https://climateinvestigations.org/drilled-climate-change-den...
The pricier of these figures is the external figure, so they're being charged for being too alarmist with the public. In either case I don't think it has much to do with the previously linked research claims in this thread.
(To this, there is added some consumer fraud by... not labelling gas pumps with warnings about global warnings, among other things, I think it was? This is the weaker claim, and I would not expect it to prevail.)
And I don't think being punished for using an overly conservative figure is likely, unless the court invents some duty owed to short-sellers. And it's not something we want to encourage.
For example, this lawsuit. The overall tactic is to argue that Exxon knew fossil fuels could potentially cause catastropic climate change but decieved people by sowing uncertainty about whether they would cause climate catastrophe, which isn't even a contradiction, but let's put that issue to one side.
They then hit it out the park with a humdinger - in May 2019, CO2 concentrations hit 415 ppm, and 37 years ago Exxon's scientists predicted this in a graph. This astonishing accuracy shows Exxon's scientists knew exactly how much CO2 emissions and warming they were causing. Here's the leaked document this graph was taken from: https://insideclimatenews.org/sites/default/files/documents/... Some choice quotes from it that somehow didn't make it into the complaint: "There is currently no unambiguous scientific evidence that the earth is warming", "Overall, the current outlook suggests potentially serious climate problems are not likely to occur until the late 21st century or perhaps beyond at projected energy demand rates", and also apparently coastal flooding wouldn't happen for centuries even in the worst case scenario. There's quite a bit more too. The supposedly super-accurate secret internal report didn't contradict Exxon's external talking points, it matched up with them exactly.
(There's also weirdly gratuitous dishonesty. For instance, the Exxon document argues that if a rapid move away from fossil fuels was necessary to prevent climate catastrophe, nuclear power was the only feasible option and renewables such as solar were completely infeasable since it'd take at least 40-50 years to achieve significant power production using them. For some reason, the complaint claims that Exxon recognised measures such as energy conservation and shifting to renewable sources were the only viable options. I guess the prosecutor reckoned renewable power was more sympathetic and popular than nuclear...
The complaint also goes on to accuse Exxon of misleading the public by claiming that efficiency improvements in their products reduce greenhouse gas emissions because producing and using them still emits greenhouse gases. Do they want to actively discourage energy efficiency improvements?)
It is totally plausible that the global oil / fossil fuel market would have not been as big as it is now, that efforts (from government or from private entities) to find less-polluting alternatives would have been more popular, etc.
When you disrespect the law, you risk devaluing a powerful tool against evil (and one of the few tools against evil that's actually discriminating, one of the few tools to actually make a good faith attempt to distinguish guilt from innocence.)
It'd be a different thing if they hadn't tried to hide the findings of their own scientists and hadn't spent that much resources to discredit people actually trying to get us to fix stuff.
They're guilty as hell. Morally, probably even legally.
They were actively advertising as if this could on forever, with no problems! You don’t see how “oh wait we’ve been hiding scientific evidence that’s not true” wouldn’t be of material impact?
We’ve all become paid shills of industry. Explicitly defending the indefensible because implicitly we’re addicted to our emotional models of “how reality functions.”
But society doesn’t owe us that and literally tears down its own history all the time. It’s moving on and removing the profit motive of this industry for a good reason.
Get over it.
Oil kills via air pollution. Oil companies hid this information.
Do corporations get to willingly and maliciously lie to people?
There are lots of climate change deniers who only need a little disinformation to prevent any action.
The President has said that climate change is a hoax. This Senator brought a snowball to work to explain that climate change is not a problem:
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/02/3-years-ago-...
I think the answer to that seems like "yes", do you have a different opinion?
Oil saves more lives than it kills and it makes lives better for all of us. You can't just take the negatives and ignore all the positives.
Most of us wouldn't be here if it wasn't for oil, the internet would not be here if it wasn't for oil, most medicine, the ability to keep an incubator running let alone the materials for creating and I could go on we wouldn't be as many people on the planet today if it wasn't for our use of oil.
What is at issue here is the willful negligence and active deception campaign by the incredible profitable oil companies to bolster their profits by deceiving and outright lying to the public to avoid those risks.
If this is not called out and punished, then it will be that much easier for the next great crime to happen, whether its face is tobacco, renewable energy, or fusion power.
