The fossil fuel companies knew their product was harmful years before the words global warming were even part of the zeitgeist. They could have begun planning for the future in a responsible way. Instead they spent millions of dollars every year spreading lies, misinformation, doubt, and turning it into a political wedge issue.
Probably 40% of Americans now live inside of a subculture that would ridicule them if they did decide to accept the science and take it seriously and that is a direct consequence of decades and hundreds of millions of dollars of concerted effort on the part of the industry.
corporations are building these products and then paying other corporations to convince people that they need to buy these disposable products made from nonrenewable and unsustainable resources.
We wouldn't buy the dumb shit that we use if we weren't convinced that we needed it by marketers.
It seems that you have become quite aware of the people that are trying to convince you to buy all these things. Now that you know this, are there steps you are taking to become less convincable?
You're pivoting right back to blaming the individual.
Why is it my responsibility to not be convinced - but if those companies are bombarding me with propaganda each day, backed by state-of-the-art psychology, that's perfectly fine?
I am. Though it's hard to overcome the constant drumbeat of ads that exploit baser instincts. And while education is part of the answer it clearly doesn't work quickly or as thoroughly as regulation to protect the commons.
The article isn’t really about whether blame should fall on the individual versus a corporation, but why do you feel it doesn’t fall on individuals? It is individuals’ consumerist habits and hunger for extreme convenience that makes these corporations viable? I see the argument that the individuals didn’t know the tradeoffs (due to deceptive corporate actions the article mentions) but I am not confident that greater clarity would have mattered much either.
I feel much of the problem is due to our culture - if you have a large population that wants a lot of things, bad things will happen. If a culture is willing to emphasize living more simply and portraying happiness and status in other ways, consumption will reduce. But culture is bigger than individuals and corporations - and I can’t see blaming just one of them.
Exxon had their own state of the art climate science department. Way back in 1982 they accurately predicted that in 2020 co2 would be around 415ppm and there would be about 1C of warming.
At a time when the average person had never even heard of global warming Exxon had already confirmed their product was irreversibly damaging the planet and shortly thereafter shuttered their science program and began spending millions a year funding public influence campaigns to sew doubt misinformation, and turn the issue into a political wedge.
Of course the companies are vastly more culpable than the public. The average person is far too busy trying to keep their lives in order to educate themselves on a highly complicated scientific issue. Especially when much of the population lives within a subculture that would turn on them and ridicule them if they did look into the issue deeply because the fossil fuel PR machine managed to co-opt all of their political and cultural leaders.
The corporations had the information, the clarity, and the opportunity to do the right thing. Instead they chose to poison the discourse and stymie progress any way they could.
edit: Exxon accurately predicted 1C of warming by 2020 not 2C
As I understand, Oil companies only reviewed other scientists theories, they didn´t do research themselves.
At the end of the day it will come down to you lowering your living standards by using less energy. Much less energy. And a really large reduction in living standard where everything you consume will cost at least double of what you pay today. Even if you blame the fossile fuel industry, you will have to pay. Oil is the cheapest energy there is. You have the choice today to stop all your emission of co2, so why don´t you? Because it´s uncomfortable. Your comfort is the cause of climate change. I´m fortunate enough to realize that climate change caused by co2 is a thermodynamic impossibility because it implies that earth heats itself by energy creation. Life is much easier without believing in doomsday cults.
That's bullshit. There is a myriad of ways to get energy without fossil fuels. Wind and Solar are both cheaper than coal now and electric cars are like 97% efficient compared to ICE cars that are closer to 40%. We can replace the fossil fuel energy we use and add more to meet growing demand using wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, tidal, etc. We need a price on carbon and we need people to get their heads out of their own ass.
Also you're understanding of the thermodynamics of climate change are completely bat shit.
Exxon HAD ITS OWN CLIMATE SCIENCE PROGRAM which was outfitted with better equipment than most government programs. They weren't just reviewing other scientists theories.
All those tobacco, oil and paint executives retired with their $millions untouched, despite millions of deaths laid right at their doorsteps.
Shoot up a Walmart, though, or crash one plane, and the nation goes on a rampage.
Laws already on the books allow those executives to be charged personally. I want a Justice Department that will use the law to take on the killers of millions.
> Shoot up a Walmart ... and the nation goes on a rampage.
And rightly so. The most prominent recent example of that was motivated by racism against Hispanics. It was terrorism.
Using that as a foil for real crimes by those industry executives (whom I agree in a better society should be held to justice for their actions) reads like an apologism of one type of mass murder for another.
There are far lesser crimes - like selling crack - that are far better examples of the unequal application of justice.
