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

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook

by dredmorbius • 5 years ago

313 248 5 years ago

theguardian.com

Bostonian• 5 years ago

Big oil is big because billions of people rely on hydrocarbons for transport, heating their homes, electricity, and many other things. Demonizing "Big Oil" is a way to evade the fact that people are not willing to pay large amounts to stop the world from warming a few degrees.

j-pb• 5 years ago

That is ignoring the trillions of dollar this industry has spend on think tanks for the downplay of climate change, funding of paid for scientific articles to spread fud, funding conservative anti-science parties, lobbying for laws that actively hinder progress in renewable energies, hoarding patents on renewable energies, buying sustainable competitors and killing them.

This is beyond "people don't want to pay more", this is "we could get the same energy but cheaper, but that wouldn't allow the very powerfull to exhauste an available resource to depletion before they move on and leave us all with the externalised costs".

ryan935• 5 years ago

They haven’t spent any where close to trillions on think tanks. People want cheap energy don’t need think tanks to keep demand for oil high.

JulianMorrison4• 5 years ago

Big industry of all sorts routinely tries to manipulate public opinion and the machinery of government to keep itself in business. That goes for big corn as much as big oil, but big oil is the one fucking over the planet.

throwaway8943459• 5 years ago

Per TFA and many other sources, "Big Oil" (and many other industries) lobby and market hard to make sure that people misunderstand climate change and lack access to the information required to make climate-friendly purchasing decisions. Your comment is peak victim blaming.

ryan935• 5 years ago

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

thehappypm2• 5 years ago

People act like oil companies are the ones burning oil. They’re just responding to demand. We need to make oil less competitive, with better alternatives. No point or even value in demonizing these companies — the whole world is complicit.

dragonwriter• 5 years ago

People act like oil companies are the ones burning oil. They’re just responding to demand.

No, they’re not.

We need to make oil less competitive, with better alternatives.

Like tobacco companies, oil companies have actively lied and lobbied to maintain demand and obstruct coordinated effort of exactly the kind you describe as necessary. They are not passive actors simply responding to demand as they find it.

relax885• 5 years ago

They are doing both.

Cigarettes are a luxury item. Petroleum products are a requirement for modern life.

You could fire all of the corporate PR propagandists and lobbyists on the planet and I doubt it would make a dramatic dent in oil consumption.

Couldn’t possibly hurt though!

refurb2• 5 years ago

Nope.

Consumers knew burning gasoline and diesel created pollution 60 years ago.

They could have push for clean alternatives but didnt.

Don’t give them a pass.

coryrc5• 5 years ago

Is Big Oil why we can't have affordable, safe, quiet housing in dense cities?

Is Big Oil why people like taking planes to Hawaii?

Is Big Oil why it's much cheaper to heat with natural gas?

AnimalMuppet• 5 years ago

> People act like oil companies are the ones burning oil. They’re just responding to demand.
No, they’re not.

That would be more convincing if you gave a reason why you say "no, they're not". Even better would be evidence.

marcusverus3• 5 years ago

Like tobacco companies, oil companies have actively lied and lobbied to maintain demand and obstruct coordinated effort of exactly the kind you describe as necessary. They are not passive actors simply responding to demand as they find it.

These really aren't very similar. Big Tobacco's lies were the only thing propping up the tobacco industry. As soon as the truth became clear, their industry was absolutely crushed. The truth about climate change has been clear for decades, but unlike the situation with tobacco, the demand for Oil & Gas keeps on growing[0]. This is because, unlike tobacco, Oil & Gas is absolutely indispensable--especially for developing countries.

Lying about climate change was a terrible thing, and it cost us precious time. But we still need them to keep the lights on, and pretending that the act of producing Oil & Gas today--when it is literally a hard requirement to keep the lights on around the world-- is somehow pernicious, is just silliness. The world is stressful enough without all the outrage theatre.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels

gaze• 5 years ago

Just responding to demand by hiring lobbyists yup sure.

baron_harkonnen• 5 years ago

While I do agree that it's overly simplistic to exclusively blame oil companies, and for the most part agree that we are all complicit, it isn't quite as straightforward as that.

Most of our jobs depend on the creation of demand for products and services that didn't exist yesterday. Capitalism isn't strictly about fulfilling our needs, but perpetually creating new needs, in order to perpetually generate more profit. Those needs become real, we're all complicit only in that all of us are incapable at this point of honestly living a fossil fuel free life.

We can't radically change our society at this point, but it's naive and incorrect to assume that our unsustainable way of life was the only option. Most indigenous peoples around the globe had lived in a way that was sustainable. The Pre-columbian population of the America's is estimated to have been as high as 112 million people [0]. The societies were large and complex and yet still were able to avoid destroying their local portion of the biosphere.

Even in our industrial society there have been critics of our way of life every generation and there have been people working to silence that criticism, and it's not just the average person doing this work. One the example that I find particularly surprising is that the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth, published in 1972, was a fairly major part of the American zeitgeist, so much so that Ronal Reagan specifically attacked this idea in his famous quote:

There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder.

Consequently an era of aggressive neoliberalism means that ideologically people are less willing to accept that infinite growth on a finite planet is a problem than they were 50 years ago.

I think it's important not to fall into the easy trap of thinking that a bunch of evil oil execs are solely responsible for climate change, but at the same time it's overly simplistic, and perhaps equally dangerous, to simply say "this is what everyone wanted". A severe alcoholic might want to quit drinking, but at the same time wants to continue, if there is someone in that person's life encouraging and enabling their drinking we typically find that individual culpable in the former's struggle to recover.

