Quite literally last week I was randomly watching The Today Show (mainstream Australian breakfast television) and I couldn't believe what I just saw within the space of 5 minutes.
It was the build up to the AFL grand final and there was a presenter on a football field with kids kicking footballs in the background.
Anyway, he introduces the segment and it turns out it's a paid promotion for Shell. The show then cuts to a 2 minute promotional video for Shell fuel.
Once the promo ends, he tells the kids that whoever kicks a goal gets a $1000 petrol voucher, as he waves a stack of these petrol vouchers in front of the camera.
I don't get easily offended, but I've honestly never seen anything more disgusting in my entire life.
I don't have a problem with people having problems. I have plenty of problems. What I do not like is putting absolute statements like "never seen anything more disgusting". That usually just means you are not looking hard enough.
But, the fact that I have a problem with this relativization of everything does not mean I think problems people do not consider "the most disgusting" should not be tackled.
Look at my country for example. Corruption in local government affects me more that what is going on in China. I can also fight it more that what is going on in China. And, in the end, I care about it more in the "daily on my mind" sense of the word. That does not mean I should label it as being objectively worse or "most disgusting ever".
Hopefully, that’s the case. However, the past decade seems to show us, that if something seems hyperbolic, it’s usually rather serious at the moment. When I was hyperbolic any time in my life, I simply lied even to myself at that given moment, and I believed in that lie until my self-correction didn’t kick in seconds or minutes later. But it’s quite difficult to interpret the current political climate, if most people has such self-correction.
I guess the difference is it happening in your country. As much as I think Tiananmen Square was an atrocity, my feelings about it would be immeasurably stronger if it happened in the UK (where I am from).
"if you let your baby sleep with you, you are a bad mother" that leads to a number of accidental suffocations. I think that’s pretty reasonable to educate the public about that.
That's mostly an urban legend and the vast majority of such cases happen when the parent is not sober and essentially knocked out unconscious.
I mean, infants are typically warmer than adults and they wriggle around a lot - it's hard enough to sleep next to them, much less within suffocation distance.
If the combination of drinking and sleeping beside your infant leads to a higher chance of suffocating them you can ask people to stop drinking, stop sleeping beside their infant, or both. History has shown us that people won’t stop drinking so I think recommending the other potential solution makes sense.
Sorry, I misunderstood the parent was talking about sleeping in the same room which is shunned by many. Sleeping in the same bed is a completely different story and I hope nobody is doing that.
I would love a petrol voucher. 90% of Australians have a car so it would be useful to pretty much anyone's family. It's also a somewhat inelastic good, meaning if I gave you a petrol voucher you probably wouldn't considerably change your driving habits. Maybe you would use it to go on an extra family trip, which yes gasoline bad, but it's not exactly conspicuous consumption. It would just give you some extra money in your pocket. I would much prefer that to something like a vacation voucher or a new car or some useless stuff that I wouldn't pay my own money for.
We're fine with letting Microsoft use them to sell Windows and Office licenses though (through schooling)? Or Google to acclimatize them cloud-first computing + having their data hoovered (also through schooling)?
Let's be real here, if you object to youth directed marketing you should have been up in arms loooooong before now. Fact is targeting kids has been basic corporate strategy 101 for decades.
Tobacco in media. Coke/Pepsi. Cool cars, women, selling kids on "the Police are the good guys". In fact, your opinions about what is appropriate to shoehorn into children's formative years tends to say volumes more about what you are about than about anything else.
That being said, I agree the gas vouchers telegraph a blatant desperation move.
> I don't get easily offended, but I've honestly never seen anything more disgusting in my entire life.
That's a pretty bold statement to make. I don't know what kind of isolated world you live in if you think that a Shell ad is the most disgusting thing you ever saw in your life, but I can give you a hundred examples off the top of my head.
One example that might be related to this subject are working conditions in a lithium mine and the purification process. If people knew the price we pay to drive EVs I'm convinced they would stick with oil. Just because it all happens in China and it doesn't affect us directly, doesn't mean it's any less disgusting.
I am also getting seriously tired of this constant need for censorship which is a contradiction in an open-market economy. You should compete, not sabotage. Instead of looking for ways to ban Shell ads on TV, why doesn't the EV industry offer vouchers too?
I get your point, but I think it's relative to the society which it takes place. Corruption in China? If anything, it's to be expected. It's a literal part of how their political system operates. Corruption in a liberal democracy? Much less acceptable. Of course, that's just one point of view.
As for your comment about EVs, I don't necessarily disagree. My main outrage is that they used children to sell oil.
As for your comment on competition, how can you expect to compete against big oil without regulation, possibly the biggest most powerful industry in the world? The problem is that there is nothing better than oil for what it does, which extends to the other problem that open markets don't care about externalities or planetary boundaries. Which is where people need to come in and put restrictions.
I'm curious, but would you have been against the breaking up of Standard Oil back in the day?
