
NY State alleges ExxonMobil knew risks of climate change and defrauded investors - colinprince
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a28636123/exxonmobil-lawsuit-climage-change-new-york/
======
spodek
The sad irony is that the pattern of

\- knowing the science enough to know they're contributing to others suffering

\- knowing what might happen with reasonable certainty

\- but compartmentalizing that awareness internally to avoid acting

\- hiding it externally

\- and keeping doing what they were doing

describes the reactions of most individuals about climate change.

~~~
ThomPete
It's not that simple and my guess is that the AG wont win it (neither do they
care to)

Unless it can be demonstrated scientifically that humans are the primary cause
of climate change (despite what you hear that causality is not established) I
don't think there is any case what so ever unless some weird inconsequential
settlement.

Also

A life without fossil fuel is a life most of us don't want to live.

So sure there are drawbacks with using fossil fuels just as there were with
using wood or just as there is with dong or other lesser versions of fuel.

But the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. We wouldn't have this
conversation if it wasn't for fossil fuel.

Last but not least. This smells of politics, not of justice. NY is trying to
push for a much more green profile. So it's likely to do with that probably as
an attempt at getting de-blasio nominated (yes politics is that scruppules)

~~~
marmaduke
> life without fossil fuel is a life most of us don't want to live.

This is downright silly. Sure I have a cellphone, car but I don't live for
those things. I live for the people around me, and they are not made of fossil
fuel.

~~~
ThomPete
You don't just have a cellphone. You have ambulances, you have food, you have
medicine, you have heat, you have buildings, you have more or less 80% of your
surroundings based on fossil fuels. In other words, there would be much less
people around you to live for if it wasn't for fossil fuels.

It's silly to claim you can live without which is why we don't and aren't even
close to doing that in the rich countries.

~~~
WorldMaker
We've had the technology to do all of that without fossil fuels for decades.
We _are_ close to doing it in rich countries today, _despite_ both active
opposition and the usual passivity of the status quo. Renewable energy sources
are now cheaper than non-renewables, across the board, regardless of subsidies
in either direction. England for the _first time_ since the Industrial
Revolution generated more power with renewable sources than fossil fuels this
year. Norway, an oil exporter, is on a path to be entirely fossil fuel free
soon inside the country's borders. Germany and even the US have also had
periods where large amounts of the country's energy grids were entirely
renewable.

It's silly to claim we are entirely reliant on fossil fuels for all our modern
conveniences, when everything but cars/trucks/shipping is mostly energy source
independent and the grid is overall greener than it has ever been in decades,
and getting greener. (And we certainly have the technology to solve
cars/trucks/shipping today, too.)

~~~
ThomPete
You can call it silly all you want it doesn't change the facts.

We aren't close to doing anything even in rich countries. Wind and solar is
less than 1% of world energy. And even in countries that are rich the cost is
pushed onto the consumers just ask Germany.

[https://www.iea.org/weo/?fbclid=IwAR3eH1AFcRSPSEit8JINLCMvE_...](https://www.iea.org/weo/?fbclid=IwAR3eH1AFcRSPSEit8JINLCMvE_UmZAsNNdxRRpIepIGqCz_rILNEHHwLtNw)

------
zaroth
I’m reminded instantly of the article “Everything Everywhere is Securities
Fraud” [1]

Oh, look, Matt Levine actually references this case at the top of that
article. _Unexpected recursion detected._

[1] -
[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everything-
everywhere-is-securities-fraud)

~~~
throwawayjava
Liars who make money on their lies are fraudsters, and fraud needs to have
criminal repercussions

Yes, LOTS of people lie to make money. Yes, all those people are doing
something wrong. And yes, that wrong thing is bad enough for society that we
should punish it.

"Everything" is not fraud. Telling lies to make money is the definition of
fraud. If you think that describes "everything" that happens in the economy...
Well, stop telling lies.

And yes, lots of fraud is impossible to prove because the actors know the law.
Patent trolling comes to mind.

And yes, lots of powerful people commit fraud throughout their career in
impunity. Fraud is normal.

However, the normalcy of fraud and of getting away with deviancy does not make
fraud acceptable.

