The Center for American Progress reports
Exclusive new footage of an internal Mobil Oil meeting with employees, obtained by ThinkProgress, shows then chief executive, Lucio Noto, discussing the impact of Mobil's product on climate change a full two decades ago. This admission occurred as the company worked externally to marginalize climate science and reject any responsibility for global warming and its impacts.
Noto's statement took place in 1998--one year prior to Mobil's merger with Exxon--and raises critical questions about top executives' awareness of the company's overall carbon footprint. The answers may have significant implications for the multiple climate lawsuits currently facing ExxonMobil and other oil giants.
[...] archival video footage of a Mobil Oil meeting seen by ThinkProgress indicates that 20 years ago, employees were raising concerns about the company's responsibility for climate change. In response to staff complaints, Noto--the man who would become ExxonMobil's second in command alongside Lee Raymond--appears to acknowledge the impact the company's product has on rising greenhouse gas emissions.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @01:04PM (25 children)
Petroleum use has bettered the condition of mankind.
When the shit hits the fan, we'll have developed fusion reactors and effective carbon sequestration.
You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @01:18PM (1 child)
Petroleum utilization is nor good nor bad per se.
It hasn't been used well, because we had gas guzzlers first and heavy SUVs later and we axed public transport, and we wasted ton after ton of garbage products instead of making things repairable.
Unfortunately this is not an environmental problem, which would cease should we abandon oil, but a social one.
The same people that gave us pollution are now experimenting with weather ($$$, www, womb and weather: the new weapons, this is why the system is against militarism). They are playing with carbon taxes, making water scarce. It doesn't matter whose side are you on, you either resist at your expense, now, or you pay somehow, later.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @01:34PM
There is still a lot of overhead in human society; there's plenty of room to find efficiencies that will make paying for these things later much cheaper than paying for it now.
You can fly to the Moon on 1960s computer technology, or you can wait a few decades for video gamers to pay for the development of ridiculously better hardware. I'll wait.
(Score: 5, Informative) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday April 03 2018, @02:25PM (15 children)
Bullshit. You are talking like oil is the only choice, and has been since the industrial revolution, but that is just a lie peddled by the dinofuel industry ever since they first realised that alternative energy could hit their bottom line. We've had fission reactors (not without their problems, but way cleaner than dinofuels) for half a century, and STILL the majority of our energy use is petroleum based.
As for sequestration... again, it's something we could be doing now. Again, it's something we could have been doing decades ago, but we aren't[1], largely because half the industrialised world has swallowed the "climate change is a liberal conspiracy" meme pushed by the oil industry.
These fuckers (and their pet politicians and media) have been putting short term profit before the survival of the species. In my view, "treason" is not too strong a word.
[1] Unless you count pumping oil out of the ground, turning it into cheap, shitty, unwanted, Disney-themed landfill fodder, shipping it halfway round the world and selling it to fat kids with their Happy Meals as "sequestration."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @02:37PM (13 children)
And, we're now seriously starting to consider colonies off planet.
So, thanks dinojuice!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday April 03 2018, @02:46PM (12 children)
We'd have been considering those colonies forty years ago if we'd had widespread nuclear power. Shit, imagine how far into space we could be if we'd spent $2.4 TRILLION dollars on space exploration instead of blowing the shit out of the middle east at the behest of the oil companies.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @03:00PM (9 children)
What else is there to say? The world is what it is; you've got to work with what you've got.
The Marxists branched into 2 competing groups: Fascists and Communists.
The Fascists ran hot and fast, and turned America into a well-oiled industrial killing machine, which would have gone to space had it not been for the Communists in Russia who insisted on continuing Marxist expansionism.
So, America re-jiggered itself into a well-integrated technological killing machine, funded by an economy that is built atop petroleum.
Though that killing machine may be wound down at some point, it still needs to be fed petroleum in the meantime, so WHAT THE FUCK ELSE CAN YOU EXPECT?
Feed the machine with one hand while using the other hand to craft alternative ways of organizing society. We want a smooth transition away from the killing machine, not a rocky one that triggers its most fearsome features.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday April 03 2018, @03:11PM (8 children)
Still not seeing a connection between your "well-integrated technological killing machine" and the "betterment of mankind".
