111–120 of 285 posts
I worked for Ogilvy and Mather in the 00s and made the Carbon footprint stuff they mention, at least one version of it. Didn’t come up with the concept or wording, but was responsible for the web implementation in the US.
AMA, I guess
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> People act like oil companies are the ones burning oil. They’re just responding to demand. No, they’re not. > We need to make oil less competitive, with better alternatives. Like tobacco companies, oil companies have actively lied and lobbied to maintain demand and obstruct coordinated effort of exactly the kind you describe as necessary. They are not passive actors simply responding to demand as they find it.
> > People act like oil companies are the ones burning oil. They’re just responding to demand. > No, they’re not. That would be more convincing if you gave a reason why you say "no, they're not". Even better would be evidence.
> > No, they’re not.
> That would be more convincing if you gave a reason why you say "no, they're not". Even better would be evidence.
He did give his reasoning, you just chose not to quote it:
> > Like tobacco companies, oil companies have actively lied and lobbied to maintain demand and obstruct coordinated effort of exactly the kind you describe as necessary. They are not passive actors simply responding to demand as they find it.
And his reasoning was based on propaganda, if oil companies are just passive actors responding to demand, what's the need for such vicious amounts of lobbying and propaganda? My guess is that they're creating the need, and making sure that information and products that go against that propaganda don't become widespread.
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Language is way more powerful than people realize. Changing the language seems to literally change how we think.
While I'm no expert in propaganda, Newsspeak was certainly a major topic in Orwell's 1984. The purpose of Newspeak was solely to build language to control how people think about certain topics [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak#Thought_control
Unsurprisingly, doublethink is very prevalent in online discussion boards, I have observed it in both progressive and conservative spaces.
> Doublethink is a process of indoctrination whereby the subject is expected to simultaneously accept two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in contravention to one's own memories or sense of reality.[1] Doublethink is related to, but differs from, hypocrisy.
An example of this within conservative spaces is demanding freedom, but supporting fascism, such as the instance where the datascientist that reported covid cases from Florida was swatted by the police and had her computers and hardware confiscated.
An example of this within progressive spaces is demanding equality across genders, but at the same time screeching about saving women and children from Afghanistan and sending men to die like pigs to the slaughterhouse. Or, supporting women's education and equality while supporting anachronistic systems found within religions that facilitate subjugation.
Genuine question to all the anti "Big Oil" commenters here: what's your alternative? Let's imagine an alternate history where oil companies hadn't fought against climate change science. What does that alternate universe look like? We have known for years that climate change is real, and yet the vast majority of people simply won't actually change their consumption when push comes to shove. This is the largest, most s…
It has a carbon tax. As to what else happens, the whole point of using a carbon tax rather than some kind of targeted reforms (bike lanes, vegetarianism, solar panels) is because allowing different solutions to compete in the market has been shown throughout history to be more effective in the majority of cases than top-down economic planning. The reason a carbon tax is the best solution is because we don't know exactly what it does. It leaves our options open.
Now, granted, there are a bunch of possible problems with the implementation of a carbon tax. But we rarely get to the point of in-depth discussions about how to implement a carbon tax. Instead, we're held up at the starting gate by pseudoscience, fearmongering, and the fantasy of individual action.
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If you want to frame this in terms of the demand side, then downsizing all of the PR propagandists would be a great start, along with all the other zero sum jobs. Instead of efficiency gains causing people to work less and consume less resources for the same output, central banks insist on "full employment" stimulus that creates make-work jobs to compensate. And despite their utility being zero-sum, these workers are…
I’ve never heard a complete argument as to how central bank policy makes people want new cars, fancy clothes, or big houses (or tropical and ski vacations)… I think people want those luxuries and (many) are willing to work for them entirely independent of central bank policy.
Huh! It’s not every day you see your work called out in The Guardian as “insidious propaganda”! I worked for Ogilvy and Mather in the 00s and made the Carbon footprint stuff they mention, at least one version of it. Didn’t come up with the concept or wording, but was responsible for the web implementation in the US. AMA, I guess
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Do they also have a legal obligation to lie and fund disinformation?
Complete strawman. I never said this. Oil companies/execs should be held accountable for misdeeds. But that is a tiny fraction of the problem facing us. Let's say they came out decades ago and said "hey, there's probably going to be some repercussions for using our products" ... do you really think that would have changed anything? We know right now what needs to be done. And yet Biden is running around pleading with…
Yes. Big oil's lies and disinformation seeded the denialism that took hold in the Republican party decades ago.
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Per TFA and many other sources, "Big Oil" (and many other industries) lobby and market hard to make sure that people misunderstand climate change and lack access to the information required to make climate-friendly purchasing decisions. Your comment is peak victim blaming.
Obviously not true. People have known about climate change for many decades. Every countries media discusses it regularly. Scientists have published countless thousands of open papers about it. You act like we just found out about global warming last week
> You act like we just found out about global warming last week
Humanity isn't a borg mind. Just because science has been increasing its understanding of climate change for decades doesn't mean that the average citizen possesses a climate scientist's understanding. And the carbon industries have worked hard to ensure that laypeople and especially politicians misunderstand.
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Is Big Oil why we can't have affordable, safe, quiet housing in dense cities? Is Big Oil why people like taking planes to Hawaii? Is Big Oil why it's much cheaper to heat with natural gas?
I can’t say definitively for the first one, but for the second one, obviously not. However, lies are bad. Presumably they had a motivation to tell such lies, yes? Presumably they believed that telling such lies were to their benefit? Presumably the mechanism by which they believed telling such lies would be to their benefit would be by influencing the actions of others? Surely you don’t think the reason for the lies…
When was the last time politicians voted for something >55% of their voters didn't want? LBJ and the Civil Rights Act? How did that turn out?
Number 1 shared American value is mass consumerism.
Genuine question to all the anti "Big Oil" commenters here: what's your alternative? Let's imagine an alternate history where oil companies hadn't fought against climate change science. What does that alternate universe look like? We have known for years that climate change is real, and yet the vast majority of people simply won't actually change their consumption when push comes to shove. This is the largest, most s…
Roughly diverges from Carter putting solar panels on the White House and Reagan not taking them off. Other countries follow France in building out nuclear power as a substitute, while investigating how to reduce oil consumption to avoid depending on OPEC. Salter gets more wave power funding. Siemens get started on wind turbines earlier. Basically we end up 10-20 years ahead of current. And the discussion about what t…
It's a well-known story, but it's based on spin* . Carter did not place the solar panels due to belief in climate change. What Carter and his staff did believe in was Peak Oil, and that it would occur in the 1980s. Also, Carter wanted to wean the US off Middle Eastern oil following the 1973 oil embargo and the 1979 oil crisis.
Solar panels were a part of Carter's adaptation effort, but a bigger part was oil shale and coal liquefaction, liquefaction being so incredibly polluting (CCS wasn't even considered at the time) we'd probably be looking at 5C had it been commonplace.
The actual priorities of the Carter effort are easily discoverable for anyone looking at the period:
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/17/archives/environmentalist...
* To be clear, the spin does not come from OP, but from the Democratic spin handler that years later told the solar panels story but without the context which changes the story entirely. It's easy for people to fall into the spin if they don't know the period.