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.