I think the flaw in your argument is the assumption that the demand for fossil fuel is variable depending on anything Exxon has to say. I don’t see an Exxon ad and think “man I should buy an SUV”.

You wouldn’t blame an electric company on you buying electronic items, it’s the usefulness of the items themselves that drives the sales.

Demand is a function of many factors, including individual ethical concern and cost. Exxon has spent billions to reduce both of these effects - ethical concern is reduced because of the seed of doubt about climate change, and cost is reduced because of political contributions. Exxon is a great example of a firm successfully privatizing profit and socializing cost.

it's the usefulness of the item in relation to its cost and the cost to run it. an electric heater is quite useful, but also takes a lot of electricity. if the electric company promises that i'll spend less on electricity for heating than i would on gas, then that does make a difference.

so yes, if exxon would promise that the gas prices are so low that i can afford an SUV, then i might be persuaded.

Fossil fuels are not illegal. In fact USA has fought several wars and spent trillions of dollars to keep the flow going. So sue Exxon for a lot of other things, but not for producing fossil fuels.

EDIT: In fact people go nuts when gas prices approach $4 a gallon, which is maybe 2-3 times cheaper than in some European countries (when adjusting for income levels)

>This is an invalid argument, verging on non sequitor.

But it isn't. We cannot live without oil today. Oil is not like cigarettes. If every oil company decided to close shop tomorrow, every government in the world would step in and force them open.

There are cases where in principle we could remove oil uses (e.g. converting ICE to EVs), but there are thousands of products that require oil to make that have no obvious substitutes, from crayons to car tires, to shaving cream, to industrial lubricants, and so on. Airplanes, rockets, cargo ships, long-haul trucks cannot run on batteries, and require the energy density of oil to operate. Asphalt, the miracle road material, is essentially gravel and bitumen - a petroleum byproduct.

It does raise the question of, what are we blaming Exxon for?

Oil usage has an inherent societal cost. Exxon knew about the cost and suppressed that knowledge, much in the way big tobacco did.

If we had known, we may have not allowed them to externalize that societal cost so aggressively or required the cost be offset in some way (investments in carbon sinks to offset usage). This would have increased the price of oil, gas and coal, hurting their bottom line, but it would have made alternatives more economically viable sooner.

Anyway, the answer is lying. They lied about the dangers of their products and should be punished for that.

It's scapegoating, grandstanding and extortion - that's all it is. And you're abrogating your responsibility for your part in this when you use hundreds of petroleum-based products in your day-to-day life.

The oil companies had nothing to do with climate change action or inaction. They are providing a critical product that we can't do without even today, and we certainly could not do without when science started to come up with non-speculative evidence of human-caused climate change. US economy grounded to halt when Arab nations instituted oil embargo - with the outcome pushing Western governments to push oil companies to look for alternatives oil sources for national security reasons. You want to blame Exxon for that? As recent as this year, France experienced violent riots when gas prices rose. That's how important oil was and continues to be to the global economy. There was no need for Exxon to lie about anything.

>but it would have made alternatives more economically viable sooner.

LIKE WHAT? We have been looking for alternatives for decades. Chemistry and thermodynamics are a hard mistress. We have nothing, even today, with the energy density and portability of petroleum.

So I have no idea what you're talking about when you're creating a hypothetical world with your alternatives to oil or mitigations like 'carbon sinks' (which will never work) or whatever other mythical solution you come up with. There was no alternative to oil. There are no alternatives to oil today for the tens of thousands of products that require petroleum for manufacture. There is no alternative to oil today for global trade (airplanes, cargo ships, trucking).

By far (and it isn't even close) the biggest climate-change disaster was Western abandonment of nuclear energy in the 70s due to the FUD put out by environmental groups.

By the way, I don't see wind and solar companies proclaiming what a disaster those technologies are to the environment (from requirement of rare earth materials, to land-use and environment destruction after deployment, to lack of recyclability). Do you want to sue them to too?

This lawsuit is like two lieutenants on a sinking ship getting in a fight over whose fault it is that they got torpedoed. One of the two may be right, but none the less it's pointless and unproductive. There are more important things to do.

Unless of course the ship is sinking really slowly and one of them might get elected governor before the whole thing goes down.

In this case we could get huge sums of money to fix the sinking ship(climate change). So, I am not seeing how this analogy applies.

Exxon's current market cap is something like 300 billion. It is worth that much because of future claims it has on profits from the extraction, refinement and sale of oil. If Exxon makes enough to recoup that... you'll have another 50ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere.

So no. You won't have a huge sum of money to fix the sinking ship. You'll be bailing water from one compartment and throwing it into another.

How much could we possibly get? Nothing proportional to the cost of a solution, certainly.

The reason the characters are lieutenants in my story is because this problem is bigger than them. You could take every penny the oil companies have and it would barely make a dent in the problem. This isn't a money problem it is a fundamental economic and industrial structure of society problem.

> You could take every penny the oil companies have and it would barely make a dent in the problem.

Citation needed. The top 10 oil companies [1] had a cumulative $2.5 trillion dollars in revenue in 2017. I'd say that'd go a long way in climate change R&D.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_oil_and_gas_co...

Revenue, not profit. Oil is very low margin. Oil companies makes about 7 cents per gallon of gasoline. That's a lot less than the amount of money that is collected from gasoline taxes.

https://www.forbes.com/2011/05/10/oil-company-earnings.html#...

Value would go to zero the minute you announce confiscation or whatever we call it. And revenue is different from money in the bank or assets.

So, nationalize oil sales revenue to fight to raise money to climate change. See any problem there?

I can imagine one difference with the lieutenants here is that nobody outside will ever know about said fight, given that the ship will sink.

In my analogy the intended implication was that getting people into life boats is more useful than fighting.

Okay, but the intended implication of my comment was that since this can actually send a message to others, it might actually cause others to be a bit more careful about how they proceed moving forward, which actually might very well help with help things moving forward.

Ok, but one of the "lieutenants" in your analogy is telling passengers that the ship's not sinking, and interfering with attempts to warn other ships about enemy torpedos.