I wasn't talking about corruption in China. I was implying that we outsource the "disgusting" part of producing lithium batteries to get a ready-made product that we can use. In the same way you see a steak in a supermarket rather than years of force-feeding cattle with antibiotics and steroids, you see a Tesla Model 3 driving on the road. You don't see what it takes to produce the "stuff" that powers your car.
I'm not quite sure I get your counter-point to competition. We already heavily regulate the oil industry and subsidise EVs. We tax fossil fuels, we tax ICE cars, we favour EVs in city centres and we even brought in a law to completely ban purchasing new ICE vehicles by year X. If your product is so great, it shouldn't need government intervention to promote it; and Musk's Tesla company is a great example of that.
My original comment addressed the illusion that most Westerns live in and downvoting just proves that. Service-based economies seem to be removed from reality and don't understand the "disgusting" things that have to take place in order for them to function. Like someone said in another thread, if you're really concerned about morals then you will probably have to throw your entire PC out the window.
EDIT:
> I'm curious, but would you have been against the breaking up of Standard Oil back in the day?
You'll never get what you need for EVs without child labor or extremely unhealthy work conditions. Roughnecks and engineers happily go to work to drill for the oil that runs society
That's one very specific example, to a few very specific countries at best.
On the contrary, oil is what's primarily funding the invasion of Ukraine. Think of all the people being killed as a result of that conflict. Or for the civil wars that oil ends up creating i.e. Sudan.
I think ultimately the point is that the 3rd world always loses in the end. They're the ones who suffer most from the ambitions of Western nations, irrespective of their intentions.
Fossil fuels are irreplaceable for what they offer at the price they ask.
Don’t ask the West. Ask India that had the choice to leapfrog fossil fuels and be energy independent, at higher cost.
People don’t care about our opinions. They want the cheapest options.
The only way to transition out of fossils for energy, is to make the alternatives cheaper and easily accessible. US transitioned from coal to gas within 10 years when the economics became favorable.
It really depends on how you calculate this, but fossil fuels are not cheap by any means. The IMF has some staggering numbers for direct and indirect subsidies of fossil fuels, https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...: “… explicit subsidies (undercharging for supply costs) more than doubled to $1.3 trillion.” If we just got rid of those subsidies, we’d see a faster shift.
Then there are all the externalities that are not part of the cost of fossil fuel costs today, start charging for the pollution and make the real costs explicit. The next thing, stop subsidizing road construction and maintenance for car drivers, and make only car owners pay the costs of all the roads, people would again see more explicitly how much more expensive cars are, which would get people to shift to other options (the vast majority of which are not EVs and won’t be for a long time). People might opt to bike for anything shorter than a 3 mile errand, deeming the car to be too expensive, or use the local bus or transit system…
Point being, these fossil fuels are supported directly by our governments and many of the primary users of those fuels are also supported by our governments (some more than others like here in the US).
You're misquoting with your explicit subsidies. Undercharging is an implicit, not explicit. The vast majority of these subsidies are implicit subsidies. "Getting rid of" these subsidies means taxing an extra trillion dollars not scaling back something handing the oil companies a trillion dollars.
If you want to argue we should levy a trillion dollar tax on fossil fuels that's fine but let's at least be direct about it instead of the somewhat misleading statement that it's a subsidy, like it's some giant pile of cash the state is handing to the oil companies. It's not even that it's giving tax breaks (that would be an explicit subsidy), it's that these taxes didn't exist at all.
You're essentially arguing not being taxed to oblivion as being directly supported by the government.
Am I misquoting that? I read that report as saying that the implicit costs are about $7 trillion dollars, and the explicit subsidies are $1.3 trillion, which is the number I used in the quote because, I agree, the implicit costs are harder to understand.
I double checksd the source and you're right that isn't a misquote, but it isn't quite accurate in the end. A lot of the "undercharging" is essentially not making new taxes. Most of the explicit subsidies are subsidies that pretty much any large business gets, nothing special about the oil industry there. Things like local tax deferments for plants that supposedly bring jobs to an area are common for just about any large employer. Maybe we shouldn't be doing this in general, but it's not something special to oil industries.
We should probably just end all of those "subsidies" and loopholes in general.
Sorry for misunderstanding and missing what you were quoting. My overall point still kind of stands though, a lot of these "the government is subsidizing the oil industry trillions of dollars" is usually talking about these implicit costs that aren't taxed like they'd like.
I live in "the west" and I can contribute to change there. So I do. Try to change what you can change, instead of thinking about what you can't change and not doing anything.
problem is, unlike other issues that can have positive local impacts, the biggest downsides to climate change are global. doesn't really matter that as the US/EU our emissions have been flat for decades now if china and India are shooting up like crazy.
Sure, if you're talking per capita, US people emit more carbon dioxide but with your "even with 1/5th" and "the biggest polluter" it suggests you're thinking total not per capita.