Getting to the core of the matter as well in what you raised, we can have our cake and eat it too. We can have technological advances and better quality of life without throwing away our children's future and doing irreversible (on human time scales) damage to our planet. But not without zero cost. I would argue that cost would and should hit the pockets of the most profitable companies in the world first, whose profit is largely on deferred or unaccounted-for externalities that have long been swept under the rug.
And if we had realized 30 years ago that we were not happy with it, or that maybe we wanted to reduce our exposure wouldn’t we have had 30 years to change our infrastructure ?
Wouldn’t the amount of emphasis on the Middle East changed?
Mass transit would be a conversation 30 years more advanced.
The trick in my argument is that 30 years ago we Knew that oil was problematic.
And we saw good scientists avoid engaging with the paid shills and cranks arguing for oil and against global warming - because that would give them more credibility.
Then we saw how that made no difference.
Then scientists went on Fox hoping to have an honest discussion- and were slaughtered by dishonest arguments, fired by news anchors who were part of an ecosystem funded by Exxon and their ilk.
We all collectively owe Exxon and it’s friends an accounting for their actions, which they knowingly took in bad faith.
Because, it would have been nice to have this discussion 30 years ago.
Maybe. That alone does not mean we should continue to use oil when alternatives exist.
>and it makes lives better for all of us.
No, it does not. There are many impoverished communities on the planet who reap relatively little or no benefit from oil use and suffer disproportionate burdens from its production and use, example: Africans.
> You can't just take the negatives and ignore all the positives.
You can't just ignore the negatives, or the evolution of the circumstances.
> the ability to keep an incubator running let alone the materials for creating
Oil is useful for creating and running an incubator, or any number of modern inventions, but is definitely not necessary for all of those things.
It was the difference between whether my son who was born 10 weeks to early would both survive and be a normal kid or risk not survive and whether he would become normal.
That's what the oil contributed.
>It was the difference between whether my son who was born 10 weeks to early would both survive
Appreciated, but oil is simply not a necessary component for that to happen. It may be currently the most convenient but not necessary.
Then again I don't know all the details, I smell an attempt at scoring political points though more than anything.
Exxon could've just been honest and oil would still have been sold and used and saved people, we could've just been using it more responsibly.
But they lied, for profit.
Do you think a corporation encouraging extensive oil use at all cost is the same thing as "oil saves lives?"
It's not.
There are no realistic alternatives to 99% of our current use of oil which includes more or less any product used in a modern civilization so unless you can point me to some alternatives I think you are the one who has the immoral position.
Let's revisit this statement in the next century and see if it holds up.
It would seem to me that the only thing for humans to do is to look at it from a human-centric view which would naturally involve some sort of bio-centric view.
I for one is not ready to have a bio-centric view if it means I can't provide my kids with all the things that fossil fuels have provided and keep providing for them.
Are you also unwilling to make those sacrifices for the sake of valuing the lives and experiences of humans in every other country as much as the lives and experiences of humans in your own country? I suspect most of us are, since we collectively buy phones made in horrible factory conditions which our own labor laws wouldn't tolerate. I agree that the "natural" thing to do is to value your own species above others, but I think that applies to subdivisions of humans as well, and it gets ugly. It's not a binary thing, human v.s. non-human, it's a set of behaviors on a continuum. We can recognise that we engage in such behavior while still using figures for pollution-related-deaths that include people who work in Foxconn factories, and I don't see why we shouldn't extend the same courtesy to whales. Whales are people too, maaaan.
It's exactly not black and white which is my whole point. There are good sides and bad sides to everything we do.
The alternative for the people at Foxconn is far worse, just like the alternative to not using fossil fuels is far worse for all humans whether living in developed or developing countries.
Anyway, I have lost 30 karma points even having this discussion so this will be my last comment on this.
FWIW, you seemed polite and coherent to me and I wouldn't have downvoted your post even if I could. I try not to let karma-seeking affect my more serious posts (though I do purposefully take downvotes as a signal of what sorts of humor are acceptable by community standards), and I think it's generally a loss when somebody gets downvoted into oblivion for politely sharing a perspective I disagree with.
Unless your primary goal was to kill the industry, and never really had the victims' best interests in mind at all.