[0] https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/0289.htm

splatcollision• 5 years ago

They call themselves "energy" companies, so where does it matter where that energy comes from?

In that perfect world where once they knew early on that the consumption of their product would lead to an uninhabitable planet for future generations (because that's what we're facing now), couldn't they have pivoted (slowly) towards true renewables and battery technology? They could have been the leaders instead of the culprits, and positioned for greater long term growth and shareholder value, instead of the relatively short term profits of business as usual.

As long as we're writing science fiction that is... But someone somewhere made a choice to bury the science and keep the status quo, either by action or inaction.

nitrogen• 5 years ago

Some of them did. The first solar panel I ever saw in person had a BP logo on it. But big ships turn very slowly.

flavius29663• 5 years ago

They do invest in renewable energy, as it becomes the clear replacement for diesel and gasoline.

First you had the decarbonization of the electric grid, and of course that those companies de-carbonized first. Now that cars are getting de-carbonized, you see Shell, BP and others invest in green energy as well.

These are companies that respond to shareholders, not sure how they could "invest for the greater good" at a loss without betraying their investors. Only governments can invest at a loos, if the public opinion can stomach it.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottcarpenter/2021/03/29/shell...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bp-bets-future-on-green-energy-...

akamaka• 5 years ago

I used to only blame consumers, until I learned how inefficient oil production is and how much CO2 is emitted at the oilfield. Yes, some oil companies are burning huge amounts of oil and methane before the product even reaches the end user. For decades, these companies have chosen against implementing process improvements, and the only way they will do anything is by penalizing them.

https://news.stanford.edu/2018/08/30/measuring-crude-oils-ca...

onlyrealcuzzo• 5 years ago

How is this different from literally any company, though?

If it would be more profitable to be efficient, they would be.

Where are these mythical giant companies that are foregoing profits and doing the right thing and not getting sued by shareholders?

ren_engineer• 5 years ago

the tragedy is that we'd probably be carbon neutral if it wasn't for activists who lobbied against nuclear energy decades ago because it wasn't "environmentally friendly"

pjc504• 5 years ago

It was inextricably linked with nuclear weapons; Greenpeace got their start protesting against atom bomb tests in the Pacific, and later against the dumping of radioactive waste in the sea.

The pollutants are uniquely permanent, and not enough effort was made to not just contaminate the world.

Perhaps the nuclear industry needs to examine why their marketing failed where the oil industry succeeded.

laumars• 5 years ago

Ah the old “don’t hate the player hate the game” argument.

It’s quite possible to hate both. Yes we as a populous need to do our part too but the oil companies aren’t providing us with their services out of generosity. They’ve been actively campaigning against change. Which is literally what this submission is trying highlight.

throwaway8943459• 5 years ago

These disinformation campaigns are a major obstacle to introducing the kind of reforms required to decarbonize our economy. Overcoming these obstacles largely requires shining a light on their bad behavior so the oil companies (and other industry groups) lose credibility and thus undermine their disinformation campaigns.

Perhaps to your point, there's no way out of this mess without carbon pricing, and even Democrats (who profess to believe that climate change is an existential threat) won't rally behind it even though it would free up massive amounts of money to fund their redistributive programs--choosing instead to spend large amounts of money on symbolic efforts such as a "citizens climate corps". I suspect this speaks in large part to the extent to which corporations have politicians in their pockets (certainly Joe Manchin is in the pocket of the coal industry and doesn't even pretend otherwise). Note that this isn't to say Republicans are better--by and large Republicans haven't even signed onto the idea that climate change poses an existential threat.

EDIT: everyone should write their congresspeople and urge them to support carbon pricing initiatives. Here's a dead-simple link that takes your email and your address, identifies your representatives, and gives you a form pre-populated with a canned message that will be emailed when you click "submit": https://citizensclimatelobby.org/house/

betterunix24• 5 years ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...

That is not "just responding to demand," it is actively working to inflate demand. Oil companies have worked hard for decades to keep people in their cars, including participating in the conspiracy to dismantle electric streetcar lines across America (along with GM and several tire manufacturers). You say we need to make oil less competitive, but oil companies are actively working against efforts to do so.

bedhead• 5 years ago

I love how people who drive cars, fly on planes, use plastic, get goods delivered by truck, etc etc, act like oil companies just pump oil out of the ground for fun then light it on fire. The mental gymnastics are impressive.

toiletfuneral• 5 years ago

Nobody who travels ‘wants’ to burn oil. Capital decided oil is the most profitable way to deliver that. There was never a point where individual personal consumption habits could have changed this course.

5424582• 5 years ago

It’s profitable because it’s physically efficient - fossil fuels are readily available and highly energy dense and relatively safe. Nothing else offers that. This isn’t some sneaky capitalist plot - the soviets burned lots of fuel as well.

I’m not defending the continued dependence on fossil fuels, but let’s be realistic about how (externalities aside) fossil fuels are very, very good at what they do. The problem is those externalities have turned out to be pretty bad, and our economic systems have been slow to respond.

barbazoo2• 5 years ago

Well, some of us might drive electric cars, don't fly if they don't absolutely have to, avoid single use plastics, shop locally and in bulk, etc, etc Or at least some of us do some of those things. We don't all have to live perfectly carbon neutral lives before we can demand action on a political level or criticize organizations that are actively trying to keep the status quo for as long as possible to maximize their profits.

JulianMorrison4• 5 years ago

Big changes need government intervention. The government needs to take away the option to run cars, trucks, etc on gasoline, and restrict flights that don't use renewable energy (such as via Hydrogen). Otherwise the individual can only do a very little, and often can't afford to do that.

sharemywin3• 5 years ago

or at least require the cost of putting carbon back into the ground to be factor price.

