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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

#211

Post by datawaslost »

rfw300 wrote: post #128
datawaslost wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It doesn't keep me up at night. In retrospect, it was probably one of the most dubious things I worked on in a decade of advertising, but I (mostly) left the industry because it was morally neutral, not outright wrong. It just felt like a big waste of talent and money, rather than "insidious"

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

#212

Post by pas »

lhorie wrote: post #195
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…

I mean, if we're going to talk about forest and trees, consider that the whole "big oil lobbies governments" thing flies right in the face of the "democracy is the voice of the people" argument. If people collectively don't care to fight back at a legislative level against socialized costs, wouldn't that logically mean they're the ones ultimately responsible for their own predicament? Or more philosophically speaking…

There's nothing preventing us from living in a similarly 1-2% growing economy but with net zero GHG emissions. Yes, free resources lying around was amazing, but since then our economic surplus is abso-fucking-lutely enormous.

We merely opt to allocate that on other things instead of decarbonizing. Eg. we spend it on silly things like paving half the world, giving everyone their own car, building small (actually gigantic) cookie cutter houses in suburbs, building new fabs every few years to get more transistors on chips, cramming even more photo gadgets into phones, producing more and more Netflix Prime content, etc.

Building a ton of wind turbines and PV farms, spending years (and billions of USD) reviewing nuclear power plant permits, instead of building more efficient power plants.

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

#213

Post by milkytron »

vanderZwan wrote: post #132
datawaslost wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know someone who joined Shell with the hope of helping it transition to renewable technologies (and who was actively lured with that promise), and who later quit after they realized that Shell was just trying to get all capable people who could be working on sustainability stuff to work for them instead, then drip-feed them promises of change while tempting them to work on other projects and give up on those sustai…

> With hindsight, do you think something like that was happening at BP too?

I'm pretty sure BP spent more on marketing their sustainability initiatives than they actually spent on their sustainability initiatives.

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

#214

Post by [deleted] »

jfim wrote: post #81
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…

> If an idea is only supported by 5% of the population, we generally do NOT want that 5% of the population driving the legislative agenda. It depends. The other 95% of the population might be agnostic or unaware of the idea, or the other 95% of the population might be opposed to the idea. If Congress were to pass a law mandating funding for WWVB radio until 2050, for example, would even 5% of the population have an o…

[deleted]

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

#215

Post by Hermitian909 »

lhorie wrote: post #195
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…

I mean, if we're going to talk about forest and trees, consider that the whole "big oil lobbies governments" thing flies right in the face of the "democracy is the voice of the people" argument. If people collectively don't care to fight back at a legislative level against socialized costs, wouldn't that logically mean they're the ones ultimately responsible for their own predicament? Or more philosophically speaking…

> consider that the whole "big oil lobbies governments" thing flies right in the face of the "democracy is the voice of the people" argument

I don't think it does. An important part of the lobbying is that we know oil companies are attempting to intentionally deceive politicians and the public about the negative effects of their industry and the positive effects of competitors. That deception is the point at play, the voice of the people can be misinformed.

> If people collectively don't care to fight back at a legislative level against socialized costs, wouldn't that logically mean they're the ones ultimately responsible for their own predicament?

This reads a lot to me like blaming the victim of a scam for being scammed. I've met quite a few climate skeptics in my day regurgitating oil lobbying talking points that were known to be false when published. I don't blame them for not fully comprehending the science behind climate change, I blame those oil companies are knowingly misinforming them.

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

#216

Post by coryrc »

orwin wrote: post #173
coryrc wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To answer my questions: 1 Not to my knowledge; housing policy reflects the desire for segregation. 2 No, Hawaii is nice. 3 No, it's physics. Until very recently even a heat pump would burn more hydrocarbons using the grid than direct heating and cost a lot more.

1: True 2: Big oil did push to keep the plane fuel low (or rather inexistant) worldwide though. But true. 3: What? No. Unless recently is everything after the 70s. Heat pump was more efficient than gas heating since the 50s (at least), but was hard to control, that was the main issue. My friend grandad learned to work with heat pumps during the Franco-Algerian war (54 i think) and installed one in his home (on Oleron…

Our electrical grid was mostly coal which is more carbon intensive than gas, requiring an efficiency not possible for heat pumps to emit less carbon than burning natural gas directly. Additionally they did not work below freezing well or at all.

Of course, insulation is and was the most carbon-efficient investment.

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

#217

Post by imtringued »

slingnow wrote: post #182
glogla wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This type of "evil genius" is quite successful at brainwashing people though.

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

#218

Post by jfengel »

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.

Honestly, I think most of it is culture war.

The people who oppose oil companies are often the same people who take progressive views on a lot of other topics -- gay rights, gun control, pollution, etc. And that generates an almost knee-jerk opposition: anything they are for, we must be against.

It's tribalism. If liberals are opposed to oil companies, than oil companies must be good. Then they'll be provided with arguments to support it, derived by think tanks and distributed via dedicated media, web sites, social media, etc. Those are generally pretty poor arguments, but it doesn't matter: they have a thing to say, and no particular interest in questioning it.

So the whole thing ends up being shortcut by the longstanding culture war between left and right. Neither side has to do any thinking; the thinking is all done for them. It just so happens that the anti-oil-company side is having its thinking done by scientists, while the pro-oil-company side has its thinking done by professional propagandists, political strategists, and the occasional hand on the wheel from full-time troll farms.

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

#219

Post by paulgb »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #59
paulgb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I upvoted the snark because I think in this case it's warranted. I see this article as part of a broader messaging shift to pin the blame for global warming on the N companies that pollute the most, which I don't think is productive. As an example of how absurd it gets, someone in my local nextdoor group posted something along the lines of “why should I reduce how much I drive when X% of emissions come from N compani…

Those companies are polluting because they are allowed to. Only a society level response can rein them in. And then the individuals will change what they do, based on what is still available.

Sure, a carbon tax would do essentially that, and I am supportive of it.

But absent a carbon tax, the idea that I can morally just consume willy-nilly and blame “corporations” is crazy. It's a form of moral laundering. Exxon isn't spewing CO2 for the heck of it, they're doing so as part of a production process that eventually some consumer demands. That consumer should not be let off the hook so easily.

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

#220

Post by SavantIdiot »

qeternity wrote: post #133
SavantIdiot wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This problem is so much more complicated than just blaming a few evil CEOs. That's a good point. I'd say it is universal greed, but the vast amount of power is concentrated in the hands of a few who do anything to preserve it. Perhaps we need to look at others to blame... The industrial revolution opened the floodgates for greed among all types of CEOs/Presidents that ran faster than the law or science could keep u…

> The industrial revolution opened the floodgates for greed among all types of CEOs/Presidents It's not that easy. There would be no failed/struggling businesses otherwise. CEOs would just will their enterprises into success. > The baby boom? Everyone wanted to live in suburbs, which required cars, roads, tires, gasoline, oil? Now we're talking. Those greedy CEOs are just people. Greedy people like everyone else. A h…

> A handful of greedy CEOs didn't force billions of people to collectively emit 1.5 trillion tons of CO2.

Oh by golly they certainly did! They tore up public transportation, forcing people to buy cars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

The suburbs could have had public transportation, but there was an active propaganda against that. Only poor people use buses, manipulating people into buying big, gas-guzzling cars by creating a demand for it.

And then there is 50 years of a few CEOs suppressing evidence that this was wrecking the environment.

So yes, a few evil CEOs really did work to manipulate people into ignoring their actions' consequences. I would say, given the strength of marketing and propaganda, they were indeed forced.

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