Taking a long view, one could argue that there will be less victims overall. This isn't to say that I'm in favor of making any drug illegal.
Now if you are asking why a company shouldn’t be able to lie and decieve the whole world about how their product will upset the entire global ecosystem then I don’t have the legalese answer for you (although this case should be helpful if you are interested).
The simple answer however is because it is wrong, unjust, irresponsible, causing harm, etc.
Furthermore, nobody here is arguing that oil is all bad. Obviously it has been immensely beneficial to society. And yet, how is it that those benefits are privatized by these companies, and the negatives (costs) are externalized?
The positives are also externalized. The internet wouldn't happen without fossil fuels yet it's not the oil companies who make the money on that. Many of our inventions wouldn't be possible without the ability of fossil fuels to make life easier and free up time for us, things that the oil companies does not benefit directly from. So I take issue with this idea that externalities are only negative, they are to a much larger extent beneficial in ways we don't even think about.
It rubs some people (me at least) the wrong way when we try to say our policymaking is based on reasoned science, but not everyone is bringing all their chips to the table in good faith, and some are outright fabricating lies to keep the gravy train going, and keep the public guessing.
I've actually enjoyed your posts mind, and find quite a bit to agree with in them. However, I don't necessarily think you're making a successful counterargument in the sense no one is condemning the oil/petrochem industry for doing what it's doing; it seems to be aimed more at bad behavior in terms of burying inconvenient science, and funding disinformation campaigns.
That, at least, strikes me as worthy of its day in court, so at a minimum the public interest can be served by discovery. After all, they don't need to be found guilty for good to come of it.
For one thing, the idea that they knew it would cause climate change seems highly suspect to me.
Big bad corp makes for a nice villain but in a democratic country lack of good laws (bad voters!) is the problem. Should there have been a law compelling companies to listen to their scientists? Should there be criminal punishment of execs who spread any level if false information? What about media execs? Is the lobbying problem the root cause? It all seems to me lack of good voting or the US system of democracy being inadequate. I mean,it's not like oil companies use oil strictly for fossil fuels and it's not like civilization at the moment does not depend on fossip fuels. Less pitch forks and better laws is all I'm saying.
You only say this because the marketing campaign against global warming, designed by this company because of the outcomes of said research, has been so effective.
Welcome to our latest age of populism. As usual in these cases, there are no rules, there is no law, there are no inalienable rights. There is only your chosen tribe, versus the other guys: enemies at worst, targets of opportunity at best. (If you criticize overreach and abuse on your side, breaking solidarity with the tribe, you get to be a particularly hated enemy.)
When the government routinely steals from citizens ("civil forfeiture"), calls invading other countries "military police action" so that Congress doesn't have to approve wars, gives specifically black citizens syphillis without their knowledge or consent just to see what happens when you don't treat syphillis, gives citizens LSD without their knowledge or consent (Operation Midnight Climax), claims LSD has no medical applications, tries to blackmail MLK into suicide, routinely has huge globs of cash disappearing, does obvious false flag operations (2nd Gulf of Tonkin incident, if you can't believe the ones the government hasn't confirmed yet), ignores their own constitution (Snowden et al.), etc., is it any wonder that people don't care about your laws anymore? All of the above criminality was committed by the US government within the last century, some of it within the last decade. These laws were made up to begin with, and they're typically used/broken in ways that hurt the small rather than the large. I don't know if Exxon broke any of your precious laws by systematically covering up climate change since at least the early '80s, but I'd enjoy seeing this lawless monstrosity of a government chew them up for it anyway -- just as entertainment. If you want people to respect laws when dealing with big players, maybe you should try building a system that respects laws when dealing with small players. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.” --Buckminster Fuller
A US state suing an oil company might not be the best venue to force action but courts have been used repeated to force societal change and so it's not impossible Ma could get a result
Exxon being punished isn't an important end-goal but actually forcing the oil industry to acknowledge CO2 pollution might be useful in forcing regulation stopping it (and yes, believe that the state directly forcing a decrease in CO2 is the only way that we can put a dent in greenhouse gas production. Carbon credit and even a CO2 tax are insufficient).
Could you elaborate on this point?
