Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Exxon knew that fossil fuels were influencing the climate in 1978

thecompost.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 340 posts

Re: Exxon knew that fossil fuels were influencing the climate in 1978

#21

Post by sparky_z »

School-Cotton wrote: post #11
bnolsen wrote: post #7

Having now been in China for several weeks this beating the drum trying to make americans feel guilty (and give power over to other people) is absolutely absurd. You want to control pollution the first places to start are china and india. The US in comparison produces negligible impact.

Nonsense. The US produces more than double the CO2 per capita as China. As usual, total numbers are meaningless without scaling them by population. If China split into 100 independent states tomorrow, they wouldn't be a problem anymore by your metric, even if they produce exactly the same amount of CO2 as they do now. Fair comparison with roughly equal population: Europe, the US, and Australia combined vs. China. And…

Surely, as far as the planet's concerned, the total numbers matter more than per capita. If, say, Andorra hypothetically had the largest per-capita numbers by an order of magnitude, that still wouldn't make them the biggest threat to the planet, nor would it Andorra the most effective place to target activism.

Also, if you look at the trendlines, the US's per capita numbers are going down, while the China's and India's are going up with no signs of slowing. So is their population growth. The US is currently "taking care of itself" more or less, but China and India (already # 1 and #3 in total carbon numbers) are getting worse at a frightening pace. If we spend all of our energy focusing on the US, even if we're extraordinarily successful there, we'll look around in 20 years and see we lost progress globally. As though we didn't heed Amdahl's law and spent all of our time optimizing the wrong function. The most important thing we can do is find some way for China and (especially) India to grow their economies and pull their citizens out of poverty in a way that doesn't destroy the planet.

Re: Exxon knew that fossil fuels were influencing the climate in 1978

#22

Post by pier25 »

It's terrible to think that maybe if Exxon and others didn't invest in lobbying and disinformation campaigns against climate change maybe humanity would have started acting 30 years earlier.

It's 2019 and humanity is barely starting to think about acting. Global CO2 emissions keep growing as if we were in "business as usual". Humanity needs to realize the magnitude of the problem. Climate change is, by far, the biggest threat it has ever encountered and probably will ever encounter.

The solution will require us to make radical changes to our lifestyle and our culture. For example, we can't keep having irrational leaders that ignore basic scientific facts.

Re: Exxon knew that fossil fuels were influencing the climate in 1978

#23

Post by School-Cotton »

sparky_z wrote: post #21
School-Cotton wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. The US produces more than double the CO2 per capita as China. As usual, total numbers are meaningless without scaling them by population. If China split into 100 independent states tomorrow, they wouldn't be a problem anymore by your metric, even if they produce exactly the same amount of CO2 as they do now. Fair comparison with roughly equal population: Europe, the US, and Australia combined vs. China. And…

Surely, as far as the planet's concerned, the total numbers matter more than per capita. If, say, Andorra hypothetically had the largest per-capita numbers by an order of magnitude, that still wouldn't make them the biggest threat to the planet, nor would it Andorra the most effective place to target activism. Also, if you look at the trendlines, the US's per capita numbers are going down, while the China's and India…

It would make Andorra and countries similar to Andorra the most effective place to target activism, assuming the total population of those countries was large enough to be meaningful.

According to Wikipedia, there are 41 countries with more emissions per capita than China, including some with large populations like the US, Japan, Germany, Australia, South Korea, Russia...

Really, my point is that it's wrong to think in terms of "countries" because country boundaries are arbitrary. Like, if there were one small town with 1000x the per capita emissions as the US, it wouldn't matter. What matters is the number of people multiplied by the amount they emit.

Re: Exxon knew that fossil fuels were influencing the climate in 1978

#24

Post by rorykoehler »

bnolsen wrote: post #7

Having now been in China for several weeks this beating the drum trying to make americans feel guilty (and give power over to other people) is absolutely absurd. You want to control pollution the first places to start are china and india. The US in comparison produces negligible impact.

Adding to what others have stated much of China's pollution comes from producing the endless stream of consumerist crap Americans are uniquely addicted to.

Re: Exxon knew that fossil fuels were influencing the climate in 1978

#26

Post by sparky_z »

School-Cotton wrote: post #23
sparky_z wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely, as far as the planet's concerned, the total numbers matter more than per capita. If, say, Andorra hypothetically had the largest per-capita numbers by an order of magnitude, that still wouldn't make them the biggest threat to the planet, nor would it Andorra the most effective place to target activism. Also, if you look at the trendlines, the US's per capita numbers are going down, while the China's and India…

It would make Andorra and countries similar to Andorra the most effective place to target activism, assuming the total population of those countries was large enough to be meaningful. According to Wikipedia, there are 41 countries with more emissions per capita than China, including some with large populations like the US, Japan, Germany, Australia, South Korea, Russia... Really, my point is that it's wrong to think…

I edited in a 2nd paragraph about trendlines while you were responding, sorry about that.

Country boundaries aren't arbitrary because they are where policies are made. If you could just pick the top 1-billion polluting individual humans in the world and focus on them, that would be ideal. But that obviously doesn't work. You have to operate on the level of political groups. Nation states are the most obvious groups because they can respond to geopolitical pressures.

Re: Exxon knew that fossil fuels were influencing the climate in 1978

#27

Post by jchw »

throwaway66666 wrote: post #18
ajhaupt7 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I'm the author + developer -- hope there isn't a problem with posting your own content. I think there's value in it!

I (not a mod, just your a regular HN user) think it's perfectly fine to post your own content. As long as you don't spam it, and you don't post over-flattering headlines for it. And definitely way better than posting your content under a guise of an "unafilliated" friend. It will reach the front page and stay here only if it's good, so who cares if it came straight from the wolf's mouth. Also pretty creepy that peopl…

I generally don’t look at post/comment history except out of general curiosity myself. It’s not like the stuff posted here is private, and it’s probably more permanent than most sites.

I also post under effectively my real life identity. Could eventually regret that, but there’s definitely downsides to the alternative approaches to online identity too.

Re: Exxon knew that fossil fuels were influencing the climate in 1978

#29

Post by [deleted] »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #20

What do we expect? If your purpose in life was found to be a total lie. Do you bury the truth and deny it to yourself and the world? Or do you commit suicide? Every fossil fuel company is going to lie their pants off because that's what you and all other humans would do if they got into the same situation.

[deleted]

Re: Exxon knew that fossil fuels were influencing the climate in 1978

#30

Post by dunstad »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #20

What do we expect? If your purpose in life was found to be a total lie. Do you bury the truth and deny it to yourself and the world? Or do you commit suicide? Every fossil fuel company is going to lie their pants off because that's what you and all other humans would do if they got into the same situation.

Where is option 3, come clean, change their ways and work to correct the damage? Why are 'lie' and 'kill themselves' more obvious?
Post reply on HN