This kind of actions (alongside Chevron's treatment of Danziger for his work against their pollution in Ecuador) is why:
* high level executives must have personal responsibility. They get paid the big bucks, they should get all the responsibility that comes with it. Jail a few of the egregious human rights abusers/negligent killers, and this kind of thing will be taken seriously. Why does a Muillenburg get to walk away with tens of millions of dollars for presiding over the killing of people? Some egregious ones will be made a public example of (shot in New York), but this is not a solution to anything.
* A corporate death penalty should be a thing. An ExxonMobil, after all the crap they've done (the Valdez tanker, this) is obviously rotten to the core. Nationalise, sell ot the pieces, and everyone who was employed there in any decision making capacity gets a stain on their CV like the people who worked at Enron or FTX or any other scummy company.
Reminds me of how I see executives manage to “fail upward”, where it’s just so clear the people pulling the strings don’t give a darn about workers or the population at large.
Climate change due to industrial emissions of CO2 has been known and published in mainstream news articles since at least 110 years ago.[0][1]
It's been known and discussed in public by professional scientists for over 140 years[2].
The great inaugural Nobel Prize winner, Arrhenius, wrote a paper on the topic in 1896[3] which cited Fourier's publication from 1827[4].
More generally, global greenhouse effect of CO2 has been known for at least 185 years[4], a decade before the last founding father of the United States died.
4: M ́emoire sur les Temp ́eratures du Globe Terrestre et des Espaces Plan ́etaires, M ́emoires d l’Acad ́emie Royale des Sciences de l’Institute de France VII 570-604 (1827): https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/papers/Fourier1827Trans.pd...
(English Translation)
Or that they just weren't very good business people. Their understanding of climate change back then was good enough to have a damned decent roadmap for how things were going to play out over the next fifty years. They were capable of projecting what was going to happen, the likely regulatory changes that wold be needed to mitigate climate change, and how that would affect them.
One would expect the average CEO would literally kill for a roadmap of the future. They had it, and more. Exxon, ARCO, and others even made early R&D investments that helped pioneer terrestrial solar power, not to mention their extensive R&D capabilities more broadly. Sticking with the metaphor, they had the map and some of the most important tools for the journey ahead.
Fifty years were long enough even a financial moron could have developed a long-term transition plan that avoided stranded assets and massive losses. And they--and their people--weren't financial morons. Hell, much of their capital equipment and facilities investments had expected lifespans of a similar length. They had everything needed to create the mother of all soft landings.
Hell, they could have engineered an outcome where they came out well ahead. Being able to rebrand yourself as the company that chose to sacrifice itself to save the world buys you a hell of a lot of goodwill you can leverage for subsidies in Washington. We’d have paid them for it and thanked them for the privilege.
It couldn’t have been that much harder than convincing an entire political party that the problem didn’t exist. Oil companies convincing the public they were shitty companies that needed to be reborn? If they focused on the dying part of rebirth, that wouldn’t have been a very difficult sell even back then.
Only someone who failed upwards could have been gifted a hand like that and still manage to choose the worst possible path for both the world and their own company. All they managed to do was delay the transition and make it more expensive for their company and the world.
> Being able to rebrand yourself as the company that chose to sacrifice itself to save the world buys you a hell of a lot of goodwill you can leverage for subsidies in Washington. We’d have paid them for it and thanked them for the privilege.
This seems to be incorrect. Given my estimation of the current political climate, if you sacrifice yourself to save the world, you will be dead and then someone else will destroy the world anyway while you're not there to stop them.
When was the last time the government paid someone to save the world?
> This seems to be incorrect. Given my estimation of the current political climate, if you sacrifice yourself to save the world, you will be dead and then someone else will destroy the world anyway while you're not there to stop them.
Probably, but look at it from the 1970s. The environmental movement was at its greatest legislative power, the major federal environmental legislation passed at the time was often bipartisan since environmental issues weren't nearly so neatly ideologically coded as they are now, and you had a bunch of high-profile environmental disasters that kept the issue at the forefront of politics. You also had energy crises throughout the 70s. All of that severely undermined public trust in the industry.
Despite their horrible public image since then, the fossil fuel industry has accomplished a great deal politically. They managed to convince an entire political party that climate change doesn't exist despite decades of research and ever-increasing amounts of evidence. They've fended off greater legislative and regulatory oversight repeatedly since then. And while we may not be paying them to "save the world," we're still giving them a great deal of subsidies in the form of tax benefits, consumer incentives that end up increasing the usage of their products, and the massive gift of not taxing their significant negative externalities. So we are, at least, paying them.
Put simply, their lobbyists have always been skilled, as evident by their accomplishments despite the decades-long reality that the majority of Americans don't much like or trust them. So is it really that much of a stretch to expect that they could have gotten significant federal support for a clean energy transition that started back in the 1970s and was gradual enough that it didn't shock markets and the consumers? Or that, if they were able to secure subsidies and preferential tax treatment to extract fossil fuels, that they couldn't do the same for not extracting them?
