Documents add to evidence in climate deception case against ExxonMobil
insideclimatenews.org
insideclimatenews.org
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.
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...
The above paper even has its own Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_Equilibrium_of_the_Atm...
[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.
These works were referenced in my complex dynamics classes of the early 1980s, along with other geodetic works on magnetic and gravitational fields, tides, etc.
That's rhetorical, obviously. The answer is absolutely nobody because money is the best insulator there is.
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”.
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?
Don’t kill Exxon and let Shell operate.
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 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…”
What if they did so purposefully to undercut funding for crack rehab, with the express purpose to keep people addicted?
> 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…”
It's because the topic is an existential threat to human survival that the company was knowingly worsening and manipulating people about. It's not "a standard we don't hold companies to in general", it's an unprecedented scale of harm. At some point the small claims court isn't enough, no matter how commonly it is used. Sometimes the infraction calls for the Nuremberg Trials instead.
An existential threat to human survival demands action to stop all of them not selectively or preferentially only the ones who knew a little more than others 38 years ago.
Doing the latter is not only nearly totally ineffective (as they’d be instantly replaced by others taking market share) but also ensures that companies take great pains to never do in-house research on things that might be harmful.
I've already agreed, yes, we need to obviously ban the practice of fuel extraction itself. But we also need to punish the organizations that have led us here and who's impunity set the precedent for the others to follow.
The fact they've been knowingly misleading us because they prioritized their profits over human survival needs to be addressed on top of the banning of future extraction.
These are not two mutually conflicting policies we need to choose from. We can and should address both.
> companies take great pains to never do in-house research on things that might be harmful
This is counter to how companies work, they are driven by market forces to do research to maintain their edge over the competition - they structurally need to do research because of what it can tell them about future market conditions, regulatory and attitude shifts etc etc so they can adapt their own practices. This is true for companies in harmful industries just as much as for any other. You can't just not do R&D in a competitive market.
You can then even truthfully claim to be funding basic research that doesn’t directly benefit your commercial interests.
I don't see why the same can't apply here.
They could also sue in civil court. A director lying harms the company which is breach of fiduciary duty.
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.
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.
Corporations are made of people :-)
(Also: I agree.)
It's really important uphold the law, but nothing really happens if the collective attitude won't change.
When were the times when people didn’t outsource the critical thinking to others?
Remember what is need not necessarily continue being so.
Literally no human progress has been based on 'we should be better'. It's been based on exploiting bugs in the human firmware to achieve some result. See: organized religion, the city-state, democracy, etc ...
Individual people can be rational and morally driven. People as a general population cannot.
Every time a home isn’t built in Berkeley, SF, or Oakland a car in Vacaville or Stockton gets its wings.
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.
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.”
I fear the Children of Men style future we're stepping into.
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.
A 401k that market weights is not the same as an executive actively lying.
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.
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.
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.
Imagine if money couldn't protect you from the consequences of your choices.
The absolute horror.
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.
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.
Doesn‘t Texas still have the death penalty?
1+1=…
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?
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 all you have is vibes, then it's a pretty legitimate question.
>Public health, frequency, scale of impact (more often, who is impacted that has resources to compete in court) et al are all considerations.
That's exactly not how the legal system is supposed to work. Bending the rules just because some defendant is particularly unsympathetic is exactly how you get politically motivated prosecutions and kangaroo courts.
It is. This is a misunderstanding of how justice works. People (judges, juries, et al) determine the impact of situations, not machines following abstract rules.
Which is a bad premise, because despite how much "russian troll farms" (and now "chinese AI troll farms") is bandied around in the media, it's entirely unclear how big their impact is, if any.
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
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.
PS: I like the way you think :D
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.
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.
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.
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.
Somebody could decide retroactively that you circling a parking lot to find a better spot knowing you release CO2 was unjustified and you need to be punished. These lawsuits are exactly that - arbitrary petsonalistic extortion.
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.