The problem is when you slow gdp it's the most marginalized that are hit the hardest.

So, the CEO only makes 10M instead of 50M(or whatever number) but what about the poor farmer that was making just enough to run his tractor to get by and feed his family.

allemagne2• 5 years ago

I strongly agree with you and the parent comment.

Yes, people who refuse to recognize the problem beyond the greed of oil companies are a problem. Yes, oil companies are in fact a bigger problem. However, the biggest problem is if you want a government to stay in power long enough to actually do anything meaningful about eliminating carbon emissions, then announcing some kind of imminent intention to take away gasoline-powered cars and trucks is one of the worst things you can do.

codingdave2• 5 years ago

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, just ask. They don't hide it.

barbazoo2• 5 years ago

Isn't that just capitalism? Replace "oil & gas" with any other for profit organizations and the same would be true, no?. E.g. if being privacy focused could make Facebook even more money than what they're doing now, they'd do it, etc.

aga98mtl• 5 years ago

Isn't that just capitalism?

Soviet Russia was into oil production just as much as anyone else. The simple truth is that oil is very useful and the externalities are easy to ignore. The blame game is not useful for this situation.

S_A_P• 5 years ago

I’m not sure how that CEOs response differs from <insertanyindustryhere>. It is a rare case that you see a CEO decide that some other metric is more important than making money.

qeternity17• 5 years ago

It doesn't. It's a CEO's fiduciary duty to act in shareholders best interests.

EDIT: HN, you're really getting juvenile. Save downvotes for low quality comments, not 100% factual comments that you simply don't like.

qeternity17• 5 years ago

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 businesses.

But the demand isn't there. Consumers are too greedy. Consumers don't want to change their behavior.

EDIT: Downvotes, but no replies. Really HN, we just downvote people we disagree with? How about tossing your hat in the ring.

throwaway8943459• 5 years ago

Of course this is absurd because consumers have no access to information about the emissions that factor into their products, and various corporations work very hard to prevent this kind of transparency (including misleading people on the calculus a la TFA).

Not only that, but most consumers don't concretely understand the implications of "climate change" because most people can't summon a dozen climate researchers to do a study and communicate the results (indeed, in most places the actual studies are paywalled). And here too, corporations are deeply invested in making sure people believe that climate change is just a myth or that the implications aren't as severe as the science leads us to believe.

thinkcontext4• 5 years ago

Do they also have a legal obligation to lie and fund disinformation?

stephen_g• 5 years ago

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"...

specialist• 5 years ago

'Carbon Footprints' [2004] smells like Frank Luntz. So I quickly scanned OC. Nope. Ogilvy & Mather, a different repeat offender.

Amusingly, sensing an opportunity in the fast growing climate crisis FUD services market, in 2008 they launched OgilvyEarth.

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=OgilvyEarth

Never let a good crisis go to waste.

bsanr2• 5 years ago

"Identity theft", likewise, is an attempt to put the onus - and blame - on consumers for the failure of corporations to protect personal information and combat fraud.

We should be generally wary of corporate "Do your part!" campaigns.

rdiddly• 5 years ago

Of course larger-scale changes are larger. One problem is that when you argue for a large-scale change, people generally expect you to be not-a-hypocrite on the small personal level. Small-scale actions give authority to large-scale ideas/arguments.

qeternity17• 5 years ago

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 serious, tragedy of the commons that we will likely ever face. This problem is so much more complicated than just blaming a few evil CEOs.

germinalphrase2• 5 years ago

Perhaps we would already apply environmental legislation to CO2 as a pollutant such that carbon intensive industries and products would be more expensive and low carbon products/industry more competitive giving consumers more choice.

j_walter2• 5 years ago

Who do you mean by "we"...because some countries don't give a shit about the impact they are having on the world and still pollute the air and water worse than EU and US countries 50 years ago (China, India, etc).

pjc504• 5 years ago

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 to do is easier because there are fewer financially motivated liars involved.

(We can assume that state owned oil companies still captured their respective governments, we're just stipulating that a separation of corp and state can be achieved in the west)

(However, until 1990 the world remains more concerned with the threat of immediate obliteration by nuclear war than the slow problem of climate change.)

yyyk2• 5 years ago

Roughly diverges from Carter putting solar panels on the White House and Reagan not taking them off.

It's a well-known story, but it's based on spin* . Carter did not place the solar panels due to belief in climate change. What Carter and his staff did believe in was Peak Oil, and that it would occur in the 1980s. Also, Carter wanted to wean the US off Middle Eastern oil following the 1973 oil embargo and the 1979 oil crisis.

Solar panels were a part of Carter's adaptation effort, but a bigger part was oil shale and coal liquefaction, liquefaction being so incredibly polluting (CCS wasn't even considered at the time) we'd probably be looking at 5C had it been commonplace.

The actual priorities of the Carter effort are easily discoverable for anyone looking at the period:

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/17/archives/environmentalist...

* To be clear, the spin does not come from OP, but from the Democratic spin handler that years later told the solar panels story but without the context which changes the story entirely. It's easy for people to fall into the spin if they don't know the period.

qeternity17• 5 years ago

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 revolution, which couldn't have been otherwise sped up.