The US were for a long time. But now it’s China. Although they already are the biggest producer of green energy world wide. They produce more green energy than all other countries combined. I don’t know if their strategy will drastically reduce their carbon emissions soon, for now they are still rising. In Europe and the US they are going down a while already (also because we moved a lot of our industry to china).
Yes, it's impressive what they are doing. But I think their total amount of carbon emissions are still rising in total. So their energy consumption seems to grow faster than their green energy production.
India and China are both investing heavily in renewables, this is a tired trope.
Renewable energy is also cost effective compared to fossil fuels in many cases and has been for years. This also excludes the massive externalities of fossil fuels.
True, making it cheaper is the best way, which should involve not subsidising fossil fuels and subsidising renewables.
Alas, none of this has anything to do with fossil fuel companies advertising to children, not sure if your a contrarian or a shill but your take is totally off topic.
So, in any tragedy of the commons are we just going to accept that the only solutions are going to be to change the concrete circumstances that make it a one?
If not climate change, then there'll be other instances like this where what's good for the individual (country) is bad for the world.
A couple of years ago, this was touted as impossible - "who can impose this global tax you dream of?" was said back then as well. Why should it be impossible for countries to come together like this, with agreements to implement tariffs against countries outside the agreement?
Right, let's just leave it to the free market to make the transition when economically viable. The invisible hand has been working great so far in preventing a global ecosystem catastrophe. /s
No we should do what we are doing today. Help to change the economics with investments and subsidies.
And do it in a way that the poor people do not revolt and topple the governments because of the crazy high prices in goods.
The valid debate is how fast can we go towards this direction(aka how much should we ask people to pay to fund the transition). And there is no single right answer for this.
Note the gas station brand of vanilla Fortnite is “Spillx”. Cars and trucks have faster electric counterparts.
I guess having companies build out maps and use their assets was going to be a side effect of having user created content.
Company sponsored games aren’t new (80d had 7up-spot and cool-aid man). One of this years biggest movies is a doll brand. However I don’t think they’re fooling anyone.
I remember going to Disney World sometime in like 2003 or so. My dad decided he wa Ted to go to the Epcot center for some reason and their big feature presentation was on dinosaurs but really it was thinly veiled propaganda for the oil industry. It included a whole lot of repetition of the sentiment of “don’t worry. While we keep using more and more oil, we are always finding more.” It was pretty gross and in your face.
The kicker at the end of the presentation: Sponsored by Exxon Mobile.
Tinfoil moment, there is genuine discussion and protest from Gen Z grassroots to hit them where it hurts, i.e. stop subsidies and tax breaks for Oil & Gas.
Both BP and Shell are likely aware of this and are now trying to target public transport advertisement and online communities, where they think they will probably win over Gen Z.
I feel like this must surely be an observation made from a skewed sample or from within some sort of bubble?
Tbh I don't have any research or polling data on hand, but I seem to remember gen Z being FAR more conscious of the environment (climate change and plastics pollution), their own health (drinking/smoking) and global social issues.
How could it be? The company name alone almost guarantees negative reactions. And rightly so, because they keep reneging on their promises. It also has a terrible "fellow youngsters" vibe, one that even I can feel. Both are an invitation to sarcasm.
I doubt that the sentiment is universally shared, though. There are still large groups in denial about climate change, even though heat record after heat record is broken.
"even though heat record after heat record is broken."
It's not really strange that people don't get that argument though right? Since the heat records are only a few 100 years old at most.
If "climate change is real and a problem, because weather heat records" is supposed to be a logical narrative then I can totally understand that people don't follow that logic and just tune out.
I trust the science about global warming, but the logic in those papers is very very far from "climate change is real and a problem, because weather heat records".
When heat records that stood for a century are now broken every year, it’s a clear indication that something is going on. And it’s clearly a problem. Heat being so high to beat the record is unequivocally a problem.
Anyways, it’s not like those that “tune out” when you point out heat records are being broken every year would listen if you gave them truly scientific arguments.
I don't think it's obvious to everyone why heat records being broken are clearly or unequivocally a problem. These projections we've seen from climate scientists have always been off, why should I trust them about the impact of a warmer climate?
Because higher temperatures directly correlate with higher death through heatwave events, and indirectly through more intense weather events and longer fire seasons.
Why the actual fucking fuck did Fortnite get in bed with these petro boomers?! Shell must be one of the brands farthest removed from the target demographic. I can't believe they need the cash that badly, and like you say, this can only backfire. Millions of views on that vid, almost no likes.
I can't believe this exists, it's almost funny. Maybe they can do Depend Adult Undergarments branded content next.
This has been the case for a hundred years already.
It is why Santa is dressed in red. Why people buy diamond engagement rings. Why cigarettes were readily available for literally decades after they were already known to be harmful. And why American gun control laws have never matured despite all the evidence that proves the status quo isn’t viable.