I'm routinely astounded by how _surprised_ people are to learn that telling
lies to make money is illegal.

Tech in particular needs to do something about the fact fraud has reached meme
status in our industry ('fake it till you make it').

~~~
geofft
I don't think people are surprised that it _is_ fraud, just that there _isn
't_ a better way to prosecute it. If ExxonMobil's board hired a hitman to kill
a competitor's CEO, I think people would hope that the response is to
prosecute the board for murder and not merely for fraudulently claiming their
company is valuable when they were actually relying on destabilizing their
competitor. No one's defending the fraud, it just doesn't seem like the most
important problem here.

------
perfunctory
“What we are facing now is a person whose crime dwarfs all of the crimes ever
committed in human history. We were unable to find a single law applicable to
his crime. So we recommend that the crime of Extinction of Life on Earth be
added to international law, and that Rey Diaz be tried under it.”

— Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest

~~~
rebuilder
Retroactive legislation is usually frowned upon or outright banned in many
jurisdictions.

~~~
patientplatypus
I believe
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_humanity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_humanity)
is literally true in this case.

------
mrosett
Assume for sake of argument that climate change is catastrophic and that
ExxonMobil knew as much. We’re to believe that the real victims here are
ExxonMobil’s _investors_?

~~~
hristov
They might not be the greatest victims but they certainly are some of the
victims. They invested money in a company whose business model was
unsustainable. The company knew that the business model was unsustainable but
did not tell them.

In the US publicly traded companies have a duty to let their shareholders know
all material risks to the company that the company is aware of.

The response to this is usually “but everyone knows about climate change”. But
that is not the case. By now everyone has heard of climate change but many
still don't believe it/dispute it. You can call these people stupid and
uneducated but they are entitled to the same protections under the law which
means that they have a right to be alerted to the potential danger to their
investments posed by climate change. I am sure even the more ignorant would
pay more attention if the climate change warnings came directly from an oil
company they are thinking of investing in.

Furthermore, the NYAG says he has evidence that Exxon knew it was happening as
long as 30 years ago. Back in the late 80s and early 90s climate change was
far from settled thing.

~~~
positive_future
> Back in the late 80s and early 90s climate change was far from settled
> thing.

I was under the assumption that the basic tennets of climate change were well
understood by scientists more than 100 years ago. While the climate models
have been developed only recently, enabling more accurate predictions, climate
science is centuries old as it relates to understanding human impact on our
climate.

Climate science was as "settled" in the 80s and 90s as it is today. Yes, the
predictions are more accurate today, but the confidence that we are changing
Earth's climate was just as strong then as now.

I remember in 1997-8 being taught in US public schools, in no uncertain terms,
that we are changing the climate, warming the atmosphere into a runaway
greenhouse effect. This was in the US South in a very red state that mostly
denies climate science today. The only way to interpret the idea that climate
science was "less settled" in the 80s 90s is political. It has been "settled"
for 100+ years in rational scientific discourse.

