Exxon knew that fossil fuels were influencing the climate in 1978 • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by crimsonalucard » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:15 PM UTC

esailija wrote: post #198

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.

Even if a fossil fuel company did the right thing, unfortunately all it takes is another fossil fuel company doing the wrong thing so that the end result is the same. The only difference is that the companies who did the right thing just get screwed. You need regulation to force every company to do the right thing so that no 1 company can screw it for everyone else.

Honestly you won't even find one fossil fuel company that will admit it. It's not human nature to do this. The data shows this both among people and corporations.

You are correct, regulation is the only path forward. The problem is, when you give too much freedom to a capitalistic society, the major capitalists aka corporations seem to take control. The corporations in turn take their power and influence the very regulatory bodies that are suppose to keep them in check.

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

#262

Post by psandersen » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:16 PM UTC

perfunctory wrote: post #206

scroot wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could this result in moving to countries that don't have such policies, thereby allowing for increasing emissions (ie carbon tax havens)

Would have to tax imports from those countries as well

Pricing in externalities are the only good economic argument for tariffs I'm aware of...

Carbon tax + tariffs in proportion to the lack of carbon taxes would be the most logical way of setting up a market-based solution to climate change.

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

#263

Post by kaybe » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:16 PM UTC

Youcandothis wrote: post #170

scotty79 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's a physicists. Why would he have any idea about climate? He's just a person with an opinion not a dissenting scientist. And if his work suffered as a result of voicing such opinion then it was only to be expected. If you voice stupid opinion regarding domain you know almost nothing about and prop it up with your work reputation it's only fair if that reputation takes a hit.

The climate is a physical phenomenon.

And many climate scientists are in fact physicists.

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

#264

Post by mikestew » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:17 PM UTC

rmellow wrote: post #239

modzu wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there has been plenty of genuine scepticism from within the scientific community (as there should be). what has happened is that it has become politicized such that the science is suffering for fear of being labeled a heretic. much of the research is published via the intergovernmental panel on climate change; well it's right there in the title. none of this is to say that there aren't also entities pushing propagand…

The fact you are being downvoted really makes the case that any dissent on climate change makes you a heretic. And before I'm downvoted, note that you don't know my position on climate change: all I'm against is punishing people for genuine disagreement of thought.

all I'm against is punishing people for genuine disagreement of thought.

I'll down vote you for the straw man. You have no idea why parent is being down voted, but a top runner on my list of guesses is that "scientists want to disagree, but they don't for fear of speaking up" is a pretty weak argument.

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

#265

Post by ThomPete » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:18 PM UTC

specialist wrote: post #186

ThomPete wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Risk management has a cost. The question is what is the price? What are you willing to pay for being "safe". What are you willing to risk? Are future generations worth more than current? Should we militarily prohibit poor countries from using fossil fuels which they use to better their lives? You can say worst outcomes with other things too, meteor, nuclear war, pandemic, terrorism, etc. you always have to find a bal…

I'm willing to risk removing the subsidies for carbon. Then let the Freedom Markets™ decide which sources of energy are better. Economically.

Me too.

Wind and solar constitute less than 1% of world energy consumption and doesn't have all the other properties and uses that makes oil such a fundamental and necessary ingredient for modern living. Hopefully overtime we will find something that's better, for now it's hard to find as amazing and flexible a resource as oil.

Nuclear would probably win out, then oil and coal

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

#266

Post by ridicter » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:19 PM UTC

FrojoS wrote: post #229

ridicter wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are tons of real world proposals that do this. Here's one that's in Congress now that you can support: the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act ( http://energyinnovationact.org ) . All revenue from a carbon tax goes to citizens as a yearly check. It has some 30+ cosponsors, including a Republican. A tax at point of source is more efficent than a per-item budget. Any rising cost of CO2 will be accounted for…

Thank you. I live in Switzerland not the US, so I’m not well informed on US legislation. What about my points 1 and 2? Is the roadmap reliable and aggressive, and are all products incl. imported ones included.

This sounds very similar to cap and trade, no? Place a cap on total emissions, and decrease that cap over time. Correspondingly, have pollution permits that are allocated according to this cap. Companies that are especially CO2 efficient can sell their extra pollution allowances. Companies that are not can purchase these pollution allowances. As the cap is set lower and lower every year, the pollution allowances become more valuable, raising the price to pollute, or emit CO2. Over time, using fossil fuels becomes more and more prohibitively expensive, until we eventually transition to a near zero carbon society.