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.
Oil and gas companies strongly lobby for Republicans they know will remove any incentive for them to need to worry about the environment.
I would not celebrate this work, it's typical corporate boss-pleasing. It's not some exhortation towards clean energy.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Another good idea would be to mandate working from home for everyone that reasonably can do so. During Covid I've only measured about 300ppm as the bottom baseline, while nowadays I do not measure lower than 400ppm. (Co2 measuring devices are fairly cheap and good to have in your office, as high Co2 affects your ability to think clearly. Without opening a window and having just one person inside Co2 easily climbs to about 3000ppm within a few hours just from your breathing.)
The idea that we can lock up land, forever, planted in trees to offset our consumption is blissfully naive
In New Zealand large swatches of land are being taken out of production, for a onetime big payment
It neglects two things:
1. Trees burn. Forests left untended for years choke with fuel and then catastrophically burn releasing all that carbon
2. We need the land. Future generations, this generation in a few years, will not be sympathetic to the vast swatches of unproductive land (that due to 1. above create costs)
We must stop producing carbon. It will mean many obscenely rich will be downgraded to wealthy. And the prospect of that is enough to burn the world
Carbon capture is physically unable to be as effective as we need it to be. To an approximation, growing a tree is able to capture as much carbon as burning the wood from that tree. If most of our released carbon came from burning wood, we would just need to re-grow that amount of wood (unfortunately it's not even that simple, as the soil stores carbon long term in a way that just growing the tree doesn't capture, and is also released over time when old growth forests are cut down). Instead, the carbon we're burning comes from processes which efficiently concentrated the carbon from plants and microorganisms over millions of years to create coal, oil, and gas.
Carbon capture technology would have to artificially replicate these millions-of-years-long processes, and do it on a scale of years to decades. The scale of carbon capture we need is entirely unfathomable, requiring processes that don't exist, because they have to work against entropy itself.
Carbon capture at the point of burning fossil fuels to abate further emissions might be economical. Capturing already released carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (concentration of ~0.04%) is a fiction pushed by fossil fuel companies to muddy the debate and distract from the urgency of immediately stopping the burning of fossil fuels.
I think it's more productive to not entertain wild fantasies and be realistic about what can be done.
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
Emissions displacement is healthier for where humans actually live, but they do also reduce emissions over their lifetime. you and others can work on improving that further at the other parts of the stack
Thanks for the tip on what to work on. You too can work on other parts of the stack. And you can even improve the "vehicle" end of the stack, to which it sounds like you confine your actions, by moving around less, and when moving around, not hauling one or two tons of "car" with you. This can be accomplished by, for example, moving close to work (or only working close to home), living only in areas with good public transit, and/or bicycling everywhere -- all of which I did for 30 years, so I know it's possible. (edit: saved a bunch of money too)
Solar panels are now vastly cheaper and more effective than they were even a few years ago. Replacing the whole US grid won't happen overnight, but once the government is actually expending effort to move in that direction, rather than clawing in the other direction by its fingernails, it will move fairly quickly.
> I can’t speak for, say, lobbying efforts.
Even easier to deceive yourself if you blind both eyes.
> collective “good”
Privatized gains, public losses. Surely this is known to you? Compare this to how Norway distributed its bounties.
The US and Exxon could have been a leader of the green transition starting in the 1970's, when everyone figured this out. With a few things breaking differently, we would have been.
We'd have had the absolute edge on the solar/battery transition.
Instead, precisely because of decades of deceptive lobbying, deindustrialization, bribes, and outright crimes, we're coasting far behind China's industrial policies.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Incidentally, the magical carbon capture that they like to research is what would let them continue their business forever unaltered!
Which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, if it was really possible!
But, as it turns out, carbon capture anywhere close to the scale they blather about is a fever dream, and they know it well.
But yes, let's celebrate them, heck lets make them saint!!!