Long story short: I'm not sure that even in a perfect world, that we would be all that different. Fossil fuels were still the cheapest source of energy for many, many decades in a rapid growing global economy. 20 years ahead is certainly a stretch. 10 years would be high case, 5 years base case...in a perfect world.

fallingknife2• 5 years ago

Other countries follow France in building out nuclear power as a substitute

The problem is there is a ton of overlap between people who are really concerned about global warming, and people who have an irrational fear of nuclear power.

deeviant• 5 years ago

What does that alternate universe look like?

Have all the billions of subsidies flow into renewables, battery and electric car tech, instead of oil? Today it's slowly catching up, but we'd be decades ahead if we started decades ago.

Nobody is saying it all the fault of "evil CEOs", but it fair to point out evil CEOs and in general evil deeds by corporations.

qeternity17• 5 years ago

When people talk about "subsidies" to oil, what they really mean is lower retail taxes for gasoline at the pump.

This isn't for the benefit of oil companies, it's to placate voters, who want to pay less at the pump.

It's not as if the US government is running around dropping truck loads of cash into insanely profitable businesses.

And no, if gasoline had higher taxes, that would not be absorbed by the oil companies. It would be passed on to the consumer just like every increase in oil prices is. Gasoline has a very flat demand curve.

martin-adams• 5 years ago

I think it is like the car industry. The push to electric vehicles has forced companies to adapt, reskill and do the R&D because they know their business will be going away in 10+ years.

I would like to think that heavy R&D into renewable energies would have been the priority of "Big Oil", not the alternative.

simfree• 5 years ago

50+ years of manufacturers spending on R&D for internal combustion engines could have been spent on improving electric powertrain technology.

Think about how many engineer's have spent their entire lives optimizing ICE powertrains, with all this tech actively harming us with smog shortening our lifespans, acid rain and climate change.

qeternity17• 5 years ago

50+ years of manufacturers spending on R&D for internal combustion engines could have been spent on improving electric powertrain technology.

You're missing the point. This didn't happen because it wasn't economical. You're just wishing for fanciful things. You might as well just wish that CO2 weren't a GHG.

Consumer demand forced R&D into ICE instead of electric.

daveFNbuck2• 5 years ago

Without dedicated lobbies paying politicians to ignore the problem, Republicans could have promoted conservative solutions like nuclear energy and carbon pricing.

Green energy could have been cost-effective decades earlier, leading to wider adoption and massive investment in research. We could have been building nuclear plants for the last several decades instead of pretending coal was still viable.

qeternity17• 5 years ago

Republicans could have promoted conservative solutions like nuclear energy and carbon pricing.

Arguably the two most important missed opportunities, imho.

We would still be left with transportation because battery tech advanced on the back of the consumer electronics revolution, but with cheap nuclear power and a functioning emissions market, we could accelerate the transition much faster.

SavantIdiot4• 5 years ago

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 up. Although I doubt the blighted factory towns in England that lived under perpetual smog darkness were like "Sure, this is OK for the environment."

The baby boom? Everyone wanted to live in suburbs, which required cars, roads, tires, gasoline, oil?

American's sense of entitlement? "I deserve more and I'm going to take it?" Let's be honest, most americans are greedy seflish bunch who think "Well, this one little thing isn't going to hurt anyone this time..." x 1,000,000 instances.

It's probably just the fruition of Manifest Destiny: man's toxic urge to conquer and oppress: only the strong survive, winner take all, yadda yadda yadda. When is the last time you heard a leader (with actual power!!!) say, "Hey, wouldn't it be great if we were all just nice to each other?" ... And that guy was nailed to a tree...

qeternity17• 5 years ago

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

Solving the problem requires giving these people an alternative. This isn't some attempt at absolving whatever issues people have categorically with CEOs, rather just a realistic take on what needs to happen to unfuck the planet.

ben_w• 5 years ago

Although I am currently optimistic about the future and think we’re on a good course WRT anthropogenic climate change and (peak) oil production, I do remember 15 years ago when I was worried.

The two big differences between what I wanted done and what actually happened are: (1) mandatory solar systems on all new buildings (unless there is a very good special exceptional circumstance), and (2) bike lanes automatically added to every city road whenever and wherever roadworks occur, and those made grade-separated when the existing roads are 3 or more car-widths in each direction.

sly010• 5 years ago

My takeaway from this article is "Big Oil" should have invested their billions in research on renewables, batteries, etc, instead of lawyers and fighting change.

If you have a short-term-great, but long-term-dying business (which is all business), it's really hard to make the decision to invest in alternatives that - if successful - will invalidate your current business. You are basically investing against yourself. On the other hand if you don't do it, someone else will. This is the innovators dilemma.

qeternity17• 5 years ago

They've generated a few trillion dollars in profit over the past few decades, and now they have tens of billions at their disposal to invest in R&D now that there's a market beginning to demand it.

From an innovators dilemma perspective, if they can pivot, they will have nailed the balance perfectly (granted, we may have fucked the planet in the process, but that's just an outcome of a demand function).

plorg• 5 years ago

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

qeternity17• 5 years ago

100% agree.

But this does not go over well with the masses.

scythe• 5 years ago

Let's imagine an alternate history where oil companies hadn't fought against climate change science. What does that alternate universe look like?

It has a carbon tax. As to what else happens, the whole point of using a carbon tax rather than some kind of targeted reforms (bike lanes, vegetarianism, solar panels) is because allowing different solutions to compete in the market has been shown throughout history to be more effective in the majority of cases than top-down economic planning. The reason a carbon tax is the best solution is because we don't know exactly what it does. It leaves our options open.

