Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed • Hacker News Board

Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#121

Post by mindslight » Thu, Aug 26, 2021, 4:38 PM UTC

lupire wrote: post #37

mindslight wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"full employment" is everyone who is willing and is able to work, not everyone. Also, "full" is defined as something like 96% of people who are willing and able.

I don't see how spelling out their technical definition addresses what I said. Current central bank policy guarantees that most everyone will "want" to be working to keep paying for their dwelling. Sure, technically if they changed the stimulus to basic income that was high enough to make fewer people "want" to work, then "full employment" could be achieved with less human labor. But in practice that's not how the term is used at all, because of the underlying protestant work ethic asserting that work is good for work's sake.

Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#122

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 26, 2021, 4:40 PM UTC

marcusverus wrote: post #104

dragonwriter wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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. These really aren't very similar. Big Tobacco's lies were the only thing propping up the tobacco industry. As soon as the truth became clear, their industry was absolutely crushe…

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Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#123

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Aug 26, 2021, 4:41 PM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #99

pjc50 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was inextricably linked with nuclear weapons; Greenpeace got their start protesting against atom bomb tests in the Pacific, and later against the dumping of radioactive waste in the sea. The pollutants are uniquely permanent, and not enough effort was made to not just contaminate the world. Perhaps the nuclear industry needs to examine why their marketing failed where the oil industry succeeded.

From what I understand, nuclear power was “inextricably linked with nuclear weapons” because it was designed to be that way . From what I hear, it can, and could, relatively easily be designed otherwise, but the powers that be wanted nuclear weapons at the time.

Absolutely; the power generation was almost a side effect of producing plutonium. This also cross funded the projects. Many of the countries with reactors have the bomb (notable exceptions: Canada, Japan, Germany)

Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#124

Post by glogla » Thu, Aug 26, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

Hermitian909 wrote: post #100

A lot of comments here seem to be focusing on the fact that individuals use oil products beyond what is necessary for basic life and in fact do have some personal responsibility. This seems to me to be missing the forest for the trees. Sometimes society ends up in a situation where we need things that are not sustainable, like oil or coal. Producing those unsustainable products to meet the demands of society does not…

Well said.

I will never understand why people protect oil companies. You know how in comic books there's always a villain going trying to DESTROY THE WORLD and it seems unrealistic and over the top?

Oil companies are this villain in the real world. They are doing their best to kill off humanity, for short term profit.

Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#125

Post by uhorb » Thu, Aug 26, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

datawaslost wrote: post #111

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

Oh cool, thank you.

I’ve read that oil companies were well aware of how climate change is going to develop based on their sales volume and the resulting oil consumption.

Assuming that's true for BP. To which detail was the climate change impact communicated to you? Was it an explicit requirement to focus public interest away from BP?

What is your opinion on the article in this post?

Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#126

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 26, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

filoeleven wrote: post #108

dleslie wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an unpopular proposition to state that there exists a collective responsibility to make individual adaptations to combat climate change. I also argued that the lockdown was good for combating climate change, and there are many people who are desperate to leave their bedroom communities, hop in their car, and commute to the downtown office.

> there exists a collective responsibility to make individual adaptations to combat climate change. Individual adaptations do not matter unless they are undertaken collectively. My personal lifestyle changes don’t impact the state of CO2 emissions in any significant way. Leading by example AND talking about it has more impact, but still negligible unless/until enough people do it. Changing incentives, by making produ…

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Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#127

Post by filoeleven » Thu, Aug 26, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

qeternity wrote: post #34

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…

Those CEOs set us back by 50 years in getting people used to the idea that we need to make changes in order to have stability in the future. They manufactured the idea that there was no problem, and therefore the greater resistance to change.

The alternate history looks more like CFCs and the ozone hole, only slower and writ larger. The time it takes to convince most people a) that there is a problem, and b) it will require big changes to address is a very important factor. If the scrambling towards renewables we see now happened in 1980 or even 1990 instead, we’d have more runway before missing some tipping points. It would be more of a behavioral adjustment instead of a crisis.

I don’t just blame the CEOs, I also blame our politicians. They only respond to big donors and public pressure. Without the billions backing the big lie, and with more time to alert people to the problem, public pressure would have won out much earlier—not that it has, yet.

Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#128

Post by rfw300 » Thu, Aug 26, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

datawaslost wrote: post #116

datawaslost wrote: post #111

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

Not my proudest work, but this was pre-Deepwater and BP was honestly putting a lot of new money towards green and renewable projects. At the time, it felt like a step in the right direction.

Do you think it was wrong to do in hindsight?

Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#129

Post by qeternity » Thu, Aug 26, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #57

qeternity wrote: post #34

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…

I'm not sure how any of this would radically change where we are today (not saying it wouldn't be better, just urging some basic PCA here).

Solar was only possibly due to massively unprofitable investment by the Chinese state and cheap labor. Wind costs haven't decreased nearly as much as solar and still suffer from the same problems they did decades ago. Battery technology has been driven by the consumer electronics revolution, which couldn't have been otherwise sped up.

Long story short: I'm not sure that even in a perfect world, that we would be all that different. Fossil fuels were still the cheapest source of energy for many, many decades in a rapid growing global economy. 20 years ahead is certainly a stretch. 10 years would be high case, 5 years base case...in a perfect world.

Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#130

Post by sokoloff » Thu, Aug 26, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

mindslight wrote: post #115

sokoloff wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you, or someone you know, ever alternated between having a high-compensation low-free-time (eg high paid tech job), and low/no-compensation high-free-time (ie funemployment) ? They're two completely different operating modes. In the first mode, every minute of time is valuable so you pay more for convenience (eg restaurant food, same-day shipping), and when you're not working you're willing to spend a lot of mon…

I see the multiple modes, but I think it’s human nature and not central bank policy as being the prime driver of that behavior or of the overall financial treadmill.

On average: People want nice things more than crappy things. Nice things cost money. Getting money requires doing something to create value. Creating value for most people means working at a job. If you want nicer/more things than last year or than your neighbor, you need to increase your income.

The beauty of this system is that individuals can choose to live frugally and opt-out of the race to a significant extent, taking advantage of the equity market’s consistent long-run returns to setup a system where they can work hard for 10-15 years and bank enough to live a frugal life for their lifetime. In that regard central bank’s current easy money policy is very much supportive of the choice of people consuming less than 100% of what they could rather than encouraging 100+% consumption.