~~~
hristov
Perhaps i misspoke. By less settles i meant that it was less known about and
believed among the average population rather than as a scientific consensus.
The relevant discussion here is corporate risk disclosure. If a corporation
says it does not need to disclose a known risk because everyone knows about it
it has to be something that is really universally known and universally
believed to be true. Something like gravity. That certainly was not and it is
not true about climate change. There are still people that believe it is not
true and there were much more of them in the 80s and 90s. We are not talking
about scientific consensus here. The exxon stock was not sold exclusively to
scientists. We are talking the average joe.

~~~
SturgeonsLaw
> believed among the average population

Yes, and 45% of the population believe in ghosts [0], 29% of Americans believe
Obama is a Muslim [1] and 40% of Americans believe the Earth is less than
10,000 years old [2], so frankly I put very little stock in what the average
Joe thinks these days.

There has been a constant propaganda campaign waged in the media by people who
have an interest in maintaining the status quo regarding extractive
industries, and a rather large proportion of the population has eaten it all
up.

\---

[0]
[http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/ghosttoplines.pdf](http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/ghosttoplines.pdf)
[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-
faith/wp/2015/09...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-
faith/wp/2015/09/14/a-startling-number-of-americans-still-believe-president-
obama-is-a-muslim/?noredirect=on) [2] [https://www.livescience.com/46123-many-
americans-creationist...](https://www.livescience.com/46123-many-americans-
creationists.html)

------
thaumaturgy
A likely factor in this lawsuit is the excellent investigative series done by
InsideClimate News. They were a finalist for a Pulitzer for this series.

Part [1] covers the beginnings of Exxon's own climate research in the late
70s, and the findings of their scientists, which was approximately accurate to
modern climate behavior today, 40 years later. Back in 1979, Exxon outfitted
some of their ships with equipment to detect CO2 absorption in the ocean along
their routes; Exxon was, at the time, one of the leading climate research
organizations in the world.

Part [2] covers some of Exxon's research and findings in more detail.

Part [3] describes the climate models that Exxon's researchers developed in
the early 80s, and some of the early decisions that corporate leadership made
to downplay the implications of these models and search for other poorly-
founded ideas that might rebut them.

Part [4] is about Exxon's discovery of and response to a major CO2 source in
the South China Sea.

Part [5] briefly talks about synthetic fuel technology under development in
the 1980s and the impact that early climate science might have had on
exploring that technology.

And [6] finally gets to the meaty part where, after well over a decade of
their own research efforts were telling them otherwise, company executives
began a misinformation campaign through the 90s and 2000s, downplaying the
certainty of climate science and its potential effects.

You can also explore a pile of internal Exxon documents yourself [7].

The comparison between energy companies and tobacco companies is apt. There is
no doubt that, even as Exxon duped an entire legion of people into believing
that climate science was "uncertain", internally they had solid research
demonstrating the effects their practices would have on the global climate.

It's fair to say that climate change skeptics _have been arguing against Exxon
's own research_. They just didn't know they were arguing against Exxon's
research, because Exxon lied, repeatedly, to the public.

Their executives did not want to accept the potential liability associated
with the findings of their own internal research.

[1]: [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15092015/Exxons-own-
resea...](https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15092015/Exxons-own-research-
confirmed-fossil-fuels-role-in-global-warming)

[2]: [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16092015/exxon-
believed-d...](https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16092015/exxon-believed-
deep-dive-into-climate-research-would-protect-its-business)

[3]: [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18092015/exxon-
confirmed-...](https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18092015/exxon-confirmed-
global-warming-consensus-in-1982-with-in-house-climate-models)

[4]: [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08102015/Exxons-
Business-...](https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08102015/Exxons-Business-
Ambition-Collided-with-Climate-Change-Under-a-Distant-Sea)

[5]: [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08102015/highlighting-
all...](https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08102015/highlighting-allure-
synfuels-exxon-played-down-climate-risks)

[6]: [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22102015/Exxon-Sowed-
Doub...](https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22102015/Exxon-Sowed-Doubt-about-
Climate-Science-for-Decades-by-Stressing-Uncertainty)

[7]:
[https://insideclimatenews.org/search_documents?topic=All&pro...](https://insideclimatenews.org/search_documents?topic=All&project=41124&keywords=)

~~~
torpfactory
Thank you for posting. It is very important to put into context how badly
fossil fuel companies may have knowingly screwed us.

~~~
antisthenes
It's also important to put in context that they were busy screwing us while a
large chunk of the new generations _haven 't even been born_

------
heyoni
Does this stuff ever get us anywhere? I just looked at the AG's website and it
looks like we're constantly suing every high powered entity in America:
[https://ag.ny.gov](https://ag.ny.gov)

~~~
kmlx
i recommend this essay about how absolutely crazy the AG role actually is:
[https://repository.jmls.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1913...](https://repository.jmls.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1913&context=lawreview)

~~~
rolltiide
Now explain the New York AG and why it seems others are twiddling their thumbs
in comparison

Or perhaps they are active against multinational corporations but arent
physically close enough to the media for it to ever surface?

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
The New York AG has the obvious advantage of having jurisdiction over the
world's financial capital. Other states may often lack the nexus with the
business to have standing.

Then, it's simply a matter of experience: corporate and especially financial
law is beyond complex, and they have the expertise, plus the financial
resources, to investigate such cases. New York law is also similarly ahead.

And, of course, the majority of Attorneys General are currently Republican and
have absolutely no interest interfering with corporations unless those happen
to be involved in journalism, renewable energy or other despicably altruistic
lines of business.

------
cytherean
I hate fossil fuels as the next guy, but

a. we need them as there are no alternatives currently

b. everybody with just a little gray matter under their skull knew that
burning fossil fuels is not good for the environment, and our health.

