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

theguardian.com

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

#181

Post by qeternity »

deeviant wrote: post #58
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…

> What does that alternate universe look like? Have all the billions of subsidies flow into renewables, battery and electric car tech, instead of oil? Today it's slowly catching up, but we'd be decades ahead if we started decades ago. Nobody is saying it all the fault of "evil CEOs", but it fair to point out evil CEOs and in general evil deeds by corporations.

When people talk about "subsidies" to oil, what they really mean is lower retail taxes for gasoline at the pump.

This isn't for the benefit of oil companies, it's to placate voters, who want to pay less at the pump.

It's not as if the US government is running around dropping truck loads of cash into insanely profitable businesses.

And no, if gasoline had higher taxes, that would not be absorbed by the oil companies. It would be passed on to the consumer just like every increase in oil prices is. Gasoline has a very flat demand curve.

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

#182

Post by slingnow »

glogla wrote: post #124
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.

I see more and more of these types of comments that just go so far out there as to be absurd, and I'm glad they're downvoted.

You have a long way to go to prove that this vague, evil entity called an "oil company" has a will of it's own, and that will is to destroy the world. My guess is that the will of this entity is to make money, and an unfortunate side-effect is that it damages the earths ecosystem.

But then I'm not prone to ridiculous hyperbole.

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

#183

Post by throwaway894345 »

ryan93 wrote: post #145
throwaway894345 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course we both know that it's insufficient that the media and science discuss it if huge swaths of the population distrust those institutions or if they get large amounts of conflicting information via their social networks. > 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 mea…

I actually think everyone understands that dealing with climate change means increasing energy costs substantially. Oil companies wasted money on lobbying. Human nature would have given us the same result

I've never met anyone who could estimate with any degree of certainty how much a given climate policy (e.g., a $15/ton tax on carbon with border adjustments) would affect a given product or service (not even gasoline, which is a straightforward derivative of oil) because supply chains are so opaque. No doubt there are economists and other academics who try to get in the right ballpark, but even then the error margins are enormous and economists account for a minuscule share of voters.

> Human nature would have given us the same result

Lobbying is human nature. Human nature already gave us this result. Banding together to overcome special interests is also human nature. Everything we do is human nature, so this isn't very meaningful. The meaningful question is whether or not we might have implemented carbon pricing by now were it not for corporate lobbying and disinformation campaigns, and I'm thoroughly convinced that the answer is "yes".

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

#184

Post by relax88 »

epistasis wrote: post #156
relax88 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are doing both. Cigarettes are a luxury item. Petroleum products are a requirement for modern life. You could fire all of the corporate PR propagandists and lobbyists on the planet and I doubt it would make a dramatic dent in oil consumption. Couldn’t possibly hurt though!

> Petroleum products are a requirement for modern life. This is the most insidious and false lie that is spread. Right now we are going through a technological revolution in humanity, maybe on the level of the development of agriculture, in how we generate energy. Renewables and storage are often cheaper than fossil fuels at the moment, and they are getting cheaper just like Moore's law describes the densification of…

When I say petroleum products are a requirement for modern life, what I mean is that more than 80% of the energy driving modern society comes from fossil fuels. It probably doesn’t have to be that way, but it is. You definitely can’t say that for cigarettes.

I think that you raise a valid point, but also that you’re far too optimistic about renewables.

The people of HN are indeed very tech focused, and I believe that such optimism about energy transformation with renewables may be more difficult to foster if this forum were called “Engineering and physics news” simply because technologists tend to suffer from the “Law of the hammer” problem.

There are very real engineering challenges with renewables that may very well preclude the kind of dramatic progress you’re referring to. Solar and Wind for example require huge amounts of land, and have a fairly high materials throughput as their lifespan is typically only 15-20 years. All of that effort is spent gathering a diffuse source of energy. There are very real physical limits to how much energy you can gather per square foot, per kg of silica, concrete, or steel.

I think your sentiment is correct about nuclear though, which makes me wonder how much big oil has been funding groups like the Sierra Club et al. who have spent nearly half a decade campaigning against nuclear energy.

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

#185

Post by qeternity »

yyyk wrote: post #141
qeternity wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Improving energy supply methods would have been tough without future knowledge. Reducing energy consumption was however much more doable. For example, the West switched quickly from Incandescent bulbs to CFLs to LEDs in the 2010s. But CFLs was arguably doable in the late 1970s, definitely in the 1990s. We could have had a far earlier CFL transition, saving decades of incandescent bulbs.