> Is killing millions for profit less bad than killing tens for bigotry?
I'm saying it's a pointless comparison. They're both horrendous crimes and should both be punished and justice pursued for their victims. I agree with you that it's a crying shame that killing millions for profit does not get punished.
A much better for foil to make your point - which I agree is a valid one - would be the number of people in prisons for nonviolent offenses thanks to things like 3-strikes laws, not bigoted murderers.
Are you advocating that we treat bigotry-motivated mass murder as occurred at the El Paso Walmart more leniently (as a society and in the justice system), just because we are failing to hold the even greater crimes accountable? That is the implied subtext of your original comment, at least as I read it.
If that's not what you are advocating, then I'd argue the Walmart shooter is a poorly chosen example, and that we are in agreement about the overall issue (lack of accountability for very wealthy executives whose businesses have caused the death of tons of people).
I said not one word about El Paso. Inventing leniency advocacy is not honest.
Still, the whole scene was entirely within the capabilities of the El Paso PD. You know about it only because it was lurid, not because it had any effect on you at all (presuming you don't shop at that Walmart).
A million cancer cases for corporate profit are not lurid enough, evidently.
A national response to cases like El Paso would crack down on right-wing nutjobs, but that (too) is absolutely not happening. That is a problem with the FBI, not the DoJ, and is another worthy topic, but not this one.
The DoJ already have all they need to empanel grand juries and issue indictments.
> You know about it only because it was lurid, not because it had any effect on you at all (presuming you don't shop at that Walmart).
As someone who has on many occasions been the recipient of physical intimidation and harassment by white supremacists, I assure you it affects me when it happens to others, in whatever degree.
> A national response to cases like El Paso would crack down on right-wing nutjobs, but that (too) is absolutely not happening. That is a problem with the FBI
The FBI are getting a little bit of pushback on that from DoJ's boss:
There is an active whistleblower complaint from within DHS that the administration-appointed heads of that department are trying to suppress release of assessments of the white supremacist threat:
It's a difficult proposition to "restore faith in capitalism" when the core tenet of that ideology, that consumption is good because it is a marker of human industriousness, is directly responsible for most if not all of the environmental problems that we now face.
Am I saying it is a bad thing to expand human knowledge and endeavor? Of course not, I like the medications and conveniences that it has brought me. But these things are also absolutely not an untainted justification of the processes used by capitalism to arrive at the result. The Soviets made great planes and tanks too, and Jonas Salk had no problem giving away the rights to his Polio vaccine. The Apollo program, perhaps the USA's greatest achievement, was also its greatest experiment in communal effort.
That seems unsupportable. Climate models make predictions and those predictions can be checked later. In fact the results are in, and despite what deniers claim, the models are not overstating the problem. If you doubt that, watch this video:
"Gah, just another youtube idiot", I can hear you say. But here is the difference. The guy is a geologist by degree and spent his career as a science reporter. He repeatedly says: don't believe me, just like you shouldn't believe the press reporting on it (which is always prone to simplistic summaries and hyperbole). What sets him apart, besides his level tone, is he reads primary sources (and encourages you to do so too) and cites all of his sources, unlike just about every denialist. If he later finds out he has some fact wrong, he happily admits it and posts the correction prominently in the video description.
As far as physics and biology ... those are very broad fields and some of it is falsifiable and some not.
It's not falsifiable in the sense that it's factual and so that makes it practically impossible to falsify, but if it wasn't factual it would absolutely be falsifiable.
It isn't like some magical invisible ephemeral floating teapot with no mass that senses peoples attempts to detect it and evades them intelligently.
The numbers simply don’t add up for a consumer oriented solution to make any sense.
Probably 40% of Americans now live inside of a subculture that would ridicule them if they did decide to accept the science and take it seriously and that is a direct consequence of decades and hundreds of millions of dollars of concerted effort on the part of the industry.
We wouldn't buy the dumb shit that we use if we weren't convinced that we needed it by marketers.
Why is it my responsibility to not be convinced - but if those companies are bombarding me with propaganda each day, backed by state-of-the-art psychology, that's perfectly fine?
In my case it works so well I am often unaware of new "trends" in products adverti
I feel much of the problem is due to our culture - if you have a large population that wants a lot of things, bad things will happen. If a culture is willing to emphasize living more simply and portraying happiness and status in other ways, consumption will reduce. But culture is bigger than individuals and corporations - and I can’t see blaming just one of them.
At a time when the average person had never even heard of global warming Exxon had already confirmed their product was irreversibly damaging the planet and shortly thereafter shuttered their science program and began spending millions a year funding public influence campaigns to sew doubt misinformation, and turn the issue into a political wedge.
