Says exec of company that has objectively caused more environmental harm to the world than any others
Petrochemicals and the energy from fossil fuels did provide the needed food and energy to boost our standard of living.
HOWEVER
By the time we knew they were affecting the climate, we had the technology to move off of them and didn’t because of assholes like this.
we had the technology to move off of them
We still don’t have the technology to move of them. Energy storage is severely lacking.
I bet if we had started the process in the 1970s like Carter wanted we’d be a lot further along by now.
It’s possible, but it’s not like technology halted in that time and there has been a big energy independence drive regardless of Reagan.
The harsh truth is that we still need fossil fuels today.
We’re probably going to need them for decades to come, even if we have massive green energy drives.
big energy independence drive
This is a great weasel word. “Energy independence.” Like we’re going to hook cables up to George Washington and run on carbon-neutral Freedom Juice.™
“Energy independence” still means using fossil fuels. Just maybe different ones like natural gas instead of coal. There’s less emissions, sure, but it’s not anything like what Carter envisioned: Solar power stations in LEO, beaming gigawatts of carbon neutral power down from space.
Carter also embraced nuclear energy, IIRC. Meanwhile, you’ve got California trying desperately to shut down Diablo Canyon but kicking the can down the road every two years because, surprise surprise, energy demand went up and they can’t afford to take DCNP offline. As I recall, DCNP’s reactor core was due for decommissioning twelve years ago, we just keep stringing it along like “c’mon bro, just two more years, I swear I’ll shut you down then. We won’t need your 2,000 gigawatts by then, bro, I promise, c’mon bro, please don’t fuck up on me, just hold on for two more years”. It’s stupid. We could’ve replaced the goddamn reactor by now, but we gotta play stupid games and win stupid prizes.
Carter also embraced nuclear energy, IIRC.
Carter specifically avoided nuclear energy. He was involved in a nuclear accident, so he knew the risks and favored building massive solar panels.
To quote the linked article: “The project was not continued with the change in administrations after the 1980 United States elections.”
That fucker Reagan also took Carter’s solar panels off the White House.
3 mile island happened at the end of his tenure, but yeah
“Energy independence” still means
It also meant reducing imports of oil by being more efficient and investing in green tech by lots of parties across the country.
green tech
Green tech like clean coal? Green tech like fracking to get natural gas? Which “green” tech are we talking about here?
Green tech like wind, hydro, solar, and geothermal. The big deal was the fact you don’t need to import oil to run them.
If this was truly what Carter envisioned, then he was an unbelievable moron. “Sunsats”, are not practical or environmentally efficient. The mere fact that you have to place and maintain them via spacelaunch is a huge penalty, then you have to account for radiation loss to the atmosphere.
False equivalence. If we had been working towards this goal since the 70s then more focus, both financial and science/engineering, would have been put into it and progress we’re making now might have happened 20 or 30 years ago.
Oil companies did everything they could to stop it, instead of positioning themselves as research leaders they went for short term profits. After all, they swam in pools of money for the rest of their lives and we’ll all be here when all the crops die and the mountains become the shores.
So anyway, that’s why I love communism now.
that’s why I love communism now
Imagine the Republicans controlling not only the government funding but also private funding. That’s what you’d get under communism.
Or imagine lowest common denominator tragedy of the commons with cheap fuel ousting all other forms of energy with no state to stop it.
Communism is a stupid ideal that doesn’t work in the real world.
“Instead of positioning themselves as research leaders”
Why would they? If researching new ways of replacing oil is in everyone’s benefit then why does it fall on oil companies to do it? And not also everyone else?
So anyway, that’s why I love communism now.
Ah yes, the Soviet Union was well-known for its production of renewable power.
The Soviet Union never transitioned to communism, they stopped at an authoritarian state.
Just how much money has been spent on fossil fuel extraction that could have been spent of tech development instead?
We had the technology to start. Photovoltaic panels, windmills, etc aren’t new technology; the Carter administration actually installed photovoltaics on the white house and they stayed there until three guesses which president (yep, Reagan) took them down. Florida voted to start building a high speed rail project in their state (which would have decreased interstate and short-haul airline dependency, thereby decreasing oil dependency) and it was going to happen until Mr. State’s Rights himself, Ronald Reagan, blocked any state from launching a high speed rail initiative. More people believed in global warming and climate change in the 90’s than now, but in the 2000’s, the small government W Bush administration forbade government officials from talking about climate change, gutted government research on climate change, and collaborated with big oil lobbyists on pivoting to using softer, more nebulous terms to address global warming (this is actually where the widespread use of ‘climate change’ comes from). We’ve basically kicked the can down the road for forty years and only started taking it kinda seriously in the last ten or fifteen. If we’d been developing and implementing these technologies gradually over the last fifty years, it would have been a lot less painful and we’d have made a lot more progress for a lot more value on the money spent. Since we’re trying to speedrun the last fifty years of implementation and development into the last decade or so, that’s going to be really economically painful and not nearly as smooth as it would have been under the long implementation. But, it’s gotta get done, or we’re going to keep fucking up the same ecology we depend on to stay alive, getting in endless wars, and giving money to jackass countries to feed our voluntary fossil fuel addiction.
