Comment by jacquesm
9 hours ago
So, who will go to jail?
That's rhetorical, obviously. The answer is absolutely nobody because money is the best insulator there is.
9 hours ago
So, who will go to jail?
That's rhetorical, obviously. The answer is absolutely nobody because money is the best insulator there is.
Nobody will go to jail. The gubmint will give them trillions of dollars for carbon removal (PR campaign that the benevolent oil companies and Govt are working for them). They will give themselves awards for saving the planet and everyone else.
The captured carbon will be used for Enhanced Oil Recovery. Fossil fuel companies add a few trillion dollars in govt money, in addition to the $7T dollars in subsidies today (yale).
Carbon capture tech a 'complete falsehood', says Fortescue Metals chairman: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35829500
More importantly, when will the common folk stop delegating critical thinking to these corporations?
It's really important uphold the law, but nothing really happens if the collective attitude won't change.
No one is delegating their critical thinking to corporations, except professional climate catastrophe deniers, media "spokespeople" who are paid to repeat lies, and bought-and-paid-for politicians.
One of the most transformational things that could happen in politics would be a "misconduct through media" law, where promoting known lies, thinly packaged as entertainment, would be fined at some multiple of the actual harms caused.
I agree there's less delegating now in these areas, but these are mostly topics of the past. Which half truths are we swallowing now, unknowingly most of the time, spoonfed by corp propaganda?
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> More importantly, when will the common folk stop delegating critical thinking to these corporations?
When were the times when people didn’t outsource the critical thinking to others?
Never I think, it's time we started choosing not to.
Remember what is need not necessarily continue being so.
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The person who has to buy 3 gallons of gas to make a round trip to work is often suffering the consequences of other people’s (nimbys, congresspeople, traffic “engineers”) decisions, often made decades earlier.
Every time a home isn’t built in Berkeley, SF, or Oakland a car in Vacaville or Stockton gets its wings.
The Center for Tobacco Studies is a top tier research organization. Nick wouldn’t deceive us. Look at that smile!
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/09/1145728/we-are-p...
lol. And we're worried about sycophantic AI.
These people doomed humanity to make a buck. Jail would be too good for them.
Humanity isn't doomed. Worse, it's going to survive, and have to deal with the messes we made.
Humanity, possibly. Science and culture as we know it - absolutely not.
Lest you make them martys. Much better if we somehow turned them, used the one ring against them.
[dead]
The current party which holds 3 of 3 branches of the government that would be responsible for prosecuting such a crime is entirely behind the idea that climate change is a hoax.
And the party that's held 3 of 3 branches for twice as long over the past ~20 years, and at least 2 for 6/10 of those Congresses?
I'm not saying they're the bad guys. I'm saying that they had chances to do something, and didn't. They didn't care about implementing "The green dream or whatever they call it," even when they had a mandate, let alone punishing the people who made it a necessity by manipulating the public for several decades.
The IRA committed $400 billion and was the biggest piece of clean energy legislation ever made, and yet the Democrats were swept out of power 2 years later.
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It's entirely possible that candidates who are not promising real consequences will be unelectable in the next democratic primaries.
This doesn't work when every candidate holds the same position.
That’s one reason, but also just the impracticality of jailing everyone who was a shareholder at the time. Diffuse responsibility is also a very strong insulator.
I'll settle for the executives and the board serving time.
Maybe how much time you serve correlates to how much money/stock/etc you have made?
Why would you jail every shareholder? You jail everyone who took part in the deception.
"Took part" should include those who knew about the deception and did nothing.
Maybe it will yeet out all the "investors" who are just parking their money and aren't interested in what their investment is doing. Maybe that will help return the capital markets to serve their original purpose again.
The idea that you can just magically park your money somewhere and it automagically generates numbers, zero risk (because the government always bails you out, directly or indirectly) and zero knowledge requirement has turned out to be incredibly corrosive to society.
Reaping the benefits of the deception is taking part.
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The shareholders are literally the ones that paid for the deception and who benefitted from the deception. Why in the world would you punish the hit man but not the one who paid for the hit?
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Who is suggesting that every shareholder be jailed?
History says it's like this for decades, centuries... Until it isn't. And then it's guillotines and chaos.
I fear the Children of Men style future we're stepping into.
I got admonished by a moderator here for using that word, be careful.
What word are you referring to? I’m missing something here.
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Yeah, I guess it’s part of doing risk/reward like the taxes thing. It works for many but sometimes it gets ugly for few either by chance or social/political reasons and of course saying everybody does it it’s not helping. I think the Dieselgate was the same thing.
Another recent take is that you could go to jail or bankrupt for sharing some content or you could become billionaire/trillionaire torrenting the whole world. It’s more about the timing and leverage you build along the way.
I wonder if governments will sue to recover climate mitigation costs
That is the lawsuit that caused these documents to be released (there’s actually a cluster of such lawsuits; the Massachusetts one released these documents which they got in discovery)
We're already in jail. Nobody is getting off this rock.
I didn't get the money, only the jail term. Nice.
PS: I like the way you think :D
Ideally, at least the board would do time and lose any rights holding such positions for a long time.
One of the chief architects of the coverup died recently - massively wealthy, no consequences, and a fortune passed on to his descendants.
