What about the state oil companies of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, and others that produce the other 95% of the oil?
Climate Change is not a problem that can be unilaterally solved by the West. Saudi Arabia isnt going to agree to be a poor desert backwater again to protect beachfront property in Malibu.
Climate Change is a massively intractable problem. The fact that the West's favored solutions are Hail Mary bets on radically increased performance of batteries and renewable energy sources that are unlikely to be achieved at best, is highly disconcerting.
We've had a good 25 years to ramp up next gen nuclear, which can work at volume and much more safely, but it's been frittered away on the hope that renewables can function as baseload.
Perhaps this is just my ignorance showing, but wasn't the data that Exxon based its own modelling on more or less publicly available? It can't have been a secret how many barrels were being pulled out of the ground each year? What am I missing?
Far from wanting to defend Exxon, but regardless whether or not they knew; if the narrative is that the "world outside Exxon" didn't know, doesn't that in itself amount to wilful ignorance or negligence at best?
What data did they have that the rest of the academic/political world couldn't add up on its own without corporate cooperation?
The authors have been doing work in this direction for several years. Since McKibben's substack is written for "insiders", I guess he assumed people would know where to look.
The "famous", at least in some circles, paper on climate change created in 1977. It has predicted our current actual temperature increases along with carbon emissions with startling accuracy:
The lack of references combined with the “I was arrested for pointless virtue signaling protest” lead in doesn't make for the effective argument the author thinks it does.
So, now we know, Exxon has the best crack team of climate scientists. My question is, what are they predicting for the 2020s-2100s period (my lifetime)? If they're really so accurate then we could assume their future predictions are reasonably accurate as well.
In China, the authorities would immediately send the police to arrest the entire corporate suite. They have even executed corrupt CEOs, for example in the tainted milk scandal.
In the United States, nothing will happen. No law was broken, you would say. Still. There should be consequences. There should have been consequences. In China, prosecutors would chalk it up to general charges of "corruption" or "public dishonesty" or whatever.
It's a position of honor and integrity that carries a burden of the public trust.
If people are exposed as underhanded scoundrels, they should be stripped of the privilege of being in c-suites.
We have rules by the SEC that do similar things for other crimes and analogous rules for other professions like law and medicine.
If someone abuses a child, they can't be around children anymore, if someone gets a restraining order because they're being harassed, the harasser is restricted as well.
When someone does egregious crimes while acting as an executive, they shouldn't be allowed to be an executive any more
China strikes me as a somewhat oppressive society, whose norms and mores I would prefer not to live under. However, I do not have the impression that it is ruled by fiat. They have harsh laws against corruption, though my impression is that enforcement is uneven and many choose to gamble, on either not getting caught or being able to bribe their way out of trouble.
Isn't it possible that you're just defaulting to assuming business operators are generally innocent and public authorities generally dictatorial?
I don’t know what are you talking about and why are you arguing with me.
Read the original comment I replied to.
It’s along the lines of “It is bad that in US there are no consequences when no law is broken or when it cannot be proven. In China they can just charge you with corruption in general or whatever and hang you.”
I felt you misrepresented it, and that you have done again here. It makes a simple policy argument that there should be sterner consequences for lying to the public, contrasting the US with some other countries. You have rewritten it to say something quite different.
It's simple; China has strong laws against self-dealing, and (in the poster's view) their legal code is not riddled with loopholes and getout clauses. We have the same concept in the USA, but it is rarely applies to financial crimes. It's called 'strict liability.'
And have you not noticed how people sometimes get longer prison terms for small crimes than large ones? As of 2021, the US incarcerates ~5x more people than China (per capita), but penalties for untoward business activity are generally light.
The point is that that country has strong general laws against corruption. The US does not; deceiving consumers is largely excused here, and stiff punishments are reserved for deceiving investors.
Revealed: Exxon made ‘breathtakingly’ accurate climate predictions in 70s & 80s
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34358759 (111 comments)