> research into carbon capture and other mitigations a top corporate priority
Do you have evidence? Evidence in the OP says otherwise:
"The documents include some statements which, according to the attorney general’s office, show Exxon knew that technology was also unlikely to present a scalable solution to cutting emissions.
A 2014 presentation on Exxon’s carbon capture portfolio included a slide listing challenges to reaching commercial scale. It noted widespread deployment would require a “massive investment” and an eventual storage rate “comparable to current oil and gas production.” It said costs were high and there were no market-based incentives."
Also, where are the results from this top priority of some of the largest companies in the world, with all these good-natured earnest scientists working on it?
"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 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.
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.
Every poll I’ve seen has that at around 25-35%.
It’s so basic
They got in this mess not because they made bad products that kill people. That’s actually fine, no politician in the US cares about that. No, they got into this mess because they spend decades covering up the truth and trying to convince consumers “see, it’s not that bad!”
Now that’s a problem. If the product just killed people we could sit around and play the “free will” game. “Well you see consumers can choose to kill themselves!” But that game goes out the window when we pollute free will with deception.
What free will actually looks like is a price that reflects the actual cost of the product, as well as labels that make it clear “this will kill you”. Turns out, when we do that, a lot less people choose to consume the product.
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?
Truly damning stuff.
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.
What an amazing achievement for the liberation of everyone.
The oil companies should have shifted innovation and R&D to cleaner alternatives decades ago. When they had the capital and political sway. That would have ensured their long-term profits.
But they didn’t, because they figure doing the same thing forever will just work. It won’t, of course, and now they’re paying the cost.
The ultimate irony is that this isn’t even because of climate change. Even if climate change didn’t exist, this would happen. Already greener alternatives are getting cheaper and cheaper, and soon it will make zero economic sense to be a petroleum company. Like the coal companies before them.
And now, it’s too late. With each passing day the oil giants lose foothold, and now they don’t have the runway to pivot even if they wanted to. If they started in the 70s with the energy crisis, they would be more profitable today than ever. They would have ensured their place in the modern changing world. But they didn’t, and now they will die a slow death. Not because of climate change, but because of the nature of the free market.
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.
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.
https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-poca...
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...
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.
It's also not just influencers, it's scientists and the leadership of scientific institutions directly, too.
"If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late."
- Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [August 19th, 2008]
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-economist-debat...
"We cannot now afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world."
- James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies [January 17th, 2009]
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/18/obama-cl...
Unfortunately there's some truth to it, especially in the mass media age. We have a President who became the most powerful person on Earth by more or less eating his own boogers, because it got attention, and "any attention is good attention as long as they spell your name right." It works, unfortunately.
But it's damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you crank up the hyperbole you discredit yourself. If you don't, you're ignored. Rational measured opinions get no press and have no "virality."
Some of the AI doomers are, I think, genuinely kind of nuts (the Rationalists), but I suspect that some of them (especially actual scientists like Hinton) are doing this. They think if they don't make bombastic claims nobody will listen.
Unfortunately it means everyone will dismiss the entire issue when, in a few years, AI has not destroyed humanity.
They're saying that unless we stop our behavior in the next X years then it will be too late. We will have added so much to the system that it will "run away". This will eventually lead to the environment being inhospitable to our ways of life. Most dates ive read are 2075 or so. That's not 5 years.
They are not saying that life will end in 5 years.
This is a purposeful misinterpretation so that the reader doesn't have to listen. It allows the reader to scoff and go about their excess.
This interpretation was pushed, very purposefully, to accomplish apathy and complacency in the general public.
But back on tbe point, nobody really ever said "humanity is OVER in 5 years if we don't stop". What has consistently been said is "we are changing our environment and it will eventually change in ways that won't support our life" with various dates, usually 50+ years, given.
There is no such thing as a right to a comfortable outdoor temperature in the geographic environment of your choice.
This was true even before we started burning coal, it's true now, and it will still be true even after we hit net zero carbon emissions, and even after all of the CO2 dissipates.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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".
