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Comment by smackay

8 hours ago

You'd think the one place in the world where checks and balances would be understood would be the United States of America. What did anyone expect ExxonMobil to do? Release a public statement that terrible things were going to happen, shut down all operations, lay off everybody and switch off the lights. Why was the issue politicised so the two main parties could make sure it served their interests. How come institutions like the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine had to weather severe political pressure to silence them, instead of being taken seriously and something done sooner? It's not much of a system if it's so easy to derail.

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smackay

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Sharlin  7 hours ago

The checks and balances in the US were always rather fictional, but this particular failure mode of big corporations being able to cause vast amounts of harm and suffering, completely disproportionate to any benefits to the society, seems to be intrinsic in any state of matters where big corporations are allowed to exist at all.

However, there are certain aspects of the US society and political system that appear to be particularly well suited to the rise of big corps doing big evil things.

  • eej71  7 hours ago

    Big Oil has been an immense producer of _value_ to society. It is fossil fuels that has enabled so much of our modern world to be possible. Cheap, portable, effective and efficient production of energy at scale. My goodness. The ancients would be so jealous of what we have - and so confused by our reaction to what made it possible.

    What an amazing achievement for the liberation of everyone.

    • preg_match  4 hours ago

      Yes however that value was always temporary in nature. Like most things, new innovations seem good for a while until they’re outpaced, then they’re just bad. But we still do them because of inertia.

      The oil companies should have shifted innovation and R&D to cleaner alternatives decades ago. When they had the capital and political sway. That would have ensured their long-term profits.

      But they didn’t, because they figure doing the same thing forever will just work. It won’t, of course, and now they’re paying the cost.

      The ultimate irony is that this isn’t even because of climate change. Even if climate change didn’t exist, this would happen. Already greener alternatives are getting cheaper and cheaper, and soon it will make zero economic sense to be a petroleum company. Like the coal companies before them.

      And now, it’s too late. With each passing day the oil giants lose foothold, and now they don’t have the runway to pivot even if they wanted to. If they started in the 70s with the energy crisis, they would be more profitable today than ever. They would have ensured their place in the modern changing world. But they didn’t, and now they will die a slow death. Not because of climate change, but because of the nature of the free market.

jfengel  5 hours ago

It's not much of a system. It is easy to derail.

The system got a series of lucky breaks for about a century: immense natural resources, and the European economies destroying each other. This obscured the deep flaws in the system and has made it practically impossible for Americans to see them. Quite the opposite: whenever the flaws manifest, we try to solve them my entrenching them further.

anonym29  7 hours ago

It's a real shame these institutions have been rendered ideologically indistinguishable from the activists who've been telling us constantly the world will end if we don't get rid of all oil in the next 5 years for the last decade and a half. "Boy who cried wolf" resulting from activist alarmism has done immense and possibly irreparable damage to the credibility of the scientific community.

  • yojo  7 hours ago

    It will actually take a little while to tell if they were, in fact, crying wolf.

    There is a lag between when carbon is released and when the effects of it peak. If we did stop all carbon emissions today, the effects of prior emissions would play out over the next 30ish years.

    We’re injecting unprecedented amounts of thermal energy into planet-scale systems, and it is hard to predict second and third order effects.

    I have kids/I really hope they were crying wolf.

  • chneu  7 hours ago

    Nobody really ever said the world will end in 5 years.

    The message has basically always been "the climate is fragile and we're adding energy to that system, which will cause change in the climate"

    The whole "the world will end in 5 years" is a really lame reaction that dismisses the messaging on purpose. It's what people use when they don't want to say, "I don't care" because saying that makes people feel/look bad or because they are "anti-hippie" or whatever phrase we wanna use.