply because I disagree with their aims.

I'm not religious. If I had to live in a world with either Israel or Palestine in it, which seems to be the implicit choice Hamas are presenting, I'd choose Israel.

I think that people of the Jewish faith are on the whole far more tolerant and accepting than followers of Islam are. Even the militants are more reasonable.

Protest groups with titles like "Queers for Palestine" I find to be not villanous but rather simply misguided. Of course I'm going to distrust someone who seems to be borderline suicidal, the normal incentives I assume of my fellow man don't apply to them.

> It explains why the public gets angry at climate protestors instead of the oil executives who've ruined their future.

Oil companies aren't the cause of climate change. The people who burn the oil are.

P.S. Oil replaced the slaughter of the whales and saved them from extinction. Oil also produces much less pollution than coal, which oil replaced. Coal saved the forests from extinction.

And coal/oil marked (mostly) the end of slavery and other forms of indentured labour.

But Jevons' paradox means that the efficiency of oil leads to its consumption at huge levels. You want the strength of 150 horses just to go to the shop and back? No problem, Average Guy, just pop the key in and off you go.

Now imagine how rich you'd have to be in 1800 to have one hundred and fifty horses at your disposal. The expense and labour involved in keeping them fed and watered, and the labourers themselves fed and watered.

And that's just a small truck. For a passenger airliner, you're looking at eight hundred horses per passenger that's typical of a long-haul jet aircraft.

What do you prefer? Short lives, famines, etc.? That was ended by the industrial revolution.

I suggest touring Washington's Mt Vernon estate. He was probably the richest man in America at the time. I wouldn't trade my current standard of living for his.

I'd prefer a culture with a little self-discipline and self-control. Not using 150 horses where five, or none, will do.

Let's use the oil, sure, but treat it like we need it to last 200 years, not 20.

If you take an audit view, you can see that some of what we burn - perhaps a third - is essential to modern quality of life. Making sure people have access to enough nutritious food, and access to semiconductors, satellites and antibiotics. Very hard to replace this stuff, and we're screwed if and when it runs out.

Another third or so is used valuably but inefficiently. Transport and food choices where you'd need to get the job done, but could get it done on a lot less. Heating/cooling large and poorly insulated buildings. People with desk jobs driving trucks for a commute which a hatchback or light motorcycle could do. Beef, so much beef. Can't substitute any of these to zero, but some pretty significant reductions are possible with little more than self-discipline.

And then there's a third that's just sheer waste. The majority of long-haul flights taken add a negligible amount to quality of life or human experience relative to what they burn. Basically everything the super-rich does, their lives are no happier, wiser, longer or better than the just plain rich (or even the upper reaches of the middle-class, in well-off social democratic countries), but their consumption footprints are proportionally huge.

> Oil companies aren't the cause of climate change. The people who burn the oil are.

Also the people who fought tooth and nail against transitioning to oil's natural successor: nuclear power.

Oil companies knew for a fact, from their own research in the 70's, that they were putting the planet on a course to irreversible massive damage.

Their response was to hush that up and initiate a massive Big Tobacco style disinformation campaign.

They are the cause, root and stem.

So whether you're aware of it or not, you're blaming the victim, and covering for an unfathomably evil global-scale crime.

People who drive cars are not victims.

As for oil company research, anybody could do research.

You can also blame the activists for preventing nuclear power generation.

> People who drive cars are not victims.

Sure they are. They're victims of the entities which killed public transport so they could profit more, and the oil companies who lied and funded disinformation about climate change.

> As for oil company research, anybody could do research.

Many have? Even long before the 70s.

That does not absolve oil companies of their crimes. They've spent untold millions promoting doubt for 50+ years, lobbied politicians for subsidies, infiltrated regulatory agencies, targeted activists, smeared alternatives, etc etc, all in full knowledge that they were putting us on a catastrophic course.

> You can also blame the activists for preventing nuclear power generation.

"Activists" are not a monolithic entity. Nuclear isn't perfect either - there's only so much fuel in the world.

Also, I would instantly bet you my life savings that Big Oil money promoted the anti-nuclear campaign.

I think you need to think much, much deeper on this.

And if the oil companies shut down in 1960, what would our economy have run on?

In WW2, the main target of the USAF bombing campaign was the Reich's fuel supply. They were successful, the German war machine ground to a halt from fuel shortages. They did use a lot of horses, but there weren't remotely enough.

The German U-Boot campaign was aimed at cutting Britain off from fuel.

What were the alternatives?

There's a false dilemma if ever there was one.