Aren’t they claiming companies are people?
Doesn‘t Texas still have the death penalty?
1+1=…
Oil, the old AI.
I know this will be an unpopular opinion, but the number of politicians and other officials who would benefit from a successful case against one of these companies or even one of their executives is a mile long.
I don’t mean generic “throw someone in jail because we all agree they’re evil amirite” posturing, but actual cases against someone based on evidence of breaking a law. Any law. It doesn’t even have to result in jail time to be a political career builder. Saying you’ve pursued and won cases against a “bad” company or executives is a huge boon to anyone in this current political environment that is highly against establishments. It’s universal, from Elizabeth Warren campaigning on her actions against Wall St to the entire “drain the swamp” phenomenon.
Reading the actual memo, not the journalists trying to make articles out of it, reveals a little more about why there isn’t the classic smoking gun here, which is a much simpler explanation for why nobody is going to jail than assuming that money has bribed, paid off, and outlawyered everyone in the country who stands to benefit politically from going after a real crime.
And that fact should tell you a lot about the politicians we have now, that they are actively resisting such efforts.
This is reading American politics 100% wrong, like George Costanza "I should do the opposite of my instinct on everything" level wrong.
Who's getting punished for corruption these days? Is Elizabeth Warren the President? She ran once and was only used as a stalking horse to keep Bernie out, while finishing 3rd in her home state.
You completely ignored the other half of my example of the “drain the swamp” campaigning that got someone elected.
He didn’t actually do what he promised and his targets differed from Warren’s, but the weight of those anti-establishment vibes are real and underly a lot of what’s happening in American politics.
If you don’t see it, you are the one completely reading it wrong. You tried to cut out everything in my comment except for the Elizabeth Warren part and then you attacked that, but that was only an example to show that this sentiment is prominent in both major parties.
If it helps you understand it, remove Elizabeth Warren from my comment and the point remains valid.
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Its time to finally bring in the corporate death penalty.
>Its time to finally bring in the corporate death penalty.
Corporations are made of people :-)
(Also: I agree.)
Agreed. The business is dissolved, assets confiscated, and the board goes to jail.
And to preempt the inevitable comments about what happens to the employees: anyone who works for an oil or gas (or tobacco or social media or junk food, etc) company who's culture is so broken that it produces such planet- or society-wrecking egregious behaviour, is part of the problem and they know it. Find a new job doing something constructive.
The concept is thrown around a lot but the most obvious interpretation is that the company is shuttered, disbanded. So who suffers more, the executives who took the decisions and bail out with golden parachutes, the people who executed knowing the implications and got a bonus for it, or the many random employees and who knows how many more in the larger ecosystem who knew nothing more about it than you do?
The fix isn’t to kill the company, it’s to hold people directly accountable for decisions like this one. Unfortunately these are close to impossible to prove especially in the land of “best justice money can buy”.
The historical case of Enron and Arthur Andersen is instructive. No one from Andersen went to jail but it had to be argued up to the Supreme Court for their charges to be dismissed. The company was disbanded but the conviction against it was overturned afterwards. This is certainly some evidence for "killing the company" not being the right move.
Several Enron execs did go to jail: Kenneth Lay the chairman would have gone for 10+ years but died before sentencing, Jeff Skilling did 12 years, Causey did 5 years, Fastow did 5 years.
In the current environment of DOJ corruption I don't think this sort of thing would happen... unless the executives were conveniently non-supporters of the current President.
Why can’t the shareholders collectively vote to jail the execs and install new leadership?
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If you kill the company the shareholders can sue the management for damages
So first of all I agree, definitely hold the directly responsible accountable.
But it's not an either/or thing, we can just do both!
Because I'm sorry, but who works at Exxon and doesn't know its probably not great for our planet?
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In what contexts is lying to the public a crime? The closest are laws against lying in police investigations or official proceedings, but otherwise it's not a jailable offense.
And all of this is before you get into the question of whether they lied or were engaging in motivated reasoning. During COVID we had anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, seemingly without clear commercial reasons to lie. Should those people be thrown in jail as well?
> In what contexts is lying to the public a crime?
This feels like a disingenuous question. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that claiming X isn't toxic, when you know that it is dangerous. Public health, frequency, scale of impact (more often, who is impacted that has resources to compete in court) et al are all considerations.
Humans act in their own self interest. Relying purely on individual self interest is a degenerate approach in public health issues. One of the many purposes of government, is to act in the collective interest. eg Typhoid Mary
>This feels like a disingenuous question. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure [...]
If all you have is vibes, then it's a pretty legitimate question.
>Public health, frequency, scale of impact (more often, who is impacted that has resources to compete in court) et al are all considerations.
That's exactly not how the legal system is supposed to work. Bending the rules just because some defendant is particularly unsympathetic is exactly how you get politically motivated prosecutions and kangaroo courts.
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If you take the post-mortems on the psyops campaigns from our national adversaries at face-value then what they were doing was actually worse.
>If you take the post-mortems on the psyops campaigns from our national adversaries at face-value
Which is a bad premise, because despite how much "russian troll farms" (and now "chinese AI troll farms") is bandied around in the media, it's entirely unclear how big their impact is, if any.