YHK - yet another hacker news clone

I don't think that's it at all, it's that capital has no desire to hold people like Epstein and company accountable. That's an uncomfortable place to be in, and so it doesn't get talked about.

It's what leads to a sort of cheat code that the Bay Area investment scene has discovered - if you burn capital quickly enough to grow your revenue fast enough (even hamstringing profit to do so), and in doing so generate more investment interest and more capital attention, you eventually become Too Big To Fail, like Uber did, or the AI companies are doing now.

It's really important uphold the law, but nothing really happens if the collective attitude won't change.

I fear the Children of Men style future we're stepping into.

Doesn‘t Texas still have the death penalty?

1+1=…

And all of this is before you get into the question of whether they lied or were engaging in motivated reasoning. During COVID we had anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, seemingly without clear commercial reasons to lie. Should those people be thrown in jail as well?

The captured carbon will be used for Enhanced Oil Recovery. Fossil fuel companies add a few trillion dollars in govt money, in addition to the $7T dollars in subsidies today (yale).

Carbon capture tech a 'complete falsehood', says Fortescue Metals chairman: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373538

Honest Government Ad | Carbon Capture & Storage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZgoFyuHC8

So this 1000 metric ton CO2 DAC plant could offset the activities of 100-400 vehicles in a year... minus the activities of the employees to get to the plant. That's what I wanna know. When are the workers going to stop driving 60 miles round trip to work? And how many need to be at work everyday at the plant? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38237920

Out of the 27 commercially operational CCS projects worldwide, 21 inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs to force out petroleum: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36970085

Big Oil Helped Shape Stanford’s Latest Climate-Research Focus. Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability recently unveiled its first institutionwide research focus: greenhouse-gas removal. Taking tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere will be “essential” to limiting global warming, as a news release last month explained, and ideas will be marshaled from across the school to get it done. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35829500

I don’t mean generic “throw someone in jail because we all agree they’re evil amirite” posturing, but actual cases against someone based on evidence of breaking a law. Any law. It doesn’t even have to result in jail time to be a political career builder. Saying you’ve pursued and won cases against a “bad” company or executives is a huge boon to anyone in this current political environment that is highly against establishments. It’s universal, from Elizabeth Warren campaigning on her actions against Wall St to the entire “drain the swamp” phenomenon.

Reading the actual memo, not the journalists trying to make articles out of it, reveals a little more about why there isn’t the classic smoking gun here, which is a much simpler explanation for why nobody is going to jail than assuming that money has bribed, paid off, and outlawyered everyone in the country who stands to benefit politically from going after a real crime.

Frankly, I hope that both of those things happened, so that people could make their own minds up after an adversarial process. (We have one pure-EV and one ICE car (non-plug-in hybrid, but that's just ICE with extra equipment for marginal efficiency gains), because the cars have different use cases that they're good at. I'm very happy for the EV companies to tell me how much better EVs are than ICE cars; I'm also happy for ICE car companies to tell me how much better their cars are than EVs.)

It’s not like you can squash only PR campaigns that you happen to be misaligned with, so If you want your own biases to be able to communicated, you have to let others do the same.

"Please don't turn away from oil now that its geopolitical risks are so plain to see."

However, there are certain aspects of the US society and political system that appear to be particularly well suited to the rise of big corps doing big evil things.

Classic example:

- guy owns a cab company

- he puts each cab in it's own LLC

- the idea is that if a cab hurts or kills someone, the liability stops at the cab and doesn't come back to him

Judges will say "that is not acceptable" and rule that the liability does indeed extend outside the single car LLC and should apply to the owner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil

* There is a company that manufactures and sells cars that supposedly brake in front of pedestrians. * The company is aware that the car's braking system is faulty. * It runs a sophisticated public relations campaign campaign to convince buyers that cars can not run people over. * Public evidence of its failed braking system emerges. * It attempts to muddy the waters, cast doubt on the victims, and shift blame to drivers. * You buy such a car and run someone over.

The car is a machine. It cannot be responsible. If you believed the company's lies, then you are the victim of a misinformation campaign, as is the person you have run over. If you did not believe the company's lies then depending on your intent, you, the company, and the people involved in obfuscating the truth about a faulty braking system may be responsible.

I disagree.

This is where cutting edge academic research was already 10 years earlier:

1967: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/24/3/1520-04...

1969: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/8/3/1520-045...

The reports in your link start from 1977 and they are just summaries of public research. They are well done, but lots of people with engineering and/physics training would be able to read published research and write summary reports.

Let's look at the first one: https://insideclimatenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Jam...

The actual, original science is properly referenced in the end in "Bibliography" (pdf page 15).

I really don't find any "cutting edge research" in those reports. Maybe "cutting edge reading", if we think that being able to follow, read, understand and summarize published research was cutting edge in the late 1970s.

It’s so basic

How would one even begin to adjudicate that? How do you determine which storm or what portion of a storm was caused by climate change, and how do you determine what portion of climate change was caused by Exxon’s CO2 emissions or whatever?

This is a claim that is very contrary to the prevailing view. If you wish others to be persuaded by this claim, I recommend that you provide some evidence for it, because on their own your statements are unconvincing.

Oil and gas companies strongly lobby for Republicans they know will remove any incentive for them to need to worry about the environment.

I would not celebrate this work, it's typical corporate boss-pleasing. It's not some exhortation towards clean energy.

This is a strawman (and a weirdly strong appeal to emotion for unclear reasons).

The claim is that their scientists were loudly saying internally their PR campaigns and climate claims were false and contrary to their findings. Executives read these memos and chose to do these anyways.

For instance:

> The new disclosures in the Massachusetts case add to the evidence with excerpts from a deposition by an Exxon scientist who worked on the program.

> Asked whether a 2018 press release, which said Exxon anticipated “10,000 barrels of algae biofuel per day could be produced by 2025,” was misleading, the scientist said “yes,” adding, “All the clauses in there are patently false.”

edit: the single memo that you linked (actually one of many the article is discussing) is not supposed to be some smoking gun, it's useful to dispel any idea that there's a reasonable claim of ignorance on Exxon's part, and the date is especially notable: 1988. Basically any PR, legal, and lobbying work for at least 38 years is suspect because of what they actually knew.

Having read both the memo and article, maybe there is a language barrier here, but how is it "incredibly far from the sensationalized headline"?

Maybe this comes down to how one defines "deception", but I have a hard time seeing it not apply here and don't see any hyperbole, overpromising or inaccuracy in the title given the memos writing. Certainly not "incredibly far", even if we split hairs on what raises to being "deception".

Carbon capture is fraud. You can EASILY stop carbon emissions by switching to EVs, which are cheaper to buy and operate. Instead Govts want to spend trillions on top the $7T dollars/year subsidies to help oil companies recover more oil.

The COP summits are held in fossil fuel countries and discuss carbon capture.

Shell Is Looking Forward The fossil-fuel companies expect to profit from climate change. I went to a private planning meeting and took notes: https://archive.is/15Dj4