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

#267

Post by kaybe » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:25 PM UTC

civility wrote: post #150

ljcn wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A lot" maybe, but I suspect the majority would do the opposite and deny/understate the problem. Also the parent comment is more about risk management. The sensible thing to do in the absence of information is precisely to imagine the worst outcomes and act with them in mind. The precautionary principle is a statutory requirement in law in some jurisdictions to help avoid the worst outcomes.

> I suspect the majority would do the opposite and deny/understate the problem. I don't know. I've seen so much fear-mongering in my life. We're all going to die from zika, n1h1, ebola, killer bees, aids, mrsa, terrorists, and so on. In each case, there's something to be afraid of, and you might actually know someone who died in one those ways, but the media and the lay people blow it way out of proportion. The peopl…

Very often the reason we don't die from these things is because we take precaution. Imagine we had done nothing against ebola or aids, we'd have millions of deaths by now. (In the case of aids, not all places were so lucky [0].)

Same for the ozone hole, or dying trees from acid rain. When the source of the problem is identified, we can fix it, and that's the case for greenhouse-gas-caused climate change.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aids#Economic_impact

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

#268

Post by kaybe » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:38 PM UTC

ThomPete wrote: post #147

Gupie wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely if you are not a climate scientist what is the rational for not going with the consensus of 97% of climate scientists?

Because that consensus is trivial. Probably 100% agree that the climate is changing which is the question people agreed on. Even so-called skeptics agree on that. It's all the other questions that have much more uncertainty and less consensus. The use of that number is the kind of outright political manipulation that's so prevalent in this debate. Keep in mind we aren't even talking about scientifically demonstrated…

I really hope you are right. :)

> The IPCC doesn't do any research themselves and don't check the data, its a meta-study.

The people writing the chapters are involved in doing the research. (It's not like doing that is a full-time job, mind.)

> What started my skepticism was when I realized they don't actually know how much human co2 emissions affect the temperature. Go try and find that number, you won't find it cause we don't know.

For anyone wondering, look here:

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

Short answer - doubling the atmospheric CO2 should lead to an increase between 1.5 and 4.5°C, though more current work I remember narrowed the range down somewhere around 2.3°C-3°C. There is a lot of work down to narrow it down further.

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

#269

Post by wang_li » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:42 PM UTC

FrojoS wrote: post #193

Slightly tangential, but I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the political way forward for big countries: 1. Have a single CO2 budget for the whole country, with an aggressive, Hard to change roadmap of yearly reduction of said budget down to zero in the not too long future. 2. Estimate the CO2 footprint of every single product, incl. imports by one or several neutral organizations. This doesn’t have to be perfe…

Would be much better to give every citizen their share of the CO2 budget and then require them to spend them as they buy goods and services. This way you don't end up with bureaucrats giving favored, e.g. the company that promised said bureaucrat a huge annual salary post government service, businesses special treatment.

If a person can style their life in a such a way as to have CO2 budget left over at the end of the year, then they carry it over to the next year or allow them to sell it. But any system that doesn't involve giving the budget directly to citizens is broken and designed for graft and fuck that.

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

#270

Post by bumby » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:53 PM UTC

FrojoS wrote: post #233

bumby wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the difficulty here is getting a consensus on #1. If it's an international effort, there's going to be disagreement on how to set a budget. Does a country with an emerging economy get a higher budget because they're behind more advanced economies who benefited from fossil fuels in their past growth? Getting advanced economies to make a disproportionate sacrifice will be a hard sell. And what is the accountabi…

Sure. The Citizens need to be very willing to take sacrifices despite other countries not being onboard (yet). But they can if they want to! In principal this already works in many cases, eg California/US subsidies on electric vehicles or Germany’s subsidies for solar. Both are very expensive with little benefit for the countries citizens compared to all other earthlings. To everyone else. They are just not aggressiv…

> But they can if they want to!

Agreed. Most every problem is solvable if there's the will to do it. The problem in this case is that there doesn't seem to be the political/social will to make the changes and sacrifices necessary for this scale.

It's unfortunate, but most people are very present-biased. It's a tough sell to convince them to adopt a forward thinking policy when it causes pain now. Maybe I'm cynical, but if you offered people to vote on whether to double the price of gasoline in order to subsidize renewables because it will be better in the long-run, I doubt that would pass.