Of course the companies are vastly more culpable than the public. The average person is far too busy trying to keep their lives in order to educate themselves on a highly complicated scientific issue. Especially when much of the population lives within a subculture that would turn on them and ridicule them if they did look into the issue deeply because the fossil fuel PR machine managed to co-opt all of their political and cultural leaders.
The corporations had the information, the clarity, and the opportunity to do the right thing. Instead they chose to poison the discourse and stymie progress any way they could.
edit: Exxon accurately predicted 1C of warming by 2020 not 2C
At the end of the day it will come down to you lowering your living standards by using less energy. Much less energy. And a really large reduction in living standard where everything you consume will cost at least double of what you pay today. Even if you blame the fossile fuel industry, you will have to pay. Oil is the cheapest energy there is. You have the choice today to stop all your emission of co2, so why don´t you? Because it´s uncomfortable. Your comfort is the cause of climate change. I´m fortunate enough to realize that climate change caused by co2 is a thermodynamic impossibility because it implies that earth heats itself by energy creation. Life is much easier without believing in doomsday cults.
Also you're understanding of the thermodynamics of climate change are completely bat shit.
Shoot up a Walmart, though, or crash one plane, and the nation goes on a rampage.
Laws already on the books allow those executives to be charged personally. I want a Justice Department that will use the law to take on the killers of millions.
And rightly so. The most prominent recent example of that was motivated by racism against Hispanics. It was terrorism.
Using that as a foil for real crimes by those industry executives (whom I agree in a better society should be held to justice for their actions) reads like an apologism of one type of mass murder for another.
There are far lesser crimes - like selling crack - that are far better examples of the unequal application of justice.
Has even a single tobacco or coal executive been arraigned for murder?
Is killing millions for profit less bad than killing tens for bigotry?
I'm saying it's a pointless comparison. They're both horrendous crimes and should both be punished and justice pursued for their victims. I agree with you that it's a crying shame that killing millions for profit does not get punished.
A much better for foil to make your point - which I agree is a valid one - would be the number of people in prisons for nonviolent offenses thanks to things like 3-strikes laws, not bigoted murderers.
If that's not what you are advocating, then I'd argue the Walmart shooter is a poorly chosen example, and that we are in agreement about the overall issue (lack of accountability for very wealthy executives whose businesses have caused the death of tons of people).
Still, the whole scene was entirely within the capabilities of the El Paso PD. You know about it only because it was lurid, not because it had any effect on you at all (presuming you don't shop at that Walmart).
A million cancer cases for corporate profit are not lurid enough, evidently.
A national response to cases like El Paso would crack down on right-wing nutjobs, but that (too) is absolutely not happening. That is a problem with the FBI, not the DoJ, and is another worthy topic, but not this one.
The DoJ already have all they need to empanel grand juries and issue indictments.
As someone who has on many occasions been the recipient of physical intimidation and harassment by white supremacists, I assure you it affects me when it happens to others, in whatever degree.
> A national response to cases like El Paso would crack down on right-wing nutjobs, but that (too) is absolutely not happening. That is a problem with the FBI
The FBI are getting a little bit of pushback on that from DoJ's boss:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/us/politics/fbi-russia.ht...
There is an active whistleblower complaint from within DHS that the administration-appointed heads of that department are trying to suppress release of assessments of the white supremacist threat:
https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/homeland-security-whi...
Am I saying it is a bad thing to expand human knowledge and endeavor? Of course not, I like the medications and conveniences that it has brought me. But these things are also absolutely not an untainted justification of the processes used by capitalism to arrive at the result. The Soviets made great planes and tanks too, and Jonas Salk had no problem giving away the rights to his Polio vaccine. The Apollo program, perhaps the USA's greatest achievement, was also its greatest experiment in communal effort.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugwqXKHLrGk&t=2s
"Gah, just another youtube idiot", I can hear you say. But here is the difference. The guy is a geologist by degree and spent his career as a science reporter. He repeatedly says: don't believe me, just like you shouldn't believe the press reporting on it (which is always prone to simplistic summaries and hyperbole). What sets him apart, besides his level tone, is he reads primary sources (and encourages you to do so too) and cites all of his sources, unlike just about every denialist. If he later finds out he has some fact wrong, he happily admits it and posts the correction prominently in the video description.
As far as physics and biology ... those are very broad fields and some of it is falsifiable and some not.
It isn't like some magical invisible ephemeral floating teapot with no mass that senses peoples attempts to detect it and evades them intelligently.