What I expect is not the question. I am cynical enough to expect the worst. The question is, exactly how much devastation have the lies of the oil industry wrought on the people of this planet, and how do we get them to use their resources and energies in a more positive way?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @03:21PM (6 children)
Try again?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @04:01PM (5 children)
You may not have made such a connection, but you forget that "the machine" does no good and is obviously just a tool to further the greed of oil / war companies. It was never a requirement and the US could have stopped its imperialism a long time ago. Yes that is the world as it is now, but without telling the truth we won't get enough people pushing for change.
Maybe this revelation is still a bit too new for you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @04:14PM (4 children)
The Truth is that the toxic, self-entitled, illogical Communist rabble provoked America to transform itself from a dreamer into a mundane, reactionary thug.
Maybe this revelation is still a bit too new for you?
In any case, the petroleum economy has bettered mankind beyond its wildest dreams, and cannot just be ripped out in the name of politically motivated "science". Developer indisputably superior alternatives, and then we'll talk.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @05:06PM
Oh I see, you're a blithering moron probably old enough to have ratted out his Eastern European immigrant neighbor cause he was probably a commie. Go boil your head, you sound more like a paid agitator but I'm not beyond thinking you're just brainwashed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @05:36PM (2 children)
Communist rabble lol.
So what, exactly, did this communist rabble do? Care to at least help us out with understanding your theory?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @05:55PM (1 child)
Those innocent little, caring, cooperative communists. Such nice people. The best people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @07:04PM
I'll take that as a no.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @03:35PM
Ask khallow, pretty sure he has an opinion he's like to share with us and, let's keep in mind, (misre)present as fact.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @10:48PM (1 child)
forty years ago
My bet is that we'd have even more Three Mile Islands, more Simi Valleys, more Chernobyls, and more Fukushimas.
The latest on that last thing:
The article also mentions that Japan's contaminated soil will host the 2020 Olympics.
Building nuclear reactors--in particular on the Ring of Fire-- [google.com] has to be among the stupidest things humans have ever done.
...not to mention having always-be-maximizing-profits entities running those.
[1] Those would be food production areas.
[2] I recently discovered that cesium has 40 isotopes (making it tied with mercury and barium for the element with the most isotopes).
Only 1 of cesium's isotopes is not radioactive.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday April 04 2018, @09:13AM
Still cleaner than coal.
If a nuclear power station goes pop every few years and causes some local chaos and pollution and even death, that's bad. However coal power stations are pouring huge amounts of radioactive substances and particulates and not to mention CO2 into the atmosphere 24/7, 365 days a year. Dinopower is killing people by the million, right now, but nobody really talks about it. It causes causing cancers and breathing conditions, as well as global environmental damage that leads to habitat loss, food-chain disruption and immense political upheaval and human misery. It's just that this constant devastation is better hidden and less publicised than a nuclear event every couple of years.
You are right in that nuclear power plants are not always the best-designed or best-managed, but that could be fixed. There are nuclear designs and technologies far safer and cleaner than the ones we use now, which were basically designed as factories for nuclear warhead material. Civilian power was only ever a happy side-effect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @04:06PM
YHBT
HAND
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RamiK on Tuesday April 03 2018, @03:46PM (5 children)
Depends on how well your grand grand children will fare in a lake of fire: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ [ucsd.edu]
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @05:10PM (2 children)
Wheee, I can't wait for the majority of the Earth's GDP going towards solutions to our self-made problems. We dug our grave with technology, here's hoping we can find a tool to get out in time.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @06:46PM (1 child)
Does that include interest payments on government borrowing?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @10:55PM
Sorry I'm not privy to our financial involvement with the Grays or the Lizard People. Hopefully our cheap investment of used underpants will pay off with the Gnomes and that will bail us out of this mess. I'm a little tired of the whole thing so I just hold nightly worship to Cthulu in the hopes that the giant squid and octopi will take over.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday April 03 2018, @07:43PM
Inventing ways to break thermodynamics will become the new global pastime.
Excuse me, I have to tune my EmDrive.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Tuesday April 03 2018, @11:10PM
Quite interesting conversation, well worth reading and thinking about.
I can't offhand think of any way to refute the physicist, but would love to hear someone try.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @10:34PM
it's because of idiots like you the shit is already at our noses