~~~
cheeze
I think that there are some alternatives, but they definitely aren't feasible
in many parts of the world at this point.

That being said, I do think one could make a strong argument that Exxon lied
to investors through omittance of a truth that they new. Not that they were
harming the environment, but that they misrepresented risk to the business due
to environmental harm.

------
tlb
Source article: [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24102018/exxon-climate-
fr...](https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24102018/exxon-climate-fraud-
lawsuit-new-york-attorney-general-investigation-tillerson)

Are there previous examples of a lawsuit over a company misleading
shareholders about potential future liabilities, where the liabilities are
still unknown? We still don't know how much business Exxon might lose, or how
much its penalties might be, as a result of climate change. So how would you
calculate which shareholders lost how much?

~~~
united893
That's not the source. That article merely rehashes the AG PR[1] and doc [2]
from 2018.

This article just discusses preparations for the opening arguments due to
commence.

[1] - [https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/ag-underwood-files-
lawsuit-a...](https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/ag-underwood-files-lawsuit-
against-exxonmobil-defrauding-investors-regarding-financial)

[2] -
[https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/summons_and_complaint_...](https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/summons_and_complaint_0.pdf)

------
hughw
Full NYAG complaint here [1].

[1]
[https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/425-2018-10-24-exxon...](https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/425-2018-10-24-exxon-
complaint/7d82160337839c883934/optimized/full.pdf)

------
shanxS
Interesting, use that money to fund R&D to reduce CO2 in atmosphere?

~~~
lazyjones
We already know very well how to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, but we're
doing the opposite. For example, in the EU we're adding "biofuels" to gasoline
for stupid reasons and part of that comes from palm oil, which is produced
where rainforests are cut down first. So we're not only trying to save the
dirty ICE, but we're also destroying rainforests in order to look "green".

I don't expect anything good to come from politics under the pretense of
saving the planet.

------
thecleaner
I hope NY State wins the lawsuit. Typically investor fraud lawsuits have
higher penalties. If it was workers rights that wouldn't be a problem for
them.

------
DoofusOfDeath
At first blush, this seems like rough justice to me.

Based on cynical assumptions, I'm guessing that the NY AG _actually_ has an
axe to grind about ExxonMobil's political/PR efforts regarding climate change,
but couldn't pursue them because of First Amendment protections.

And so the AG is grasping at other legal straws within the same general topic
area.

~~~
matthewdgreen
Lying to investors is a serious crime. What you're saying is that Exxon
actually committed a much more serious set of bad acts -- acts that may be
constitutionally protected -- and that "lying to investors" doesn't seem _as_
serious when compared with Exxon's real bad acts. But that's insane. It's like
saying that I shouldn't be prosecuted for arson if setting someone's house on
fire also kills them.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
Sorry, let me clarify. My impression from reading the article was that Exxon's
communications to shareholders weren't materially lies in any relevant legal
sense. I.e., that trying to prosecute them is at the very least a legal
stretch, or at worst a case of malicious prosecution.

If I misunderstood the article or missing something crucial in it, I
apologize.

~~~
matthewdgreen
I guess that will be up to the courts to decide. I'm guessing Exxon will argue
strenuously that this is true, there will be more discovery to decide whether
this is accurate, and (in a perfect world) the right thing will happen :)

------
Derek_MK
It seems like the big distinction is going to be between "they didn't tell
investors that they were a huge climate change contributor" and "they didn't
tell investors how much money they'd lose out on from stricter environmental
regulation".

------
euroPoor
This is one of many cases, cf
[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02121-6](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02121-6)

------
jgaa
When will Saudi Arabia, Russia and Norway be sued in an international court to
pay for the damage _they_ did (and continue doing every day?