Now, granted, there are a bunch of possible problems with the implementation of a carbon tax. But we rarely get to the point of in-depth discussions about how to implement a carbon tax. Instead, we're held up at the starting gate by pseudoscience, fearmongering, and the fantasy of individual action.

filoeleven• 5 years ago

Those CEOs set us back by 50 years in getting people used to the idea that we need to make changes in order to have stability in the future. They manufactured the idea that there was no problem, and therefore the greater resistance to change.

The alternate history looks more like CFCs and the ozone hole, only slower and writ larger. The time it takes to convince most people a) that there is a problem, and b) it will require big changes to address is a very important factor. If the scrambling towards renewables we see now happened in 1980 or even 1990 instead, we’d have more runway before missing some tipping points. It would be more of a behavioral adjustment instead of a crisis.

I don’t just blame the CEOs, I also blame our politicians. They only respond to big donors and public pressure. Without the billions backing the big lie, and with more time to alert people to the problem, public pressure would have won out much earlier—not that it has, yet.

slingnow3• 5 years ago

I find it infuriating that your perfectly reasonable question/comment is so heavily downvoted, and yet it's followed up my many thoughtful and interesting responses. Boggles the mind.

nyerp• 5 years ago

"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 sufficient to affect the problem in a timely fashion; collective action seeking changes in policy and law can.

This is actually a description of the politics of "special interest groups" and it usually leads to horrible things. 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. Instead, ideas need to first gain broad support among the general population, at which point enacting legislation may be desirable in order to solve collective action problems such as preventing free riding.

jfim• 5 years ago

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 opinion on it either way?

turbinerneiter2• 5 years ago

Probably, if you used words they know instead of acronyms they don't.

"Do you want the radio signal that allows clocks to sync to keep running? Here is a list of devices you might know and use that rely on them: ..."

majormajor4• 5 years ago

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.

arbuge3• 5 years ago

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.

Tijdreiziger2• 5 years ago

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'.

arbuge3• 5 years ago

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.

throwaway8943459• 5 years ago

1. Consumers don't have access to information they need to make climate-optimal decisions.

2. Oil companies lobby hard to make sure people lack the aforementioned information, specifically downplaying climate change.

3. SUVs are not even a drop in the ocean compared to industrial emissions. You're reaching hard to blame consumers for what is transparently industry's fault.

We need to pass carbon pricing and decarbonize our energy sector.

arbuge3• 5 years ago

Regarding 1 & 2, I think there's more than enough information out there at this point for anyone to figure out that large SUVs are worse than smaller vehicles or bicycles for the environment, regardless of whatever lobbying is going on by oil companies.

Regarding #3, I don't know if your first statement is correct or not, but again it would seem to me that the consumer (industries in this case) would have their own share of responsibility, not just the oil & gas companies supplying them.

SavantIdiot4• 5 years ago

ngl, their marketing teams are brilliant. yes, they are destroying the planet, but they certainly succeeded in driving the language/narrative.

BitwiseFool• 5 years ago

Language is way more powerful than people realize. Changing the language seems to literally change how we think.

SCUSKU• 5 years ago

While I'm no expert in propaganda, Newsspeak was certainly a major topic in Orwell's 1984. The purpose of Newspeak was solely to build language to control how people think about certain topics [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak#Thought_control

teddyh2• 5 years ago

Yet people usually mock Richard Stallman for insisting on proper terms being used as a condition for being interviewed…

SavantIdiot4• 5 years ago

Reminds me of the Negativland album "Free" which discusses the use of language and marketing.

Can't find my CD, but there are samples and one says: "The right words, said Stalin, are worth a thousand regimen"

EDIT: Found it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXAVvmpNYhM

Stupulous• 5 years ago

Language doesn't appear to be the driver here. The concept of a carbon footprint is what changes how I think, the name is just a compelling way of conveying that concept. If it were called 'per capita carbon consumption', it would still change how we think in the same way, though fewer people might be aware of it.

LatteLazy• 5 years ago

We've known aboht climate change for 40 years.

We've all individually and collectively chosen to ignore the problem.

Now is the point where we lie and pretend no one told us and it was all somehow a conspiracy by big oil, big meat, big airline-travel etc to force us to emit when we didnt want to.

Count me out.

sharemywin3• 5 years ago

If I benefited just as much as the CEOs where's my 5th empty mansion on the beach?

ManBlanket• 5 years ago

"Personal virtue is an eternally seductive goal in progressive movements"

You don't say... Almost sounds like planting a sign in your yard enumerating the various reasons you're a good person is the brand of activism advocated by regressive causes. Doesn't matter if you do anything to advocate those causes, so long as you pretend to care. Broadcasting it to your other privileged friends and neighbors. That way you can continue business as usual while thriving on the status-quo, but rest assured you're on a pedestal above everyone who didn't plant a sign next to their stoop proclaiming activism. Printed free of regulation in SE Asia, wrapped in plastic, shipped across the ocean, and delivered to your front door. Now if only there were a way to wear it on your face...

Hermitian9092• 5 years ago

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 make the producers solely responsible for any side effects. What is immoral is trying to artificially delay the transition to more sustainable alternatives or to socialize the costs of doing business.

Oil companies have repeatedly run well funded PR campaigns with the explicit goal of discrediting arguments that more sustainable energy technology was necessary despite knowing them to be false. Similarly, they have lobbied hard to ensure that when the impacts of oil to the environment are larger than expected, society picks up the tab. This lets them be more reckless with our communal environmental resources.

glogla2• 5 years ago

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.

namanyayg2• 5 years ago

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.

LeifCarrotson2• 5 years ago

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.

papandada• 5 years ago

There is a market for the products they supply at the price they offer, there is a demand for return on investment they provide in a global financial system (and just try to disconnect from that).