Part of the rule of law is that the government doesn't just get to make up laws because it wants to punish you. It's why there's generally a prohibition for punishing people for things they did before it became illegal to do them.
A lot of this is symptomatic of both sides of the political spectrum feeling impotent to pass laws that actually do what they want, so they're doing what they can do bend existing law to do what they don't have the votes to do in new law. The whole situation is bad on a number of levels.
It's one thing for private citizens/companies to file vague or spurious lawsuits against each other, only to have the courts throw it out. It's another for the government, who hypothetically represents the Law, to be bending/testing the limits of it.
It also presupposes that the court system is fair, and not inclined to side with the government. Obviously in this case, there's a claim to be made that it might be biased towards a massive corporation too, but in general prosecutors tend to get what they want in cases. I'd be shocked if this gets thrown out/refuted by the court without going to trial.
Capitalism is about leveling the playing field. Not enabling crony assholes to play by their own set of rules.
> 687. ExxonMobil's greenwashing misleads consumers by saturating its brand with deceptive "green" images that portray ExxonMobil as a good environmental steward when, in fact, these images are contradicted by the actual environmental and public health impact of ExxonMobil's business. These images direct attention away from the massive and dangerous climate and public health harms caused by the routine production and use of ExxonMobil fossel fuel products and focus consumer attention instead on ExxonMobil's purported environmental responsibility and leadership.
>645. ExxonMobil’s misleading statements and omissions are deceptive because, even if it is technically true that Synergy™ and Mobil 1™ improve internal combustion engine performance and/or efficiency relative to prior or other products, ExxonMobil’s claims that these products help reduce greenhouse gas emissions convey a false impression that using the products results in environmental benefits. To the contrary, the development, production, refining, and consumer use of ExxonMobil fossil fuel products (even products that may yield relatively more efficient engine performance) increase greenhouse gas emissions.
The non-lying versions of the ad would be more like: "Combusting hydrocarbons produces, directly and indirectly, large portions of the total global CO2 released every year. The only way to reduce tailpipe CO2 emissions is to consume less combustion products. If you use ExxonMobil Synergy™ and Special Green Mobil 1™ then you could burn 0.65% fewer hydrocarbon molecules in your first 3 months!"
I do however agree with your main point, it probably wouldn't A/B as well.
I'm not sure how I feel about it myself, but I'm not sure how I want this to be handled as a legal matter.
Apologies for the quick tangent but... It's interesting.
As far as I'm aware, there is a lot you can get away with not saying, as the courts are specifically not huge fans of compelled speech.
Each form of compelled speech that I'm aware of tends to arise from the authority of an administrative regulator. I.e. FDA compelling ingredient labels, side-effects, Office of the Surgeon General for alcohol and tobacco/nicotine warnings, FTC/CFPB for product/financial product marketing/disclaimers, Bureau of Labor postings in the workplace etc.
With regards to specific things like child labor/conflict minerals, etc..., the issue shouldn't have to come up in theory, because you shouldn't be doing it period, and any evidence that you are is prosecutable without having to indirectly assert it was a case of securities fraud.
It's also not illegal to be daft or misleading until it crosses the line into fraud, where a material reliance on the veracity or falsehood of the information can be demonstrated.
That doesn't mean that there aren't grey area cases, or that everyone does their due diligence, but in general, this is the way things have always worked for as long as I've been around.
My 2 cents.
Obviously Exxon and others went further and attempted to discredit the evidence that what they were doing could be wrong, but if they'd just done the research into the climate impacts, and just never published it, would that have been fraudulent? To just pretend they didn't know what they were doing was immoral/unethical? That seems like the sort of things plenty of companies do all the time, to varying degrees of moral and ethical fault.
More generally, preventing deceptive trade practices without preventing ordinary marketing is a well-established and well-explored field, it's not like Massachusetts invented it for this case. (And if anything threatens the rule of law, it's saying, "I don't know what the relevant statutes and regulations and caselaw is in this field so I think we shouldn't enforce laws in this field at all.")
It strikes me as implausible that even if Exxon has published all of its internal climate research it would have made a substantive difference in people's likelihood to invest, or to consumers propensity to purchase Exxon gas. Because these are the only outcomes germane to the case aren't they?
You can tell by the comments here that people want Exxon punished, they don't care much about the means by which this occurs.