------
cronix
The main pic in the article strangely looks like a nuclear power plant.

~~~
ndonnellan
All sorts of power plants have those large cooling towers which have become
symbols of nuclear power plants. To me it looks more like a natural gas plant,
what with those smaller exhaust stacks next to the cooling towers.

See "natural draft cooling towers":
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower)

------
salusbury
What's the likelihood on this changing the industry as a whole?

~~~
rebuilder
The obvious lesson would be not to try to find out if your business has
enormous environmental consequences.

------
chiefalchemist
So it's not that they've endangered the public, or maybe even the environment.
It's that they deceived shareholders.

~~~
vasco
Shareholders _are_ the public, it's a public company.

~~~
gruez
That's true, but it's very much biased towards the rich[1]. I think what the
parent is trying to say is that the only reason this issue got legal action
was because the rich were the primary victims. Had it been some other public
issue that doesn't disproportionately affect the rich (eg. fracking/mining
contaminating ground water), there wouldn't be similar action.

[1] [https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-richest-1-own-50-of-
stock...](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-richest-1-own-50-of-stocks-held-
by-american-households-150758595.html)

~~~
toast0
If this were about shareholders, it would be a shareholders lawsuit, not an
attorney general lawsuit. This is about (in theory) distorting the public
market through fraud.

------
OrgNet
sounds like a 5 trillion settlement would be appropriate in this case...

~~~
irq
Probably even more than that, when you consider how many more years the planet
will be dealing with Exxon's BS, even if they were to cease operations today.

~~~
kjar
The company knew the physical ramifications from at least the 1970s,
suppressed that knowledge, and now we are locked into decades their product
manifested for many decades. Extractive industry - oil, coal, methane needs to
have ended decades ago. We are climatically locked in for insane
destabilization

------
egdod
What a bunch of pandering nonsense.

------
jeandejean
I'm super worried by these lawsuits. Instead of forcing the oil industry to
invest in cleaner energies, to clean the atmosphere by for instance paying for
planting massive amount of trees, or even to extract oil more sustainably...
They want them to pay investors that were deceived by a fact everybody fucking
knew for decades.

Makes me feel we're doomed and incapable of focusing on real challenges.

~~~
jgaa
It's probably a law issue. Is it illegal to lie and deceive to make money? No.
Is it illegal to destroy the Earth's eco system? Only if it's intended as an
act of terror. Is it illegal to mislead the share holders? Yes. So that's the
crime they can prosecute.

~~~
nfoz
> Is it illegal to lie and deceive to make money? No.

What, really? Isn't that the definition of fraud?

------
Bostonian
This is ridiculous. For decades, New Yorkers, like all Americans, have enjoyed
the benefits of cheap energy. Exxon and other oil companies are giving
consumers what they want.

~~~
losteric
They lied to the public about side effects of their product. That's
ridiculously illegal.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
Maybe they did, but this lawsuit isn't about that. The lawsuit claims only
that they lied to investors about how they were managing the financial risks
of increased climate regulation.

------
radford-neal
Hasn't Exxon been rather profitable for the last 40 years? How have the
investors of 1979 lost out?

In any case, my understanding is that all of Exxon's research was publicly
available, so investors could look at it and judge for themselves what they
thought the risks were. The idea that Exxon executives were supposed to make
their own scientific determination regarding the magnitude of the effect of
CO2 on climate - an issue that has since then been the subject of 40 years of
intensive debate in the scientific community - is absurd.

Yes, absurd. This is not a good-faith law suit. It is political intimidation
and extortion.

~~~
bdamm
Exxon has been profitable but they allegedly did it by committing fraud. They
allegedly knew the magnitude of the effect of CO2 on climate, and allegedly
conspired to cover it up. Part of the reason there is "intensive debate" is
because of Exxon's cover up. It wouldn't have been much of a debate without
it. Therefore, Exxon was purposefully redirecting the efforts of investors to
understand the risks that the company faced.

~~~
radford-neal
The suit alleges that the investors were defrauded - not the public, or some
such. (That would also be absurd, but it isn't relevant anyway, so no point
arguing about it.)

But the investors made lots of money. It doesn't make sense.