I hate that companies are ruining the environment, I hate that companies are killing people with unsafe products, I hate that companies are mistreating workers, I hate that countries have bullied their way over indigenous peoples to "own" the country I live it, I hate that companies profit off of promoting things that destroy humanity as we used to know it.

But I don't see there being a clear line between who is "good" and who is "bad". My own answer, which I expect will please very few, is that we do our best in the small sphere of influence we have to be loving toward all, and beg God to save us.

slingnow3• 5 years ago

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 not prone to ridiculous hyperbole.

jfengel2• 5 years ago

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.

troyvit• 5 years ago

That's totally true, but it's also true that if we reined in consumption, altered our habits and focused on reusing more then we are doing two things. First, we're taking ownership for our responsibility in this whole mess (acknowledging that there are trees in this forest), and second we're hurting oil companies where it counts. If we don't consume they can't supply.

If we wait for our governments to hold them to account we're not going to get anywhere.

nicoburns• 5 years ago

If we pushed up the cost of that consumption I'd be willing to bet we'd see it magically reduce.

jkubicek• 5 years ago

I don't think focusing on individual responsibility will work. In order to make a meaningful difference we need to make sure that

a) everyone knows what the issues are and what changes need to be made b) everyone is willing to make the sacrifices necessary

If we've learned anything from (the entire history of the human race) it's that people who know and care will shoulder the burden of making changes while those who don't will benefit from it all.

If we want to make a dent in our fossil fuel consumption, we need meaningful action at the national and global scale by major political powers. Taxes, regulation, criminal consequences are the only way to move the needle.

edit: dougmwne said it better than I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317665

lhorie2• 5 years ago

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, whose fault is it that people living under democratic rules don't challenge the efficacy of their governments? Or, perhaps more importantly, why?

I think the problem with finger pointing is that it distracts from meaningful introspection. I think there are far deeper connections between oil and consumption than the "I do my part" crowd seems to realize, from the economics of the logistics industry, all the way down to the fundamental assumption that modern growth-oriented economics and consumption are even "normal" (compared to, say, how native tribes lived eons ago). In other words, merely being aware of the need for unsustainable resources in various cases doesn't fully detach us from the reality that the system we rely on to live is broken.

Sometimes I contemplate the "weird" trees in this forest: people investing into off-grid living, or people stocking up bunkers, or isolated tribes in the middle of nowhere; and I wonder if thinking about regular society in terms of scalable homogeneous solutions isn't in a way similar to breeding cavendish bananas - highly optimized in one specific metric, but susceptible to being wiped out globally by a single unforeseen threat (or in our case, by one of the many potential global catastrophes that scientists have been warning about)

If darwinism applies to civilizations, things ain't looking great for the vast majority of us precisely because we're stuck in a rut talking about ifs-and-buts instead of physically adapting to the logical end state of the trends we see in scientific data.

PaulHoule• 5 years ago

This could be asteroid that kills us

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

Concentrated interests (oil companies) tend to win in battles against diffuse interests (individuals and their descendants who are threatened by climate change.)

An interesting corollary is that a "majority" oppressing a "minority" is not a going concern, but the opposite is. That is, black vs white in the United States vs. South Africa are entirely different things. (Think, 90% of the population can steal everything from 10% of the population and raise it's standard of living by about 10%. 10% of the population can steal 10% of the standard of living from the other 90% and double its own standard of living.)

imtringued2• 5 years ago

I think there are two reasons.

Capitalism rests on the promise that inequality maximizes economic growth and economic growth in itself will sweep all other social problems including inequality away. Once there is a prolonged period without (high enough) growth, the promise becomes worthless. People see the inequality for what it is.

However, since there is no growth, they are barely scraping by. They have no spare resources to throw into caring about the environment. So they will all do the thing that hurts them the least today. Meaning they will prefer cheap and destructive products and services over sustainable but expensive ones. Mandating sustainability essentially forces expensive products down the throat of people but since inequality is high they can't afford them.

What truly perplexes me though is that even in Germany people will keep voting for parties that basically double "dip", they promise to ensure the availability of cheap unsustainable products but also enact policies that make inequality worse. Cheap meat and oil have basically become a form of welfare to bribe the population.

pas3• 5 years ago

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.

Hermitian9092• 5 years ago

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.

riversflow• 5 years ago

I mostly agree with what you said here. I'm constantly reminding people I know that its called the petrochemical industry because its about far more than just fossil fuels, you can't unwind the need for advanced chemicals in modern society, the population is just too big for us to realistically unwind our need for e.g. the Haber-Bosch process without major advances, and both the pharmaceuticals industry and high tech are completely dependent on extremely complicated oil-based supply chains. Many people will at this juncture reply that we just need less people, but thats not really an ethical solution by any modern standard.

susceptible to being wiped out globally by a single unforeseen threat

I'm actually pretty optimistic about this, I think that we have enough people and growing standards of education, that assuming the technological solutions are out there, we will probably find them. The only threat that we aren't taking seriously that would really screw us up is some sort of cosmic event (I am very frustrated that with all the talks of creating a more flexible grid for renewables we aren't taking on the added burden of hardening against a solar storm, which seems inevitable. I'm pretty sure we would be pretty screwed if another Carrington Event happened today.[1])

"democracy is the voice of the people" argument.

