Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NY State alleges ExxonMobil knew risks of climate change and defrauded investors

esquire.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 123 posts

Re: NY State alleges ExxonMobil knew risks of climate change and defrauded investors

#91

Post by chiefalchemist »

inlined wrote: post #35
chiefalchemist wrote: post #25

So it's not that they've endangered the public, or maybe even the environment. It's that they deceived shareholders.

I think they’re using an interesting legal strategy here. They can use shareholder fraud to have legal standing to pull them into court, but the case prema facie rests on the acceptance of climate change.

Yes. I agree. It's the Al Capone strategy. But the fact remains, shareholders are more protected than the environment and/or the public.

We're 20 yrs into the 21 century FFS. You'd think we'd woken up already.

Re: NY State alleges ExxonMobil knew risks of climate change and defrauded investors

#92

Post by ThomPete »

spodek wrote: post #46

The sad irony is that the pattern of - knowing the science enough to know they're contributing to others suffering - knowing what might happen with reasonable certainty - but compartmentalizing that awareness internally to avoid acting - hiding it externally - and keeping doing what they were doing describes the reactions of most individuals about climate change.

It's not that simple and my guess is that the AG wont win it (neither do they care to)

Unless it can be demonstrated scientifically that humans are the primary cause of climate change (despite what you hear that causality is not established) I don't think there is any case what so ever unless some weird inconsequential settlement.

Also

A life without fossil fuel is a life most of us don't want to live.

So sure there are drawbacks with using fossil fuels just as there were with using wood or just as there is with dong or other lesser versions of fuel.

But the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. We wouldn't have this conversation if it wasn't for fossil fuel.

Last but not least. This smells of politics, not of justice. NY is trying to push for a much more green profile. So it's likely to do with that probably as an attempt at getting de-blasio nominated (yes politics is that scruppules)

Re: NY State alleges ExxonMobil knew risks of climate change and defrauded investors

#93

Post by thinkcontext »

fromthestart wrote: post #57

>Exxon and other energy companies knew as long ago as 30 years that carbon emissions were becoming perilous to the planet. This is ridiculous. No one knew about climate change 30 years ago. A small number of scientists were aware of the possibility of climate change - it took some 30 years of research, heavily dependent on modeling capability which was only really unlocked in the last decade or so, to come to any sor…

You really should read through Exxons internal documents that have been disclosed as part of this process. They far exceed what you are describing in terms of uncertainty. Not only did they conduct a mini IPCC to evaluate the public science they conducted their own original research. Then based on all of this they drew up operational plans for the effect on their Arctic operations.

Re: NY State alleges ExxonMobil knew risks of climate change and defrauded investors

#94

Post by SturgeonsLaw »

hristov wrote: post #76
positive_future wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Back in the late 80s and early 90s climate change was far from settled thing. I was under the assumption that the basic tennets of climate change were well understood by scientists more than 100 years ago. While the climate models have been developed only recently, enabling more accurate predictions, climate science is centuries old as it relates to understanding human impact on our climate. Climate science was as…

Perhaps i misspoke. By less settles i meant that it was less known about and believed among the average population rather than as a scientific consensus. The relevant discussion here is corporate risk disclosure. If a corporation says it does not need to disclose a known risk because everyone knows about it it has to be something that is really universally known and universally believed to be true. Something like gra…

> believed among the average population

Yes, and 45% of the population believe in ghosts [0], 29% of Americans believe Obama is a Muslim [1] and 40% of Americans believe the Earth is less than 10,000 years old [2], so frankly I put very little stock in what the average Joe thinks these days.

There has been a constant propaganda campaign waged in the media by people who have an interest in maintaining the status quo regarding extractive industries, and a rather large proportion of the population has eaten it all up.

---

[0] http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/ghosttoplines.pdf [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/09... [2] https://www.livescience.com/46123-many-americans-creationist...

Re: NY State alleges ExxonMobil knew risks of climate change and defrauded investors

#95

Post by wisty »

mrosett wrote: post #58

Assume for sake of argument that climate change is catastrophic and that ExxonMobil knew as much. We’re to believe that the real victims here are ExxonMobil’s investors ?

An occasional plot point in fiction is to have some kind of investigator buy a single share in a company to uncover what they're really up to.

If they told investors that climate change was a major threat (as they may have been legally be obliged to?) then that information would have become available to the wider public.

Also, we allow public companies to exist knowing that they will be more open and transparent than private companies. If a private company does something evil, we can knock on the owner's door. You can't do that if it's public. It's a trade-off - we don't hold an owner responsible but there's a requirement for more disclosure. If they're breaking the rules that usually stop public companies turning evil, then it's very clearly a concern.

Re: NY State alleges ExxonMobil knew risks of climate change and defrauded investors

#97

Post by geofft »

throwawayjava wrote: post #55
zaroth wrote: post #13

I’m reminded instantly of the article “Everything Everywhere is Securities Fraud” [1] Oh, look, Matt Levine actually references this case at the top of that article. Unexpected recursion detected. [1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...

Liars who make money on their lies are fraudsters, and fraud needs to have criminal repercussions Yes, LOTS of people lie to make money. Yes, all those people are doing something wrong. And yes, that wrong thing is bad enough for society that we should punish it. "Everything" is not fraud. Telling lies to make money is the definition of fraud. If you think that describes "everything" that happens in the economy... We…

I don't think people are surprised that it is fraud, just that there isn't a better way to prosecute it. If ExxonMobil's board hired a hitman to kill a competitor's CEO, I think people would hope that the response is to prosecute the board for murder and not merely for fraudulently claiming their company is valuable when they were actually relying on destabilizing their competitor. No one's defending the fraud, it just doesn't seem like the most important problem here.

Re: NY State alleges ExxonMobil knew risks of climate change and defrauded investors

#98

Post by ausbah »

perfunctory wrote: post #69

“What we are facing now is a person whose crime dwarfs all of the crimes ever committed in human history. We were unable to find a single law applicable to his crime. So we recommend that the crime of Extinction of Life on Earth be added to international law, and that Rey Diaz be tried under it.” — Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest

For some context, in the novel Rey Diaz tried to hold back a alien invasion by threatening to blow the whole solar system into the sun with nuclear weapons.

Re: NY State alleges ExxonMobil knew risks of climate change and defrauded investors

#99

Post by whenanother »

spodek wrote: post #46

The sad irony is that the pattern of - knowing the science enough to know they're contributing to others suffering - knowing what might happen with reasonable certainty - but compartmentalizing that awareness internally to avoid acting - hiding it externally - and keeping doing what they were doing describes the reactions of most individuals about climate change.

every item should be tax on how much money it would take to revert it back to it’s raw material and remove whatever air pollutants it produced. this is going beyond the carbon tax. such tax revenue can only be used on recycling or funding research on renewable energy or other energy sources like fusion.

Re: NY State alleges ExxonMobil knew risks of climate change and defrauded investors

#100

Post by arnoooooo »

fromthestart wrote: post #57

>Exxon and other energy companies knew as long ago as 30 years that carbon emissions were becoming perilous to the planet. This is ridiculous. No one knew about climate change 30 years ago. A small number of scientists were aware of the possibility of climate change - it took some 30 years of research, heavily dependent on modeling capability which was only really unlocked in the last decade or so, to come to any sor…

Fourier was already warning about climate change in the 19th century.
Post reply on HN