The idea that anything Exxon did had a major influence on the debate about the
effect of CO2 on climate is ridiculous. Many billions of dollars have been
spent on climate research by governments. Are we to believe that a few
scientists at Exxon had it all figured out 40 years ago? And then because
Exxon executives didn't decide their product was evil and therefore exit the
industry, nobody else realized the truth, even though the reports by the Exxon
scientists were published...?

It doesn't make sense.

~~~
bdamm
Fraud is making money by lying. The fact that the investors made money doesn't
negate the fraud. They were unaware of risks that the company knew about.
Public companies (emphasis on _public_ ) are required to reveal to all
investors the risks of investing in the company. Read any prospectus and you
will see that they don't generally hold back, and in many cases go into
specific and extensive detail on known risks.

~~~
radford-neal
But the possible effect of CO2 on climate was not a secret. It had been widely
debated for decades even in 1979.

Now, it is true that companies sometimes state widely known information in
their annual reports. Things like "the company's profitability could be
affected by a change in consumer tastes that reduces demand for our product".
(Not followed by any actual analysis of how likely this is, I note.) I assume
such nonsense is due to lawyers trying to defend against other lawyers whose
ethics don't deter them from filing lawsuits like this one.

~~~
DangitBobby
It's been "not a secret" for a very long time. Scientists were meaningfully
speculating on the effect that spilling CO2 into the atmosphere would have
since the (very late) 19th century.

Here's an old scientific article talking about it, if you're interested. [PDF]
[http://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf](http://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf)

Amazing that we have had so much time to think about this problem.

------
fromthestart
>Exxon and other energy companies knew as long ago as 30 years that carbon
emissions were becoming perilous to the planet.

This is ridiculous.

No one _knew_ about climate change 30 years ago. A small number of scientists
were aware of the _possibility_ of climate change - it took some 30 years of
research, heavily dependent on modeling capability which was only really
unlocked in the last decade or so, to come to any sort of alarmist consensus,
not to mention less than 30 years ago the consensus was one of global
_cooling_.

Sure, in hindsight, it all seems obvious, but extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence, and we're talking about terraforming a planet on the
scale of 100 years. You'd be crazy to believe in such a thing without some
hard data to back that up.

Meanwhile let's ignore that society, globally, has advanced - technologically
and socially - on the back of petroleum fuel. We all may be paying a price,
but we are all partaking in the reward.

~~~
ghouse
>This is ridiculous.

It's not ridiculous. I was taught about the carbon cycle, greenhouse gasses,
and climate change in a United States public high school in 1993. 26 years
ago.

>Meanwhile let's ignore that society, globally, has advanced - technologically
and socially - on the back of petroleum fuel.

Sure, but society has provided massive subsidies (both direct and indirect) to
carbon-based fuels. Had we not provided those subsidies, society would be much
better off.

~~~
fromthestart
>It's not ridiculous. I was taught about the carbon cycle, greenhouse gasses,
and climate change in a United States public high school in 1993. 26 years
ago.

Climate is a complex, chaotic system. Again, there was no certainty regarding
warming without the decades of research, data gathering, and modeling that
followed. Knowledge of the carbon cycle and greenhouse potential is not enough
alone to prove that the planet is warming from human activities. And, again,
20 years ago the consensus was that of global cooling, to emphasize the degree
of uncertainty in the historic consensus. You're underestimating the gravity
of the notion that we are _terraforming_ , modifying _global_ climate, which
normally changes over 10^4-10^6 years, on the scale of 10^2, 2-4 orders of
magnitude difference. No time in history have humans even been able to do such
a thing, let alone had they reason to believe that it were even possible.

>Sure, but society has provided massive subsidies (both direct and indirect)
to carbon-based fuels. Had we not provided those subsidies, society would be
much better off.

Much better off without fuel for local and global shipping and power
generation and raw material for plastics?

~~~
ghouse
> Much better off without fuel for local and global shipping and power
> generation and raw material for plastics?

No. That's an absurd characterization of my position. I do believe we're much
better off when the market, absent direct and indirect subsidies, finds the
most efficient solution. That _may_ mean less shipping, more efficient power
generation (trading CapEx for OpEx), and more efficient use of plastics.

