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ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists

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Re: ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists

#51

Post by triceratops »

goatlover wrote: post #50
triceratops wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That doesn't excuse covering up the science and the need to transition either That's what we're calling sociopathic behavior. Not drilling oil and gas.

I'd call the socipathic behavior trading a billion lives for a trillion dollars, but that's just something the parent came up with. What's the actual tradeoff, what sort of transition could have happened by now, to what extent was the rest of the scientific community aware of greenhouse gases, would a lot more nuclear power plants being built have been seen as better by the public?

> trading a billion lives for a trillion dollars

Which they did by covering up the problem.

> what sort of transition could have happened by now

More renewables and batteries, more electric vehicles, more public transit, high-speed rail, cheaper and safer nuclear.

Re: ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists

#52

Post by [deleted] »

jl6 wrote: post #39
maeil wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are essentially all complicit Empty statement that shirks responsibility when some are complicit orders of magnitudes more than others. Even among those not directly involved in fossil fuel industries. This matters. In Nazi Germany, someone working at a screw factory, some of whose screws ended up in military devices, was also complicit. Yet the morality is clear - they weren't sent to Nuremberg whereas others w…

Where do you think Exxon sits on the giving-orders to just-following-orders to just-making-screws spectrum? And where do people buying oil products sit?

[deleted]

Re: ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists

#53

Post by immibis »

christophilus wrote: post #11
immibis wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Would you? If you knew your actions would kill a billion people, you’d still do it for $1T?

Recent political events have proven that if I wouldn't, someone else would do it anyway, and then I'd have the disadvantage of not being them. The world is significantly more atomized than I'd like; you can either play the game that everyone else is playing, or forfeit by default.

Re: ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists

#54

Post by immibis »

Bluestrike2 wrote: post #20
NegativeLatency wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they knew about impacts of climate change in the 70s https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-... Reminds me of how I see executives manage to “fail upward”, where it’s just so clear the people pulling the strings don’t give a darn about workers or the population at large.

Or that they just weren't very good business people. Their understanding of climate change back then was good enough to have a damned decent roadmap for how things were going to play out over the next fifty years. They were capable of projecting what was going to happen, the likely regulatory changes that wold be needed to mitigate climate change, and how that would affect them. One would expect the average CEO would…

> Being able to rebrand yourself as the company that chose to sacrifice itself to save the world buys you a hell of a lot of goodwill you can leverage for subsidies in Washington. We’d have paid them for it and thanked them for the privilege.

This seems to be incorrect. Given my estimation of the current political climate, if you sacrifice yourself to save the world, you will be dead and then someone else will destroy the world anyway while you're not there to stop them.

When was the last time the government paid someone to save the world?

Re: ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists

#55

Post by mmooss »

holmesworcester wrote: post #10

My organization Fight for the Future was targeted by the same hacking-for-hire operation while working on net neutrality protections. It was really interesting because at the time the conclusion of our security consultants was that the attack was just random commercially-motivated prospecting. Then the Citizen Lab Dark Basin report came out years later and it was clear they were after our internal comms, so they coul…

> Yikes.

That's a common response these days and while I empathize, I think it's wrong. The right response IMHO is, essentially, 'fuck them; they can't stop us'.

A Soviet dissident (I don't recall the name atm) advised not talking about your arrest, torture, detention - the horrors, the fear, etc. That's what the oppressors want you to do, to spread fear and intimidation to all the people they didn't arrest; that's half the point of their actions - they don't have the resources to arrest everyone. If you don't talk about it, it's a forgotten moment of one small point in time and space. It's the echoes of it, of people repeating the story, that spread across orders of magnitude more time and space. Don't spread it around and you've disarmed your oppressors.

Also, look at contemporary political movements: The overwhelmingly successful one is barely slowed by attacks, never expresses any fear or intimidation, is always on the offensive. The flailing one is regularly talking about its terror, despair, whether or not there is any hope at all, and quitting.

There's a time and place to talk about your fears - privately, to your trusted confidants (and not to those who depend on you for leadership). Everyone has them; that's fine. Out in public is not the place; that's where you show that you can manage your fears and are resolute, undeterred, unshaken. Think of great leaders - Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, etc. - who ever said 'Yikes'? On social media, we all are leaders.