"Please don't turn away from oil now that its geopolitical risks are so plain to see."
> Sprow then laid out an agenda for how to achieve those ends.
> With modeling critical to climate science, he wrote, “it could be considered important to be at the forefront of this modeling effort.” Sprow proposed “supporting a person on staff at one of the leading modeling centers (e.g. Princeton) or by sending one of our people to work in such a center.”
The picture this article paints of academia seems pretty bleak to me as a layperson. I thought shady science by corps just meant publishing a few bad faith studies and pushing them hard in media, but apparently it's possible to do "incentive-driven science" in a fashion that lets you sow seeds that can influence decades of downstream research.
I would hope that the framework of science itself has guardrails to prevent these efforts from obscuring more globally relevant results in favor of "technically true" pieces that do everything the right way but are badly motivated and omit methodologies which lead to undesirable results. For people who have experience in this area - how much critical thinking do you need when reading papers on climate research? Can the research be good enough by itself on merit, or is any opinion incomplete without evaluating the journal, affiliation of the authors, funding sources, etc.?
* 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:
Of course they new. Even if we exclude what Joseph Fourier (in 1824) [1] and Svante Arrhenius (in 1896) [2] wrote about carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect, after [3] in 1967 and [4] in 1979, everybody who followed this branch of science, knew.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Fourier#Discovery_of_th...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_ef...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_Equilibrium_of_the_Atm...
Fortunately for Exxon the $100B is mostly externalities that do not affect the bottom line.
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.
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.
This is a "fork found in kitchen" sort of discovery.
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).
Essentially renewables and other eco-friendly initiatives are being adopted globally for economic reasons rather than that of concern about "climate change".
It's just a question of if they are being adopted fast enough.
The "other side's" position is basically yes — the strong version being that there's no real hurry to begin with, the weaker position that even if there is some damage being done, it is survivable (probably my position ultimately presently, as we see some tangible environmental harms being done but are still here).
HN's position I gather is "no", and they want to see more done in an eco-friendly direction above what seems to be naturally adopted for economic reasons, but there may not be a consensus on what pace is needed exactly. "Degrowthers" go a step further in arguing much more dramatic action is needed to avert environmental problems.
So it's really a question of if the rate of more "eco-friendly change", being driven mainly by economics, is sufficient currently, or if those changes should be sped up and to what degree.
As perhaps a further way to sidestep this discussion, we might entirely focus on what ways to speed up the adoption of "eco-friendly" initiatives that are economically viable, which seems like a "win-win" for everyone.
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.
This comment nailed how to respond to comments about trees being a solution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50045613 (and many sibling comments in the context)
Another one with reference to a book about this by scientists: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50044917
Solar in Sweden produce on average single digit percent during the worst months, while energy consumption doubles. This is the background why they define thermal power plant as necessary to enable renewable energy.
If the strategy is to build thermal power plants to enable renewables, then nuclear seems like a better option. If it does not need thermal power plants, then renewables and batteries are cheaper, safer, and better in basically every way. The "Fossil fuel people disguised as" can surely be both advocates for renewable and nuclear, but one of the most clear example we have was when Germany forced through EU regulations that defined natural gas as green. It does not get more clean cut than that, except maybe when the Swedish green party leader defended an oil power plant during a political debate and called it a "natural part" of the Swedish energy strategy.
There is a new thermal power plant being built in south of Sweden, built with support from local government which the green is part of, and guess what technology they are combining it with? CCS! The carbon they capture will then be sent to Norwegian oil wells, and they have said they will try really hard to use electric trucks for it.
This release, Epstein files, Panama papers, etc.
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.
Political discourse is a non starter here and everyone will continue to work for abusive companies. Gotta pay for those vacations.
What do you think is one tech deployment today that can help start to mitigate climate change?
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?
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.
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.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr
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.
Consumer spending habits enact change.
Stop giving up.