> And why American gun control laws have never matured despite all the evidence that proves the status quo isn’t viable.
Tbh I don't think this has anything to do with marketing. Guns are just a part of our culture regardless of whether we want them to be or not. If we were capable of changing this we'd be capable of doing a hell of a lot of other things, too, instead of sitting on our hands and loudly babbling about individual freedoms as a form of politics.
> Guns are just a part of our culture regardless of whether we want them to be or not.
"Owning slaves is just a part of our culture regardless of whether we want it to be or not."
And I know what you're thinking: "comparing owning guns to owning human beings is wrong". Yes, but saying that something is "our culture" and can't be changes is just plain silly. Especially when it comes to guns.
And culture is driven by marketing. Which comes right back to the point I was making.
If gun culture was so fundamental to peoples beliefs then the NRA wouldn’t need to spend as much on lobbying as they do. The entire reason that culture hasn’t changed in the last hundred years is because of marketing, not in spite of it.
Sure but you haven't shown how advertising drives specifically gun culture. Someone's eighteenth gun? Sure, but that's a rounding error in terms of gun ownership.
> if gun culture was so fundamental to peoples beliefs then the NRA wouldn’t need to spend as much on lobbying as they do.
You're conflating marketing a product to a market and bribing politicians to not restrict the sale of guns. There isn't any overlap.
> You're conflating marketing a product to a market and bribing politicians to not restrict the sale of guns. There isn't any overlap
I disagree. In the case of gun ownership, lobbying creates the market, and the more generalised marketing helps to grow it. They're two tines of the same pitchfork.
Lobbying is, after all, just highly focused marketing at specific demographics (politicians) and in often underhanded ways.
I was illustrating a point with an example, not documenting an exhaustive list of the NRAs expenditure. And the fact that you're picking meta-arguments rather than refuting my point head-on, speaks volumes.
Guns are as much part of the American culture as SUVs are: mostly fabricated by advertisement and corporate lobbying (which too is “part of the American culture”, I guess).
Guns literally are part of the founding od America. We got the second Amendment precisely because England tried to do things like take guns and quarter soldiers. Guns are and always have been part of American culture. I would also research the history of gun control the U.S, it may surprise you.
> Guns literally are part of the founding od America.
Guns are the founding part of basically every country, because in the end “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”.
You got the second amendment for the same reason the French got paragraph 35 of the Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen of 1793: «Quand le gouvernement viole les droits du peuple, l’insurrection est, pour le peuple et pour chaque portion du peuple, le plus sacré des droits et le plus indispensable des devoirs.», because when their newly founded state relied on people's insurrection to exist, they made sure that they wrote their fundamental texts in a way that guarantees it. Then the political structure of the US made the constitution very stable compared to the French ones.
The second amendment's history was then co-opted by the NRA in their marketing campaign, but this has little to do with what the second amendment is really about, that “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”. And the current gun culture is in fact mostly “conservative culture in the Reagan era and after”.
You got the second amendment from the English Bill of Rights of 1689 (along with most of the other 10), which states the same right (for Protestants only):
They actually aren't in the constitution at all. You have a right to bear arms. You do not have a right to purchase, wield, and use a handgun (which, by the way, would be hilariously ineffective in an uprising against the government and is mostly good for killing the people in your house). We just have spineless politicians on our hands.
Okay? And now where do we go from here? Decisions about the future shouldn’t be based on some weird tribalistic pride about your fav energy source’s vibes or the historical ethics of it. It’s fucking oil, it isn’t going to get hurt feelings.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of big corporations using propaganda, especially towards children but, that topic aside, people are kidding themselves if they believe their way of life would exist without fossil fuels. Look up the Haber process; your ability to walk down to a Whole Foods in a city of millions and buy groceries to support your vegan diet wouldn't be a thing. The stepping stone to things like nuclear and solar wouldn't be there. Humanity would be so bass-ackwards by now without fossil fuels that people would still be routinely dying of diseases that today are well treated, as well as mere child birth. The only way someone can't connect the progress of the 20th and 21st centuries with fossil fuels is to view it only in isolation. The "fossil fuels bad" attitude is at best quixotic, and at worst enters the realm of insanity. Next to none of us would give up our lifestyle that benefits from fossil fuels (which includes the advance of nuclear) for the sake of decarbonization.
I can tell someone is going ask you for your "solution."
You know what the solution is, reader? Either support pro-nuclear policies until something better comes along, or shut up about climate change. In my experience, every single person who views climate change as an impending catastrophe responds with "but what if" when asked about nuclear. This is a widespread form of insanity. If we are headed for catastrophe, or extinction according to some, then the purely hypothetical world-ending events related to nuclear reactors shouldn't be any more of a problem. Personally, I'll take 100 Chernobyl-like events over extinction and a dying planet. Think that's crazy? Do the math.
> Renewables are already cheaper than fossil fuels in many cases.
