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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

#141

Post by yyyk »

qeternity wrote: post #129
pjc50 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#142

Post by arbuge »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #56
arbuge wrote: post #46

Blaming climate change on the "greed" of oil companies seems to me just a way to avoid taking personal responsibility for one's own choices as a consumer. You really can't drive a massive SUV where a smaller vehicle or even a bike might work perfectly well and then yell at Exxon about their greed.

And you can't ride a bicycle or train where the infrastructure doesn't exist because of pro-car lobbying by the oil companies, and then yell at individuals about their 'personal responsibility'.

I'm going to hazard a wild guess here that there's a lot more pro-car lobbying going on by the car companies than there is by the oil companies.

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

#143

Post by namanyayg »

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.

Big oil downvoted this.

Jokes aside, I really don't see the reason for downvotes. Oil made our world what it is; but any company who still focuses on its profits while knowing alternatives exist that are better for the planet, and parallelly spending billions in PR, is downright evil.

I'd even say it's much more evil than Facebook's or Google's privacy issues that HN bashes every week.

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

#144

Post by TomAbel »

Controversial thought(not my opinion)

Fossil fuels are good for the world, The reason we used them was because we did not have any real alternative at the time. For the vast majority of history, people were dirt poor. By utilizing fossil fuels we were able to lift billions of people out of poverty.

Think about it, you cant really run an industrialized economy on 100% reneable energy.

Wind and solar are variable energy sources the more we add to the grid the more storage you have use to balance it out.

Hydro(which has its own environmental problems) and geothermal are constrained to certain regions which have favourable geography.

Fossil fuels are literally stored energy that you can stockpile and use when you want to.

We talk about replacing plastic but plastic is one of the greatest materials we ever made(its waterproof, light, flexible, we can shape it into any form and its cheap so it is accessible) just think about all the food we buy at the supermarket most of it is stored in some form plastic to keep it fresh( not talk about things it does not make sense to store in plastic ie fruit that's just silly/wasteful)

Our modern world is built with cement just look around it is everywhere, we use asphalt to build our roads and steel to build means of transport ships, trains, cars etc

We talk about decarbonization but some countries have not even really carbonized to grow their economy to what could be considered a decent standard of living. I can't see how we can look at 3rd world countries ie India/Africa and other 3rd world countries and tell them they can't grow their economies because we used up all the carbon "budget".

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

#145

Post by ryan93 »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #118
ryan93 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

#146

Post by seanwilson »

> But individual and collective action don’t have to be pitted against each other. Individual choices do add up (they just don’t, in McKibben’s terms, multiply). That vegan options are available at a lot of fast-food chains is because enough consumers have created a profitable market for them. We do influence others through our visible choices. Ideas spread, values spread, habits spread; we are social animals and both good and bad behaviors are contagious. (For the bad, just look at the contagiousness of specious anti-vaccination arguments.)

Strong agree with this. I see people argue all the time that individual action won't do anything when it's at least a part of getting to a tipping-point where big changes are made.

It's like the public (who want stuff), companies (who want money), governments (who want votes from the public and approval from companies) and countries are locked in a stalemate all pointing fingers at each other over who is responsible and should change first. Everyone has to do their part and stop making excuses.

Eat less animal products, fly less and drive less where practical is the bare minimum everyone should be doing in my opinion instead of trying to cling on to unsustainable lifestyles as long as they're allowed to.

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

#147

Post by stephen_g »

qeternity wrote: post #30
codingdave wrote: post #19

I worked in the oil & gas industry about a decade ago. I recall a conversation with our CEO directly talking about renewables and the environment. He said, very clearly, that this entire industry is about money, and they will do whatever makes them the most money. If renewable ever paid more than oil, they'd go there. But direct from his mouth - it is 100% about money. If anyone doubts that they are greed-driven, jus…

> If anyone doubts that they are greed-driven, just ask. They don't hide it. They have a legal obligation to pursue profits for shareholders. This is their fiduciary duty. And they are like this because their consumers are like this. If people weren't so "greedy" demanding hydrocarbons at rock bottom prices, and instead wanted to pay a premium for solar powered EVs, well then hell believe me they would pursue those b…

The downvotes are because you are parroting a common misconception. There is no 'duty' (legal or otherwise) for a company to pursue producing profits for shareholders.

They have to act in the interest of the shareholders, which could mean all sorts of things other than producing profit. That could include things like "not paying huge amounts of money on lobbying and advertising campaigns to spread misinformation about renewable energy and try to cast doubt on climate change for decades while they knew it was real"...

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

#148

Post by majormajor »

nyerp wrote: post #42

> "Say you have a certain amount of time and money with which to make change – call it x, since that is what we mathematicians call things. The trick is to increase that x by multiplication, not addition. The trick is to take that 5 percent of people who really care and make them count for far more than 5 percent. And the trick to that is democracy." > That is, private individual actions don’t increase at a rate suff…

That's not how I interpret that quotation from the article at all. "The trick to that is democracy" not "the trick to that is lobbying."

Instead of spending your time trying to reduce your own "carbon footprint" spend it convincing other people to support legislative action.

"Big Oil" wants you to spend your time working just on yourself instead of spending your time sharing the information about why we need to reign them in. The private individual efforts of 5% of people will do less than the evangelical efforts of that same group.

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

#149

Post by qeternity »

plorg wrote: post #101
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…

* Oil, at minimum, gets much more expensive, more quickly. * Renewable energy develops more quickly because see the first bullet point * Nuclear doesn't die

100% agree.

But this does not go over well with the masses.

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

#150

Post by LeifCarrotson »

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.

The unmoral corporate and legal pressures and incentive structures they're in dictate that they do their best to earn short term profits. They are unconcerned whether their actions kill off humanity eventually, that's simply not a factor they're capable of caring about.
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