Anyhow, if I didn't make it clear enough, the sacrifice would have been entirely symbolic. Exxon, for example, would have always survived the transition. It's just that their brand would have undergone a sort of phoenix-esque rebirth: Exxon the oil company would have gradually faded out of existence, while Exxon the renewable energy company came into existence at the same time. It would have been a marketing and PR message, but unlike with the attempts at greenwashing, the fossil fuel side of the company would have actually faded away. The message would have even been truthful in a way: it would have been a serious sacrifice of sorts on their part.
It's just that it could have been a sacrifice that didn't actually cost them much--and had they played their cards right, it might have been one that let them come out ahead in the end.
Recent political events have proven that if I wouldn't, someone else would do it anyway, and then I'd have the disadvantage of not being them. The world is significantly more atomized than I'd like; you can either play the game that everyone else is playing, or forfeit by default.
Well that's an interesting hypothetical but what they actually did was more like reducing GDP by a trillion and murder a billion people.
You appear to be justifying the deaths due to it making financial sense overall, when it didn't. A small group profited at the expense of everyone else, even if you ignore the deaths.
Only if you're a sociopath. But I also don't buy the framing that oil companies are murdering people when they're providing the energy society needs. Fossil fuels have largely powered the modern world. That doesn't excuse covering up the science and the need to transition either. But there's tradeoffs and nuance to all this. Was solar and battery technology good enough in the 70s and 80s to start transitioning then? Would the public have accepted a nuclear transition?
For that matter, are there climate models predicting deaths on the order of 1 billion? Do they even make such predictions?
I'd call the socipathic behavior trading a billion lives for a trillion dollars, but that's just something the parent came up with. What's the actual tradeoff, what sort of transition could have happened by now, to what extent was the rest of the scientific community aware of greenhouse gases, would a lot more nuclear power plants being built have been seen as better by the public?
They did? I missed the part where a billion people are dead. Last I checked, the population is still going up. I asked if there were any climate models making such a prediction.
> At least 3.3 billion people, about 40% of the world population, now fall into the most serious category of "highly vulnerable", with the worst effects in the developing world.[35] If emissions continue on their current path, Africa will lose 30% of its maize cultivation territory and 50% of its land cultivated for beans. One billion people face flooding due to sea level rise.[34] Climate change, together with other factors, also increases the risk of infectious diseases outbreaks like the COVID-19 pandemic. The report also cites evidence that China will pay the highest financial cost if the temperature continue to rise. The impacts will include food insecurity, water scarcity, flooding, especially in coastal areas where most of the population lives due to higher than average sea level rise, and more powerful cyclones. At some point part of the country may face wet-bulb temperatures higher than humans and other mammals can tolerate more than six hours
This seems like a confused analysis. As Enron and FTX both show well, personal criminal responsibility for high level executives and a "corporate death penalty" already exist and get used when circumstances warrant. The decision to use them is just made through a structured system of laws and penalties, rather than a subjective sense of which executives you feel are bad.
>As Enron and FTX both show well, personal criminal responsibility for high level executives and a "corporate death penalty" already exist and get used when circumstances warrant.
Hardly. Enron and FTX fell because they were insolvent, not because a "corporate death penalty" was levied on them.
Purdue, then, although a "corporate death penalty" executed in response to non-government-induced insolvency still seems relevant to me. The biggest proximate effect of shutting down a company is that all its employees become unemployed, so it's not something you'd generally want to do when there are other options on the table.
> As Enron and FTX both show well, personal criminal responsibility for high level executives and a "corporate death penalty" already exist and get used when circumstances warrant
Really not comparable. Enron and FTX were both insolvent due to Ponzi scheme-esque levels of fraud by their executives. The executives were sued for misleading investors and outright fraud, including securities fraud.
Boeing killing people with negligence, or Chevron poisoning millions through negligence, resulted in nothing. Personal responsibility for executives only exists for defrauding investors or tax authorities, which is wildly insufficient. Corporate death penalty only exists if the company is literally insolvent, and even them it might get rescued (GM), which is wildly insufficient.
I agree with you but the only time execs were held personally responsible that I can remember is Enron and that was on insider trading charges. There is so much plausible deniability and near unlimited appeals built into the system that it would take mountains of evidence and several hundred Lina Khans for an actually responsible executive to be tried for something like this.
* high level executives must have personal responsibility. They get paid the big bucks, they should get all the responsibility that comes with it. Jail a few of the egregious human rights abusers/negligent killers, and this kind of thing will be taken seriously. Why does a Muillenburg get to walk away with tens of millions of dollars for presiding over the killing of people? Some egregious ones will be made a public example of (shot in New York), but this is not a solution to anything.
* A corporate death penalty should be a thing. An ExxonMobil, after all the crap they've done (the Valdez tanker, this) is obviously rotten to the core. Nationalise, sell ot the pieces, and everyone who was employed there in any decision making capacity gets a stain on their CV like the people who worked at Enron or FTX or any other scummy company.