At 1pm when sun is shining. For the rest of the time you need to run backup ... on fossil fuels. This is the main reason why Germany is unlikely to decarbonize in a near future.
I'd never heard of the Haber process, it was interesting to read about
according to wikipedia it cut the required farmland to feed a population in four. obviously it's hard to argue with more food for more people, but it clearly made urbanisation and overpopulation that much easier. quite a brilliant invention of engineering, but is it actually a good thing for a population to grow at that rate?
I think it's pretty obvious what I'm implying. overpopulation is bad, and the Haber process has massively accelerated overpopulation. ergo it's worth questioning whether it's actually a good thing
Ah, the Dolchstoßlegende of nuclear energy again. The Green movement was an absolute fringe group without power that never influenced any decision regarding nuclear energy in the 20th century.
Fossil fuel companies opposing it I can understand: it’s a straightforward, strategic move.
For green proponents, I think it was an own goal, likely driven by a mix of fear and failing to realize that people would not readily temper their demand for energy and the holistic solution needs to include humanity harnessing substantial amounts of energy. Ruling out nuclear directly (in a single step) means decades of people creating gigatons more emissions from burning fossil fuels.
Also anti-nuclear greens today and then were looking at significantly different tech. I mean, some of that started when the core catchers weren't a standard thing.
In 2015, I worked for a youth-focused and progressive news/“content” organization that posted their videos exclusively on social media. Let’s call them “Know That Event.” It made/makes its money by doing the occasional advertorial video on behalf of a company and mixing it in with its typical content.
They announced to the staff one day that they landed a deal with Shell to produce videos about their science investment initiatives. I was disturbed by this and had chats with various decision makers. I was told that it would have a positive impact and celebrate the good investments, which would encourage Shell to do more good things! I wish I wrote down details, it was ridiculous. But they went ahead and did it. Shell never exerted any control over other content and all the news/editorial people were smart and committed, but this left a bad taste in my mouth about the company for the rest of my time there.
First question - is Fortnite even relevant anymore? The kids i know don't play it anymore been like 2 years. This shows how far behind O&G campaigns are. Unless they are trying out a marketing approach in a quiet space to hopefully build it out elswewhere.
I've just logged in to check - there is 300k people online playing across different modes. That's bananas for any game. Of course it's extremely relevant, because yes, kids you know might have stopped playing it already but there are always new kids who are trying it for the first time - and then people like me who still play it every week with friends even though we are 30+.
I think all three of those games are already passé for children. The people who grew up on Minecraft and Roblox are now in their twenties. No idea what actual children are playing these days; probably gacha games on their phones or something?
Minecraft is still the shit and getting passed down to younger generations. If you go to the gaming category on YouTube while logged out and (optionally) connected through a VPN, you'll see these games are far from passé.
>One of the most polluted areas on the planet, the Niger Delta has a life expectancy of just 41 years due to decades of Shell oil spills & constant gas flaring.
> One of the most polluted areas on the planet, the Niger Delta has a life expectancy of just 41 years due to decades of Shell oil spills & constant gas flaring.
That's a single data point, that contributes less than environmental factors, skyrocketing populace, low instances of vaccination and healthcare.
> The top three leading causes of death in Niger in 2017 were malaria, diarrheal diseases and lower respiratory infections. Comparatively, in the United States, the leading causes of death are heart disease, cancer and accidents.
I think the best part of this whole article is the quote from streamer GHOST WHOH (@WHOH on Twitter/X) starting "All road trips start with @shellstationsus .."
Shell Stations US
or
Shell Station Sus
Yep, pretty sus alright. I'm sure a lot of the target audience is laughing about this.
I see a positive side: It's a sign that change is happening right now.
Big oil never had to advertise the "benefits" of fuel, people just bought it. This slowly starts to change. And oil companies are crapping their pants, because in some countries a significant amount of cars on the roads will be EVs within a few years.
In Europe some corporations already switched to a 100% EV company car policy. All new leases need to be electric only, and within 3 years they will have >90% EVs in their passenger car fleet.
> Big oil never had to advertise the "benefits" of fuel
Have I got news for you... Check out the latest ClimateTown video https://youtu.be/_pNRuafoyZ4 for just a few examples, but there's lots more and it's been happening for decades.
Does anyone really think this will work? This isn’t cigarette advertising, which raises the profile of a directly harmful activity. Like what’s the best case for Shell here?
If you’re going to get upset about anything in games, get upset about loot boxes. Promoting gambling to children should be illegal. That’s psychologically damaging.
For people who don't hate fossil fuels and are sick of how invasive, disruptive and insanely hyperbolic the push for renewables has been...it's nice to see the shoe on the other foot for a change.