As for storage, that’s not an unsolvable problem. Probably the most practical solution is a nuclear fission backbone, imo, but there’s several approaches that are in various stages of development and viability.
Photovoltaic panels, windmills, etc aren’t new technology
The big modern efficient and cheap ones are.
More people believed in global warming and climate change in the 90’s than now
I’m looking at a Gallup poll showing 30 percent of Americans worried about global warming in 1990.
Modern day is 61 percent.
collaborated with big oil lobbyists on pivoting to using softer, more nebulous terms to address global warming
Which is a good idea because you get idiots showing up in Congress with a snowball, and was not a term just created out of thin air by big oil.
If we’d been developing and implementing these technologies gradually over the last fifty years,
We have been. Technology and it’s development rarely is some targeted thing. Big projects that get results tend to happen only once the base work has been completed and the investment will show hefty returns. The Manhattan project didn’t happen until the means to create nuclear power was discovered, for example.
As another big example, most of our ability to have electric cars? It’s thanks to cell phone battery research.
Without question these oil companies have stood in the way of progress, but don’t think even for a second that we would be in some magic fantasy land if it weren’t for them.
All things match along and very frequently the decisions we made are much less impactful than you would think.
OTOH, demand for something generally increases the amount of funding available for developing the technology associated with that thing. Yes, we’re more advanced now than we were in the 70s, but we probably lost a solid twenty-thirty years of demand-driven gradual progress due to regressive administrations prioritizing and subsidizing fossil dependency.
demand for something generally increases the amount of funding available for developing the technology associated with that thing
As evidence of this, take note of the dramatic decline in the price of photovoltaic power since people actually started investing in it in 2009.
I imagine we’d have had that sort of drop in the late 1980s if we didn’t elect the senile movie star.
We can imagine as much as we like. The technology and manufacturing processes simply didn’t exist back then.
Isn’t big oil holding and not using a bunch of battery patents leaving us with limited options for what they can be made of?
Definitely not. They apparently had a nimh patent but it expired and that battery tech is old news in the modern day.
The sad part is that he may be right because the urgency to transition off fossils is lost in our desire not to be inconvenienced. Don’t mention the bribes (some call them donations) to political parties, candidates and Supreme Court judges.
They’re not selling a product that’s evil - they are evil.
Petrochemicals lack the agency required for moral culpability.
we’re not selling a product that is evil
Oh I get it. The oil isn’t inherently evil. You are, both as a CEO and as a company! I agree, in fact. If we left the oil safely in the earth, there’d be nothing evil about it.
“We’re not selling an evil product, we’re just running a multibillion dollar cartel in an evil way. That’s totally different.”
We don’t profit off of suffering, we provide it for free!
You’re selling Earth blood that makes the sky melt.
That’s pretty fucking evil.
Don’t forget the brown people that die in the name of oil or propping up dictatorships like Saudi Arabia
Well I for one want to know how my oil got under their land. Why is no one asking these important questions?
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I’d like to present a beautiful Czech tradition called defenestrations. We should do more.
Oil isn’t evil. Oil has many uses outside of being burned for energy, and once we transition away from fossil fuels entirely there will still be a place for oil companies.
This isn’t what he meant, of course, but hopefully his successor will understand that and make the pivots necessary for the company to survive.
Like plastics? I can only think of fuel and plastic uses for oil.
It’s also a component in some industrial products, primarily lubricants and solvents - the latter of which was kinda funny to me because you commonly use solvents to clean off oil
Oh I guess road asphalt is a contributer too. I wonder if those uses eventually contribute to ghgs though degradation over time.
I didn’t know about asphalt, so thanks for that.
Also curious about potential ghg there.
Asphalt does off-gas compounds, though not sure how many of those compounds are GHGs:
Vitamin and mineral supplements
So basically fraud in service of destroying our only planet on the way to making a gajillion dollars. Fair enough, so we extract enough of that money to reverse the catastrophic harm they have done.
I hope you’re right but I fear it may be a Humpty Dumpty situation.
Let’s eat him
I bet we don’t even have to baste him he’s so greasy
Well yeah - it’s not an evil product. As an inanimate object, it can’t possess a moral quality.
Moral qualities are only rightly assigned to conscious beings - like, for example, corporate CEOs.
Nice mental gymnastics. That’s the name of the game.
lmao
Gosh, these guys really are following the big tobacco playbook, huh?
“Oil isn’t evil, it’s just a material, it doesn’t have will or consciousness.”
He’s right of course, the oil itself isn’t forcing anyone to use it. It’s the decades of collaboration between the fossil fuel lobby and the government that’s entrenched our fossil fuel dependent infrastructure, along with the resolute refusal of all fossil fuels companies to turn their backs on making as much money as they possibly can right this instant (because smart long term growth is illegal, brain dead quarterly growth is now my friend) and make good on their promises to pivot their energy portfolios.
In so many words, oil isn’t evil, but the people running the oil companies are.
At this point, now that their are viable alternatives (Renewables, Geothermal, Nuclear) and ways to drastically reduce their usage (War on Cars), oil should be a niche product for airplanes and construction vehicles. Large ocean cargo ships could be nuclear powered, although it would probably raise the cost of building the ships and the crew. As far as ships go, not everything needs to be shipped from the other side of the world.
