So, who will go to jail?
That's rhetorical, obviously. The answer is absolutely nobody because money is the best insulator there is.
That's rhetorical, obviously. The answer is absolutely nobody because money is the best insulator there is.
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
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'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.
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.
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.
PS: I like the way you think :D
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=…
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.)
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.
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.