On a topic not directly related to the article, there's a book written by a former CEO of Shell called "Why We Hate the Oil Companies" that's rather interesting. In summary, his points are that oil is not necessarily good or bad, but that the lack of effective energy policies and the inherent challenges of the field incentivize bad practices by oil companies, while simultaneously these companies fail to communicate their positive role in civilization as the media routinely use them as a punching bag. I'm not excusing what Shell is doing or has done in the past, but the book provides a nuanced take for anyone interested in the topic.
Energy and energy availability certainly have saved many lives and made many others much better than they would've been, but that's not really due to energy companies.
Give the ownership of oil rights to other people / companies and they'd have done the same stuff, specially after the first waves of development. Attributing all the positives of cheap energy on humanity to oil companies and their employees seems like attributing the joy of music to the record labels.
> I'm not excusing what Shell is doing or has done in the past, but the book provides a nuanced take for anyone interested in the topic.
I don't think you can write a comment that says the book is a nuanced take and in the same breath say you're not apologising for them.
Of course the CEO of shell's nuanced take is "they let us do it", when they spent an absolute fortune ensuring that they would be allowed to continue.
I've read the book, and it's not a nuanced take, at all. It sells a picture of "well you said you wanted it, so we just gave you what you want", and sweeps under the rug all of the other parts. For example, the research that these companies did almost 50 years ago that they made absolutely no effort to avoid the consequences of, instead burying them.
There was nothing stopping the CEO of shell divesting in the early 2000's other than greed and growth, and the only reason he wrote a book about it is because it sells.
Well, the reason for the hate could be that OR things like oil companies sponsoring climate change deniers and exxon hiding results of their own study which shown that continued burning of fossil fuels will have catastrophic consequences.
This is a corporation heavily investing in messaging and lobbying that makes sure they get subsidies rather than fines and regulation. Yes, that kind of comment about nuance is totally excusing them.
People have the right to know from where their quality of life comes from.
So if you think quality of life = cool ,
then it's true that fossil fuels = cool.
Don't let any private jet flying tech CEO or yacht enthusiast actor tell you otherwise. They want to brainwash you to have the exclusive on fossil fuels consumption much like they want to brainwash you to pay the maximum amount of taxes while they structure their affairs through trusts in Puerto Rico, Curacao or St. Kitts and Nevis.
Keep that foot on the pedal, they have much more to lose than we have, for once that's an advantage, if they are really so scared of climate change they'd move to Tibet or the Rockies.
I'm not listening to them I'm listening to science, the discipline that has given us pretty much all our quality of life improvements.
It's suspicious how many in this thread are pointing out that fossil fuels are an essential component of society reaching the point it has. We know, that's not a revelation.
> Don't let any private jet flying tech CEO or yacht enthusiast actor tell you otherwise. They want to brainwash you to have the exclusive on fossil fuels consumption much like they want to brainwash you to pay the maximum amount of taxes while they structure their affairs through trusts in Puerto Rico, Curacao or St. Kitts and Nevis.
I think you're spending a bit too much time in the conspiracy rabbit hole. Kim Kardashian's carbon footprint is about equivalent of 50 americans. She also has almost 350 million followers on Instagram. If she manages to get 1% of her following to reduce their footprint by 1% for a year, she undoes more than she emits in a year.
That doesn't mean they're not hypocrites, but have some context. What's actually needed is a change in consumption across the board, and a change in attitude towards impact. The only way that happens is through regulation and education.
> > If she manages to get 1% of her following to reduce their footprint by 1% for a year, she undoes more than she emits in a year
It should be the person who has a footprint of 200x the avg. person to make cuts to their CO2 emissions because they are the low hanging fruit as far as quality of life is concerned, not the avg. person.
It's a fairly easy concept, like taxation, you take from those who have, not from those who don't have anything...oops my bad it's the country of the MAGA tax breaks and tax writeoffs on new and used private jets, while Flint doesn't have clean water since forever.
By describing the products in detail using their official trademarked and marketing names, this article is doing just as much advertising for Shell as Fortnite is.
there really are a lot of "yes big oil may be bad, but here's why they aren't as bad as you think:"-type comments in this thread. maybe it's just a prevailing wind on HN though
perhaps this is just my bubble, but I don't think I've ever met a person in real life who tries to defend oil companies
I’ve noticed HN users in general enjoy being contrarian and argumentative. It’s a “I must be doing something smart if I’m going against the grain” attitude.
this is true, but I'm like 80% sure there's significant astroturfing on HN. look at any post that mentions relations with China. flooded with comments in similar formats to the ones here. I thought China was ..., but then ... and now I'm not so sure"
I have no special interest in the discussion except that I would like to leave a reasonable world to my children and I am generally pro-ecology.
With this said, I am also happy to have a car and to use it from time to time to drive. It requires fuel and fuel is made by oil companies (directly or indirectly).
I am not sure this is "supporting" them, but I sure do not want them to close overnight (we have in France from time to time the apocalyptic version of fuel not being distributed - thanks to our unions who prepare us for Mad Max style futur if oil was to suddenly vanish :))
> one of the many entities directly responsible for destroying our planet
Do any of you believe this narative?