Serious question, is this really a point of view that people have in serious circles? I don't know a single person who believes that the US doesn't suffer from a burgeoning plutocracy. I've been calling this the second guilded age for years now, and it only seems to be getting worse. There is no Teddy Roosevelt figure rising that I see. I can only hope that the next generation of politicians will take reigning in this monster more seriously, but I'm skeptical.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event I feel like something of this magnitude would be enough of a setback on science, in many ways, that all hope might be lost of escaping the terminal state we have put the earth into.

hnaccount141• 5 years ago

Or more philosophically speaking, whose fault is it that people living under democratic rules don't challenge the efficacy of their governments? Or, perhaps more importantly, why?

Because, in the US at least, average people have very little actual influence over government policy relative to the influence enjoyed by business interests and the capital class.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

pope_meat• 5 years ago

The democracy is more of an illusion, because the biggest factor in a particular policy being implemented is whether or not the wealth class supports it. If a bill has 70% support from the poor/middle class but 70% of the upper class oppose it...it's pretty likely to never pass. Reverse the numbers where 70% of the commoners don't support the bill, but 70% of the upper class do...well it's pretty likely to pass.

https://represent.us/action/no-the-problem/

rib3ye• 5 years ago

I don't think it's pessimistic to say that as the "green" economy expands we are starting to see those same well-funded parties buying PR to selling snake oil or spreading fud. Energy is pretty hard to the average person to understand and energy+politics is almost impossible without some interest/background in foreign policy.

https://www.kochind.com/stewardship/environmental-performanc...

FrankenTan• 5 years ago

I agree. Also, sometimes if there exists no demand, corporations will spend a lot to create it such as fashion as mentioned\shown in https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-12/fast-fashion-turning-...

This is probably not be true for all markets or industries, of course, but I think that (and availability regarding prices) is relevant to not shifting it back onto individual consumer responsibility.

datawaslost7• 5 years ago

Huh! It’s not every day you see your work called out in The Guardian as “insidious propaganda”!

I worked for Ogilvy and Mather in the 00s and made the Carbon footprint stuff they mention, at least one version of it. Didn’t come up with the concept or wording, but was responsible for the web implementation in the US.

AMA, I guess

datawaslost7• 5 years ago

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.

rfw300• 5 years ago

Do you think it was wrong to do in hindsight?

vanderZwan• 5 years ago

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 sustainability things with big sacks o' money. One might almost say "embrace, extend (the usage of oil), extinguish".

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

uhorb• 5 years ago

Oh cool, thank you.

I’ve read that oil companies were well aware of how climate change is going to develop based on their sales volume and the resulting oil consumption.

Assuming that's true for BP. To which detail was the climate change impact communicated to you? Was it an explicit requirement to focus public interest away from BP?

What is your opinion on the article in this post?

datawaslost7• 5 years ago

I can't really speak to BP's higher-level strategy, but this was the mid-2000s. The fact that an oil company was saying anything about climate change felt like a step forward. Other oil companies' ads were all about American workers and generic shots of sunsets over oil fields, BP wanted to position themselves as the "green" gas station at a time when that was becoming more a concern - not just with climate change but overall. At that point, BP had a pretty good environmental record compared to competitors like Exxon, who was still reeling from the Valdez disaster - so the requirement would've been to focus public interest on BP, not away from it.

But oil companies don't run ads telling people not to buy gasoline, so you've got to come at it from a slightly different angle. Luckily, "Greener than Exxon" was a pretty low bar, so they didn't need to talk about carbon taxes or emissions. Personal energy consumption has been a part of the discourse since the 70s, and probably fit in well - virtually no one will actually change their habits in any meaningful way, but will probably come out of it feeling better about themselves and BP.

The article itself seemed kinda all over the place. I agree that the world would be a better place if her preferences would've been enacted fifteen years ago, but I'm not sure that BP's advertising campaign had that much to do with it. It wasn't 4-D chess, it was "BP = Green = Good", and literally blew up in their face a few years later when Deepwater exploded.

rocgf• 5 years ago

There is this one thing I always wonder about, not just in this particular context, but generally about what is seen as "greedy" corporations, politicians and so on.

Was the conversation ever blatantly villainous or was it a bit more veiled, as is the public discourse?

datawaslost7• 5 years ago

What would the unveiled villainous conversation sound like?

I think this stuff is a lot less complex than people think. Companies just want to increase sales with effective marketing that makes them look better than their competitors.

SuoDuanDao3• 5 years ago

Honestly, the only way for grassroots efforts to do anything is to become less dependent on these doubleplus ungood corporations. I think your work is incredibly valuable, and given the quality of the Guardian recently I wouldn't be surprised to learn they're criticising your work because it encourages people to consoom less.

Bit of a technical question for your AMA, how do you see the tradeoffs in carbon footprints if supply chains shorten? There's efficiencies of scale balanced against cost of moving materials that I assume means the smallest carbon footprint for a given lifestyle requires some extended supply chains, but probably shorter than what we have today. Any thoughts on that?

datawaslost7• 5 years ago

It's interesting how much more complicated and better thought-out that stuff is now than it was fifteen years ago. I think supply chains and lifecycles are a huge part of things, and it was barely a part of our thinking back then. It was more like "hey did you know taking a plane burns carbon too?"

djanogo• 5 years ago

Isn't Big oil coining "carbon footprint" similar to Big tech coining "FSD"/"Autonomous Driving"?, doing what they need to do to support their investments?

TomAbel• 5 years ago

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".

majormajor4• 5 years ago

They could certainly have been good for the world and also bad for the world going forward. We even have cliches about this, "too much of a good thing," etc. It's not a difficult concept.

me_me_me• 5 years ago

let me fix it for you

Fossil fuels 'were' good for 'the current human civilization, as it allowed to quickly develop technology at the cost of future' because we did not have any real alternative at the time.

