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Comment by vrganj

8 hours ago

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?

That’s seems ass-backwards though. If you want to punish Exxon because they contributed to global warming by satisfying the demand of billions of people for the energy embodied in fossil fuels, it seems like you should directly attack the thing you don’t want: extraction and combustion of fossil fuels.

Don’t kill Exxon and let Shell operate.

  • Setting aside that demand is in no way an excuse - I take it you wouldn't come up with this justification for crack dealers - I want to kill Exxon for the specific thing this article is about.

    In the (honestly, not that unlikely) event Shell has done similar, they, too should be killed.

    Extraction and combustion of fossil fuels can (and IMO should!) be restricted as an orthogonal measure, but Exxon shouldn't be given the chance to reallocate its investments and pretend it never did what it did.

    • I don’t think selling street crack is a good thing and oppose everyone who is selling it (and to your last point in your upthread post, I wouldn’t worry about the supply chain players, because “who works to supply crack and doesn’t know that crack is probably not great for you?”)

      I don’t pick and choose to punish one of the dealers more harshly than the others because that one dealer had some internal research that cast doubt as to the likelihood that he would, at some time in the future, achieve a workable solution to a healthier/safer crack substitute that he currently publicly claimed to be working on.

      People seem to be conflating “this company didn’t publish everything it thought about everything” (a standard we don’t hold companies to in general) with “…and the topic was climate change, so off with the company…”

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