Honest question: isn't the destruction of the planet due to the 8 billion people that have to be fed, clothed, housed, entertained? Aren't fossil fuels directly responsible for the industrial revolution and people not starving anymore?
I get that "Big Oil" might have delayed some reforms, but isn't the elephant in the room the 8 billion people that still need to be fed, clothed, housed, and entertained?
> I get that "Big Oil" might have delayed some reforms
That's a huge understatement. They have actively sabotaged green initiatives all along. They have stopped green policies, and green policies is and has always been the ONLY way forward, you can't put shit like this on individuals.
Sometimes I think, that green policies are not stopped by Big Oil but undermined.
You see, in many countries green policies are tied with rejection of nuclear power plants, which is much more effective and sustainable than all solar & wind sources.
When I've lived in Russia, I've donated to Green Peace and WWF, because they helps a lot to save Nature Reserves, oppose predatory laws which allows to exploit Protected Areas without any ecological control, they sued factories which dump industrial waste into soil and water without any treatment, etc.
Now I'm living in Europe and I don't want to give money to Green Peace, because their agenda is not about nature reserves and industrial waste treatment, but, first, anti-nuclear-plant and then anti-travel, antu-car-ownership, etc.
> because their agenda is not about nature reserves and factory waste treatment, but, first, anti-nuclear-plant and then anti-travel, antu-car-ownership, etc.
All of these things are indeed stupid imo, typical EU green party style navel gazing. The one I kind of agree with is anti-car-ownership, but it’s an extremely poor treatment of the symptom, where the decease is poor (and in many cases irreversible) city planning and public services. Excessive car ownership in urban areas is a solved problem in many parts of the world (where a car is less convenient than alternatives for personal travel for small families/households). It’s not rocket science.
And one more: I don't know about which parts of the world you are speaking of.
I've relocated to the Netherlands half a year ago, and I'm living in Amstelveen, it is Amsterdam's satellite town.
It is "well known" that the Netherlands is very car-less-friendly country.
But no, it is not in reality. Especially if you could not ride bicycle, as my wife. There is 2 shops with limited selection of basic food in walking distance from our apartments (and it is apartments in multi-store building, not some cottage in the middle of the fields), and it's it. You need something other? You need to take tram, which costs at leas 1.8 euro one way (2.9 euro to the Amsterdam itself) and maybe shop you need will be near the one of the stops of this tram (if you are lucky). You need IKEA, really big supermarket, something like this? Good luck to get there without taxi.
It is very frustrating. I didn't own car previously, but I'm thinking about it now.
Problem is, there is no good way for long way travel but airplane or car. Flights become ridiculous expensive (thanks to green movent too), and if you don't own car...
It becomes middle ages again: you live all you life in one city, you eat only local food ("we don't need oranges all year around" from other comment in this thread), you wash with cold water (to conserve energy), you wear thick, warm clothes even indoor at winter (same). Yes, you have antibiotics and, may be, good dentist, if you could afford it. Thank you.
I'm joking about middle ages, but as they say every joke contains some part of joke...
But it's unpopular and expensive. Here in the UK, we have the minister for transport [0] jumping on the bandwagon of "walkable cities are a ploy for the government to control which shops you go to". In France, there were literal riots when fuel taxes were set to be raised.
It takes much less space (including storage for waste of current generation power plants, and we could close fuel cycle if we spent a tiny fraction of money used to whitewash oil companies to this research) that all fields of wind generators and solar panels. Also, modern nuclear station has resource much larger than modern wind generators, which is made of glass and resin. Nuclear power plant don't take space needed to graze cattle and seed crops, don't kill soil with vibration as wind turbines, don't change local micro climate as solar panels deployed on square kilometers. "Only" problem with nuclear plant is possible terrorist attack (modern control systems should exclude manual control and Chernobyl scenario).
Yes, uranium is theoretically finite, but only now known reserves is enough for something like 100'000 years on current level of power production of whole planet (not current power production of existing nuclear power plants, but total power production as-if it is made only by nuclear plants). And it is not all reserves for sure, and in 100'000 years, I hope, fusion power plants will be reality
As I understood it, we only have access to a few decades worth of high-grade uranium. After that we’re left with low-grade uranium which is hard to mine and refine - which incidentally you need fossil fuels to do (the mining part)
With regard to space needed: imagine if every existing building had roof top solar panels. We’d get quite far. I think we have the space for a few wind turbines to get us the final few kWh.
What do you think we should do with nuclear waste?
And how do you feel about giving every country in the world access to technology that also lets them develop nuclear weapons? Or should a select group of countries be environmentally conscious and the rest use fossil fuels? Renewables can be given to every country without risk.
Fossil fuels have enabled great things. Fossil fuel companies also directly interfere with policy and regulation that will enable people to have a similar quality of life while using considerably more non-emitting power. That's horrible.
