It’s truly exhausting to know the damage we’ve done to the ecosystem and how many bad actors only concerned with profit are out there preventing it from happening again.
That's a massive amount of money that could have went to paying shareholders, and that's why they don't want it happening again.
Related, but the American gov recently invaded a country to take its oil while simultaneously shutting down funding for green energy projects. Exhausting.
So no longer own oil tankers and instead each ship is owned by its own LLC so just that piece goes down and the liability gets capped to its insurance contract.
Do you know that BP wasn’t the company that spilled? LLCs don’t let you shirk responsibility like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill
But the effect is that oil companies just manage the logistics of the ships and don’t own/operate them themselves.
Ex. BP founded an entity to manage all the ships they were acquiring and later sold all the ships off to avoid liability.
"In September 2014, a US district court judge ruled that BP was primarily responsible for the oil spill because of its gross negligence and reckless conduct."
But my comment was related to parties that break their empire into little bits to avoid responsibility. And yes, the corporate veil can be pierced. No, that happens so rarely that it hardly matters.
Yet you’re sitting here pretending to be outraged that people forming LLCs are related to this.
Well in this case the consequence is "we are destroying the conditions of our own survival". Open question is whether an advanced industrial civilisation can survive at all.
"Everything applies to the others, except for the one thing that makes it different". When it is "EXACTLY the same, EXCEPT for", it means it is not, actually, the same.
Did you just learn to read or something?
"All but one thing is the same" != "It is literally the same"
The effect of all life forms on their environment were described, and then ‘omg’ as if humans were somehow unique in this.
The dominant form of life on the planet is starting to have a dominant effect is unsurprising.
Entropy also exists. Entropy is far from unique to humans.
Notably, the population problem appears to be starting to self correct, but that may change with differences in ideaology.
For anyone that has raised animals or spent much time in nature, it’s clear humans are relatively low impact and pretty clean per human.
The issue is the sheer numbers.
Humans are obviously unique in that they totally dominate all the effects that could keep their activity under control. At the scale of the whole planet, i.e. at the scale of most species.
> For anyone that has raised animals or spent much time in nature, it’s clear humans are relatively low impact and pretty clean per human.
What the hell does that mean? Are you saying that "humans destroying the conditions of life for most species on Earth" is okay, because humans are clean enough to shower everyday? "Dirty, dirty horses, they never clean their teeth!"
I honestly don't have a clue what the hell you are trying to say. That each species takes as much space as it can? Sure. And the ecosystem being in balance means that they can't get to the point where they destroy it. Humans are unique in the sense that they have reached the point where they can (and are) destroy most species (including themselves).
There were a few mass extinctions in the history of Earth. We are measurably living in one. It's the first one that is caused by a species. So yeah, OBVIOUSLY humans are unique in this.
Fucking read, Jesus.
Further reading - carbonaceous period. Jurassic period. Etc. etc.
We are getting better at this. Time will tell if we are getting better at it fast enough. Ask someone in 2126.
And no I don’t think we will be dead, but if we do too much damage the world may be severely degraded and they might be quite angry at previous generations for basically leaving them with the bill.
How no?
You're welcome to react to my comments as you see fit!
(some countries could be mentioned multiple times)
(some people will want to argue if all of these were true military invasions. fine, then let's call some of them CIA coups, soft-power takeovers, planned regime changes etc.)
(tried to contain this list to instances were it was about oil, remove the oil and the list would get a loooot longer)
“Oh, but there are other bad actors doing things” is not a counterpoint. That’s the same as claiming a government can’t work by pointing to a different failed policy every time someone points how how a policy failure was corrected.
That's more than their current market cap ($127B), and the stock price right now is not that far from where it was just before the spill ($49 now, around $59 just prior to the spill).
I'm just curious how that was accomplished, given that it would not have been a great time for them to be borrowing or issuing new shares, for obvious reasons. Maybe if it was spread out over like 10 years it could be more doable, but still that seems like a lot.