LeifCarrotson2• 5 years ago

You can run an industrialized economy on renewable energy. It just wouldn't look the same as the one we have developed in the presence of fossil fuels.

If there were a colony of modern humans established on an Earth-like planet that lacked surface coal seams, didn't have limestone deposits for cement, and lacked oil fields, you wouldn't expect them to shrug and say "Well, back to the stone age, I guess."

No, instead, they'd set up smart grid networks to use power when wind and solar were available and consume less energy when it was not. They'd use DC-DC converters that were more flexible under brownouts, where early energy systems didn't have that technology and had to rely on fixed transformers and fixed frequencies. They'd connect long distance, high-voltage lines between areas with hydro and geothermal energy to regions without, using pumped hydro storage when variable energy sources had excesses. Yes, they'd run Sabatier process factories to generate synthetic hydrocarbons for plastics and portable fuels, they'd precipitate calcium carbonate from ocean salts and atmospheric CO2 to make cements and ceramics; these would probably be less plentiful as a result of their cost and because they'd be aware that they don't decay but they wouldn't be nonexistent.

Our energy systems are moving bit by painful bit in this direction already. Indian, African, and other growing economies are growing in a world where renewables are cheap, where we have tech that makes them more usable, and where there's a lot of knowledge about climate and environmental science so they don't have to make the same mistakes we did.

Yes, the industrialized world works the way it does because of a history of fossil fuels. It may even have been impossible to jump-start the industrial revolution without them. But it doesn't have to remain that way.

seanwilson• 5 years ago

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.

dougmwne• 5 years ago

There is a heck of a lot of this that goes on within the energy and environment community where I have been involved for a decade. Tragedy of the Commons basically means that individual responsibility is a complete dead-end to solve any kind of shared resource issue. We've known this formally within economics for 200 years. Government, law and enforcement is the only solution, whether we're talking a city park or the entire planet's atmosphere. You should know that any time you are getting shamed or guilted into doing something like recycling, reducing energy consumption, cutting up plastic soda rings, instead of there being a law, some monied interest put a lot of effort into shifting the perception of responsibility away from themselves and onto someone else.

I am a staunch environmentalist and I full out reject any effort to make any of this somehow my personal fault and that I should guiltily stop having children, stop traveling, stop eating, stop driving or anything else. We are either all in this together, collectively solving the problem through our collectively determined governments or we're not.

More and more I think we are not going to solve this in a way that doesn't involve a massive diminishing of planetary carrying capacity. Currently we are bailing out the Titanic with a thimble.

heurisko2• 5 years ago

I should guiltily stop having children

The unintended consequence is that only the conscientious people take themselves out of the gene pool, which is counterproductive.

olyjohn2• 5 years ago

Well, their kids could still end up being assholes.

birksherty2• 5 years ago

What is exactly counterproductive? These children will suffer the consequences in coming years, better they don't have to.

boplicity2• 5 years ago

The climate crisis is too big to solve as an individual. Even if a million of us immediately stopped driving cars, and lived in a carbon-neutral commune nothing would change, in terms of the overall climate picture.

The only way to solve this is to build new infrastructure that removes the need for carbon emissions, while also stopping oil extraction at an increasingly rapid pace. Anything else is a distraction, and that includes asking people to "help" by driving less.

If you want people to make good choices, those good choices need to be made possible, effective, and meaningful. This is what our politicians have been avoiding.

Here in Toronto, our local federal MP once posted on Twitter that he fights climate change by shopping at a local produce market. Not only was this absolutely not stopping climate change in any meaningful way at all, it reflects the absolute inability of the vast majority of politicians to communicate that they understand the severity of the situation, much less do anything meaningful about it.

ivankirigin• 5 years ago

Blaming supply or demand when you have an unpriced negative externality doesn't make sense. Tax carbon, and use the funds to pay for decarbonization. We'll get better and cheaper alternatives and carbon sinks.

Many quote $100 to $1000/tCO2e. But if we get down to $10, getting to net zero and negative won't break the bank.

dredmorbius• 5 years ago

Who do you think opposes carbon taxes, why, and how do you think they express that will politically, and by what means of supporting that action?

One of the largely unspoken truths of economics is that wealth is power.

Actually, it was spoken, by Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, but somehow that short, succinct, critical phrase is ignored in favour of a much longer one strung together out of multiple sections over hundreds of pages using what for Smith was not an explanatory mechanism, as it's often portrayed, but of a statement of ignorance, that a cause is unknown.

i1856511• 5 years ago

This article is right. Individual liability for climate change is a con. The absolute best thing you can do as an individual for the climate is to never have existed in the first place. This sets your climate footprint to 0. However, even in this case, this does not change the trajectory of climate change at all. The hypothetical best is not good enough. So, individual liability is much ado about nothing.

csours• 5 years ago

I know HN just puts the title from the article, but I'd love it if we could add an OPINION when it's an opinion article.

kumarvvr• 5 years ago

I would have happily taken that blame, if not for the oil companies decades long and bad faith activities against climate change. Their lobbying, funding dubious studies, tactics of FUD, outright lying, etc.

Those must have consequences.

Why taxpayers are made to give billions to them every year is beyond understanding.

arcanon• 5 years ago

Step 1: electric aircraft Step 2: airstrike refineries

amai2• 5 years ago

“People who don’t know the truth are dumb. But people who know the truth and lie about it are criminals. “

Berthold Brecht

amai2• 5 years ago

"The revolution won’t happen by people staying home and being good."

A wise quote from the article

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

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