Re: ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists

#56

Post by goatlover »

triceratops wrote: post #51
goatlover wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd call the socipathic behavior trading a billion lives for a trillion dollars, but that's just something the parent came up with. What's the actual tradeoff, what sort of transition could have happened by now, to what extent was the rest of the scientific community aware of greenhouse gases, would a lot more nuclear power plants being built have been seen as better by the public?

> trading a billion lives for a trillion dollars Which they did by covering up the problem. > what sort of transition could have happened by now More renewables and batteries, more electric vehicles, more public transit, high-speed rail, cheaper and safer nuclear.

They did? I missed the part where a billion people are dead. Last I checked, the population is still going up. I asked if there were any climate models making such a prediction.

Re: ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists

#57

Post by gdjskshh »

sofixa wrote: post #3

This kind of actions (alongside Chevron's treatment of Danziger for his work against their pollution in Ecuador) is why: * high level executives must have personal responsibility. They get paid the big bucks, they should get all the responsibility that comes with it. Jail a few of the egregious human rights abusers/negligent killers, and this kind of thing will be taken seriously. Why does a Muillenburg get to walk a…

CEOs can be held accountable, look at the former CEO of United Health.

A functional legal system would be better, but as they say, nature finds a way.

Re: ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists

#58

Post by Teever »

michaelt wrote: post #38
tmpz22 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any reason you can’t dump an air gapped archive and put it on a physical device in a deposit box? Best of both worlds should you truly need to access it. Or are depositions also a concern? Funny enough I just did a business law presentation on Comcast Corp v FCC (2010). Thanks for doing what you could for Net Neutrality

Nah, the value of having access to 3-month-old e-mails is that they're indexed in gmail, so if someone asks how much we paid for that widget 18 months ago you can get the original quotes in an instant. Whereas if the data is in a bank vault, you ask the same question and the reply is "IDK, I think it was about $50-100?"

Surely there's a middle ground for these things.

The value in old data isn't just in pulling up a single piece of information like a magician pulls a rabbit out of their hat, it's tremendously useful for looking back and seeing how an organization and its methodology has changed and how that information can be applied to future project.

Re: ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists

#59

Post by triceratops »

goatlover wrote: post #56
triceratops wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> trading a billion lives for a trillion dollars Which they did by covering up the problem. > what sort of transition could have happened by now More renewables and batteries, more electric vehicles, more public transit, high-speed rail, cheaper and safer nuclear.

They did? I missed the part where a billion people are dead. Last I checked, the population is still going up. I asked if there were any climate models making such a prediction.

> At least 3.3 billion people, about 40% of the world population, now fall into the most serious category of "highly vulnerable", with the worst effects in the developing world.[35] If emissions continue on their current path, Africa will lose 30% of its maize cultivation territory and 50% of its land cultivated for beans. One billion people face flooding due to sea level rise.[34] Climate change, together with other factors, also increases the risk of infectious diseases outbreaks like the COVID-19 pandemic. The report also cites evidence that China will pay the highest financial cost if the temperature continue to rise. The impacts will include food insecurity, water scarcity, flooding, especially in coastal areas where most of the population lives due to higher than average sea level rise, and more powerful cyclones. At some point part of the country may face wet-bulb temperatures higher than humans and other mammals can tolerate more than six hours

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Sixth_Assessment_Report#I...

Plus however many lives could be lost due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_migration

Re: ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists

#60

Post by michaelt »

Teever wrote: post #58
michaelt wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, the value of having access to 3-month-old e-mails is that they're indexed in gmail, so if someone asks how much we paid for that widget 18 months ago you can get the original quotes in an instant. Whereas if the data is in a bank vault, you ask the same question and the reply is "IDK, I think it was about $50-100?"

Surely there's a middle ground for these things. The value in old data isn't just in pulling up a single piece of information like a magician pulls a rabbit out of their hat, it's tremendously useful for looking back and seeing how an organization and its methodology has changed and how that information can be applied to future project.

I see it as less about pulling up a single piece of information

and more that a tool that every employee uses a dozen times a day

produces much more value than the same tool if it's used only by the big boss, and only once or twice a year as it's so inconvenient to use

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