A better question would be if they had remained at the scale they were at in the 60's (or 70's) while their parent energy companies transitioned into better alternative energy technology earlier one.

The option was there, the dangers were known and the choice was made by executives to FUD their way out of any action other than funding thinks to counter the early climate change findings, to actively work against better public transport in the US, to promote larger and larger vehicles, etc.

Like building roads where traffic expands to fill capacity, society expands to consume available energy .. and those profiting from fossil fuel extraction expanded production rather than pivot towards better sources.

That's pure unfettered capitalism for you - dumb as an ox and making poor decisions at scale for the masses much of the time.

What alternatives were there?

> That's pure unfettered capitalism for you - dumb as an ox and making poor decisions at scale for the masses much of the time.

What do you think the USSR ran on?

You keep asking what the alternatives to covering up imminent planetary destruction with a decades long coordinated campaign are...

The alternative was to come out and say, this is what we found, let's put money into alternatives - solar, hydro, nuclear etc.

How is that not incredibly obvious?

And why is your immediate reaction to being informed of oil companies global atrocity scale actions to defend them, as if you couldn't possibly imagine a single thing they might have done differently?

> What do you think the USSR ran on?

Are you one of those binary thinkers, who think the only alternative to unfettered predatory crony criminal capitalism is full on gulag-style communism? How fascinating.

Remember, we're talking the 1960s. Solar panel technology was not very good. Hydro is nice, but it is economically destructive (which is why in the PNW the dams are being removed). There is also not remotely enough hydro power even if all the rivers were dammed. Nuclear power was not stopped by oil companies, it was stopped by activists.

The Haber-Bosch process converts air to fertilizer, and results in about 1% of global emissions. Eliminating that would quickly cut the population by several billions.

Removing oil (and coal) from the economy in 1960 would have necessitated the population being reduced to 1800 levels. Such a decline would inevitably result in absolutely massive wars, and we all know how environmentally destructive wars are.

As for government run agriculture, the USSR is hardly the only example of its massive failure. Government run agriculture always results in famine.

The idea that our oil reliance is all because of evil oil companies is simply absurd.

P.S. I remember, back in the 1970s oil crisis, there was a lot of talk about the oil companies buying up patents for 200mpg carburetors, and keeping them off the market. I ask my dad about that (career military) and he bust out laughing. He said the military runs on oil (recall my remarks about crippling enemy oil being a goal of all the major combatants). There was no way in hell the military would eschew use of 200mpg patents regardless of any silly patent laws.

Your insistent avoidance of the point* would be alarming and surprising if I expected better.

But I've read your previous four comments, and I don't.

* One more time, just in case it gets through: oil companies covered up their own research and deliberately set the entire planet on a course to self destruction for profit. This is profoundly evil, and if you don't see why there's not much I can do about that.

> oil companies covered up their own research and deliberately set the entire planet on a course to self destruction for profit.

I heard you the first time. Repeating it doesn't make it more compelling, especially since you haven't responded to any of the points I brought up.

> for profit

Show us any non-profit communist economy with a better environmental track record

> I heard you the first time.

Hearing isn't the same as understanding. When someone responds with points that don't really connect to the original argument, it's sensible to repeat yourself in case the other person didn't understand.

You really don't understand how systematically lying about fossil fuel's role in climate change for 50 years makes big oil *directly* responsible? Yikes dude.

> Show us any non-profit communist economy with a better environmental track record

The fact that they lied and committed unthinkable damage to us all for profit doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with communist economies. Your thinking is extraordinarily disjointed. It seems to be built of naughties AM radio talking points that don't all quite fit together.

Such confused thought is a sadly predictable consequence of how big oil's decades of FUD has poisoned the discourse, and warped vulnerable minds.

Buddy they put our species in massive harm's way, just so they could keep profits rolling in. If they weren't tight with our politicians and media they'd be in jail, or worse.

They're the cause of unimaginable suffering already, with far more to come. Stop defending them, for the sake of literally all life on the planet (excepting maybe cockroaches and tardigrades). We have very little time to fight back and save ourselves the worst of it - about 2 years according to most every climate scientist.

> It does nothing to affect the actual conflict, just annoys students who are there to study.

I somewhat agree but there is power in positioning the Overton window even if ultimately you do a poor job of bringing people to your side within it. If you don't have billionaires bankrolling a 24 hour network and can set the editorial themes for you, you have to take other paths.

I also think when people say this, they forget that "if you stuck to the proper channels I still wouldn't care about your issue but I would be less annoyed" isn't exactly a sales pitch.

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