> I get that "Big Oil" might have delayed some reforms, but
This sentence fragment greatly understates the impact they have had. It is clear that you consider it to be a narrative and are deliberately deflecting attention elsewhere. Both are valid statements, it is not a binary situation. It is not one over the other, and deliberately polarising situations does not help anyone. It only serves to further hinder the situation.
> I get that "Big Oil" might have delayed some reforms, but isn't the elephant in the room the 8 billion people that still need to be fed, clothed, housed, and entertained?
Imagine how much progress would have been made had Shell et al. not buried research for decades showing the harms of fossil fuels and aggressively lobbied against alternative forms of energy.
This is like saying its not Comcast's fault that your neighborhood still only has 50mbps after decades and millions in grants because people still need Internet access.
I have a 1 Gbps internet connection at home, for which I'm paying $10 per month. I live in Romania.
The US and its companies are not the only ones on this earth, so unless you're going to claim some sort of conspiracy that prevented global progress, I'm not buying it.
I think you misunderstood my comment. Comcast is a US company; the fact you have 1Gbps Internet in Romania and yet many parts of the US don't (or don't for a reasonable price) just illustrates my point.
Is this where allowing this type of rhetoric on HN ultimately evolves to, dipshit climate change deniers from undeveloped third world countries spouting brainless propoganda counterpoints to "the narrative" that using oil on the scale that we do harms the environment?
Is the understatement of the century. They knew about global warming from internal research close to a decade before public science was able to gather enough data to raise alarm bells. Over that decade big oil spent time not researching greener alternatives or options for improving things but rather prepared for the globe spanning disinformation campaign you've so lightly referred to as delaying some reforms.
Big oil is a major reason for why 8 billion people are being fed, clothed, and entertained unsustainably. We don't need oranges avaliable year round. We don't need North Sea salmon in pacific Islands. We especially don't need to import so much most is thrown out as waste.
There is a lot wrong with the world right now, and population management needs to be part of the conversation but we are not yet at a point where the volume of people is simply unsustainable. We are unlikely to reach that point as well, since population growth seems to slow naturally as populations hit carrying capacity.
By the late 70s wasn't a secret, it's more that nobody would listen over the sound of oil prices crashing half a decade later. Exxon even briefly had a substantial research division into renewables. In the 80s!
YouTube channel Climate Town has a very good summary of history of early climate chance action, The Time America Almost Stopped Climate Change
Some people really do follow this line of thinking all the way down to "the industrial revolution was therefore bad for humanity", but I think most people would agree that not true, so these simple narratives must be incomplete
I’m sure it is. But it starts to get murkier when I consider that the wood came from a tree 200m up the road, but the oil is from the Middle East, processed somewhere and delivered to me 10,000km away.
Instead, Shell—a massive oil company and one of the many entities directly responsible for destroying our planet—wants you all to know just how rad its fossil fuel products are, and even made a whole Fortnite world for you to enjoy!
Sure, spreading oil propaganda and trying to influence policies despite very well knowing of the negative consequences is bad, maybe even evil behavior. But making it sound like Shell singlehandedly destroyed the planet is just ignorant. Without us, the consumers, and our desire for the products made from that oil and gas, Shell would not have pumped a single barrel out of the ground or sunk an oiltanker somewhere in the process. The convince of having a car, consuming cheap electricity, getting plastic toys from China delivered across the globe the next day and spending your holiday at the other end of the world is what destroyed the planet.
> having a car, consuming cheap electricity, getting plastic toys from China delivered across the globe the next day and spending your holiday at the other end of the world is what destroyed the planet.
And any attempts to move away from that paradigm are heavily lobbied against by entities like Shell. It's hard to change habits, even harder to get an entire culture to change, and harder still when the change is being actively countered.
And even then, should you not be more mad at the politician that took the money? As I wrote, I am with everyone who considers that bad or maybe even evil behavior, but without a lot of other people from consumers, to voters and politicians this would all have played out differently. Putting all the blame on Shell and friends might be convinient, but it is also lazy and dishonest.
Oil and gas is like the whale oil of the 19th century except that it has rooted deeply into civilization and will strike at anyone who tries to remove its influence. It has provided many great benefits to humanity and still has a function in society. However it needs a diminished role and it needs to stop blocking progress.
Its literally causing expensive electricity now and blocking cheap electricity.
It was the build up to the AFL grand final and there was a presenter on a football field with kids kicking footballs in the background.
Anyway, he introduces the segment and it turns out it's a paid promotion for Shell. The show then cuts to a 2 minute promotional video for Shell fuel.
Once the promo ends, he tells the kids that whoever kicks a goal gets a $1000 petrol voucher, as he waves a stack of these petrol vouchers in front of the camera.
I don't get easily offended, but I've honestly never seen anything more disgusting in my entire life.