> Reducing energy consumption was however much more doable.

This I agree with 100% but is generally not something people have been keen to do. They want to drive more, air condition more, eat more animal protein, fly to more places, etc. The last 80 years of prosperity have been driven by increased consumption. And nobody seems keen to be the generation of "less is more".

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

#186

Post by dredmorbius »

ivankirigin wrote: post #172

Blaming supply or demand when you have an unpriced negative externality doesn't make sense. Tax carbon, and use the funds to pay for decarbonization. We'll get better and cheaper alternatives and carbon sinks. Many quote $100 to $1000/tCO2e. But if we get down to $10, getting to net zero and negative won't break the bank.

Who do you think opposes carbon taxes, why, and how do you think they express that will politically, and by what means of supporting that action?

One of the largely unspoken truths of economics is that wealth is power.

Actually, it was spoken, by Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, but somehow that short, succinct, critical phrase is ignored in favour of a much longer one strung together out of multiple sections over hundreds of pages using what for Smith was not an explanatory mechanism, as it's often portrayed, but of a statement of ignorance, that a cause is unknown.

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

#187

Post by heurisko »

dougmwne wrote: post #165

There is a heck of a lot of this that goes on within the energy and environment community where I have been involved for a decade. Tragedy of the Commons basically means that individual responsibility is a complete dead-end to solve any kind of shared resource issue. We've known this formally within economics for 200 years. Government, law and enforcement is the only solution, whether we're talking a city park or the…

> I should guiltily stop having children

The unintended consequence is that only the conscientious people take themselves out of the gene pool, which is counterproductive.

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

#188

Post by slingnow »

bwha wrote: post #138
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > 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.

Sigh. I mean are people really this unaware of the decades long efforts by oil companies to cover up the truth of what was going on? I'll act in good faith and believe they are. One quick summary by the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-53640382 Choice quotes from above: "... I created a model that showed the Earth would be warming very significantly. And the warming would introduce climatic changes that would be…

I promise you that the reason I drive my car everyday has nothing to do with propaganda from the oil companies in any meaningful way.

I'm 100% certain they covered up the truth, but I have no reason to believe that had everyone known the truth, anyone would have cared beyond hardcore environmentalists.

Most everyone does what's convenient and necessary until otherwise required.

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

#189

Post by throwaway894345 »

arbuge wrote: post #134
throwaway894345 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Consumers don't have access to information they need to make climate-optimal decisions. 2. Oil companies lobby hard to make sure people lack the aforementioned information, specifically downplaying climate change. 3. SUVs are not even a drop in the ocean compared to industrial emissions. You're reaching hard to blame consumers for what is transparently industry's fault. We need to pass carbon pricing and decarboni…

Regarding 1 & 2, I think there's more than enough information out there at this point for anyone to figure out that large SUVs are worse than smaller vehicles or bicycles for the environment, regardless of whatever lobbying is going on by oil companies. Regarding #3, I don't know if your first statement is correct or not, but again it would seem to me that the consumer (industries in this case) would have their own s…

> Regarding 1 & 2, I think there's more than enough information out there at this point for anyone to figure out that large SUVs are worse than smaller vehicles or bicycles for the environment

That's neither disputed nor relevant. If SUVs were replaced with Toyota Corolas overnight, the climate situation would be negligibly better.

> it would seem to me that the consumer (industries in this case) would have their own share of responsibility, not just the oil & gas companies supplying them.

Oil and gas companies are faulted for obstructing efforts to change the status quo (lobbying and disinformation campaigns), not for supplying energy to their consumers.

Most importantly, we need to pass carbon pricing legislation (with border adjustments) so that consumers at every point in the supply chain can reason effectively about (and share incentives which are aligned with) the environment. Here's a site that makes it trivial to write your legislator: https://citizensclimatelobby.org/house/

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

#190

Post by nicoburns »

troyvit wrote: post #179
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…

That's totally true, but it's also true that if we reined in consumption, altered our habits and focused on reusing more then we are doing two things. First, we're taking ownership for our responsibility in this whole mess (acknowledging that there are trees in this forest), and second we're hurting oil companies where it counts. If we don't consume they can't supply. If we wait for our governments to hold them to ac…

If we pushed up the cost of that consumption I'd be willing to bet we'd see it magically reduce.
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