Sold a bunch of assets to raise funds (about 38b apparently), cut the dividend, borrowed the remaining (you'd think after such an event it's 'hard' to raise capital but in reality BP has a great financial record and there's a chance they had prior agreements in place) and then spread cost out over ~10 years.
Humans may all die, but the planet was here before we were, and will continue to be here long after we're gone. We should be better stewards, sure.
He explained that the pollution is awful, but the metals extracted also electrified and connected the US.
He said we can both accept that it was a worthwhile trade, while also paying the bill to remediate the damage now.
We were discussing new lithium mines and he said similar tradeoffs exist today, but we have much more knowledge and technology to mitigate the downside.
If you checked the share price via Google Finance, it's off by 2x. The share price on April 19, 2010 (a day before the disaster) was $59.48, not >$100. Google Finance is erroneously reporting the price.
So the people living outside of cities that commute because they can't afford to live there, will now pay that additional tax.
Edit: want to add the sprawl also makes efficient mass public transportation nearly impossible.
People like fast, on-demand transportation they're in control of. The answer is electric vehicles.
Some places like Ethiopia have simply switched to EVs by encouraging their import and discouraging import of non-EVs. Now, most vehicles there are EVs.
It is often a huge increase in a family’s quality of life once one of them saves enough to get a motorbike or ebike.
Cars are literally an econ 101 textbook example of negative externalities.
Two-wheel vehicles are much more reasonable in all ways, I’m not arguing against them (although two-stroke ICEs are definitely terrible things).
Not enough stakeholders are terrified enough.
If the upside is profit and the maximum downside is losing money, corporations will happily rape the Earth.
The system is working as designed.
But the real danger is that we have given certain members of our species superhuman abilities to unilaterally make decisions, where these then go on to cause harm on a scale that would never be possible as just 1% of our species operating within the scope of what 1% of our species can reach with their two hands. We've creating living gods essentially. We've even created nonliving gods: pools of capital people are beholden to grow that they themselves do not even own or control, but are enslaved to them nonetheless. Decisions are what is good for the nonliving god: what grows the money pile in the quarterly time frame, not what is good for our species or even what is truly individually good for the people believing themselves to have any control over these pools of capital.
Build a bunch of drones that carry explosives and leave them outside chemical plants, refineries, and nuclear plants across the world and then launch a simultaneous attack on infrastructure.
Budget $1000-$2000 per drone and then whatever your costs of transportation for the road trip are.
To get people off of fossil fuels, remove oil subsidizes and tax fossil fuels a lot. Otherwise moving to renewals will take a very long time.
And yes, we can put up solar panels on your house, but that cost $ which people do not have. Solar Panels should be subsidized in an easy manner for people to get funds for installation.
Seems like you believe the current system is not conducive to clean/sustainable infrastructure, but the world I think you want is actually the one we're already in.
We’re plopping down enormous grid scale batteries like it’s Sim City.
Electricity in the middle of the day is free!
Even still, fossil fuel revenues dwarf renewables by ×3-6.
Because most people don't want to know. Cognitive dissonance keeps many people from realizing the inconvenient truth that modern life requires accidents like this. We have stats or projections about how many people earth can support, but none about how many people it can sustainably support. People want their plastic items and cars to be cheap, even if it results in occasional accidents of this scale (not to mention the minor accidents that occur frequently and don't make the news).
This is a completely baseless claim. It is entirely possible to have both a technologically advanced civilization and simultaneously one that doesn't have catastrophic industrial mistakes like this.
Perhaps the costs of an accident should be increased to the point that it makes sense to have the oversight.
It's true, you can't ever ensure 0 accidents. But you can do things to reduce the rate of accidents and try to limit the peripheral impact of the ones that remain.
Not the cost of an accident, but the cost of preventing them. The cost to consumers is something people wouldn't tolerate.