Letters to the Editor
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Too little, too late, too long of odds
Should Exxon and other corporate polluters pay for their environmental crimes? Absolutely. That said, many people are going to feel that they mostly just provide the products with which all Americans destroy the planet. Exxon doesn’t drive the fossil-fool powered wheelchairs to the big box stores to buy cheap plastic crap from China and out of season foods, we do. No corporation forces people to put off properly rebuilding their houses to proper insulation standards and they certainly don’t set the thermostats, we do. Since it is not possible to sue the entirety of America for the damage, I guess the corporations who have provided the tools and justifications for the coming catastrophe will just have to do. Who knows, if these companies get hit hard enough, we might actually see the cost of energy use rise high enough to get some behavioral change on the part of consumers
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Nice Legal Theory
I saw this same legal theory in an article yesterday in Bloomberg, attacking the German car maker Porsche for denying climate change. Porsche wanted to sue mayor Ken Livingston in London for taxes on high carbon vehicles coming into London. Porsche was at the top of the list.
The article basically made the same arguement. Instead of trying to forstall global warming, or making their vehicles more 'green' Porsche stuck out their chin and told everyone to go to hell. As in the Big Tobacco cases, Porsche is setting themselves up for legal claims by not trying to mitigage carbon damage.
So is Exxon, and so is the coal and ethanol industry too, I think.
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No Pockets Deep Enough
I wouldn't take too much comfort in the notion that Exxon will be held liable for its share of climate change. The people who profited from Exxon's bad behavior will have long since taken their winnings and left the casino. Exxon as a corporation may well be obliterated, but there's no way it will have the assets to pay even a microscopic portion of the harm it will have caused -- and that assumes it won't succeed, as many other corporate wrongdoers have, in passing off its assets to other entities before the sheriff comes to collect on the judgment.
It would be nice if corporations were really "persons" who could be punished, but in fact they are fictions whose sole purpose is to insulate investors from liability so that they can freely gamble on an enterprise's profitability without risking more than they are willing to invest. Smart investors will start bailing from Exxon, et al., long before the ordure hits the rotors on liability.
When the smoke clears, if there's anything left of the legal order, perhaps we can reexamine the question whether it is desirable to insulate investors this completely from the consequences of their antisocial undertakings.
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Well not just Finland and Alaska but...
Closer to home in our own breadbasket.
Corn's goin' north.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080227174936.htm
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"and all over the world people hate them."
True.
Wherever you go, the audience applauds -- and how! -- for this line:
A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN
written 1943
published 1952
by Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953)[...]
ACT TWO
SCENE - - The same, with the wall of the living room removed.
It is a clear warm moonlight night, around eleven o'clock.
Josie is sitting on the steps before the front door.
[...]
(She goes into her bedroom and returns with her broomstick club. Outside the singing grows louder as Hogan approaches the house. He only remembers one verse of the song and he has been repeating it.)
HOGAN--
Oh the praties they grow small
Over here, over here,
Oh, the praties they grow small
Over here.
Oh the praties they grow small
And we dig them in the fall
And we eat them skins and all
Over here, over here.(He enters left-front, weaving and lurching a bit. But he is not as drunk as he appears. Or rather, he is one of those people who can drink an enormous amount and be absolutely plastered when they want to be for their own pleasure, but at the same time are able to pull themselves together when they wish and be cunningly clear-headed. Just now, he is letting himself go and getting great satisfaction from it. He pauses and bellows belligerently at the house) Hurroo! Down with all tyrants, male and female! To hell with England, and God damn Standard Oil!
- - Eugene O'Neill
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Aside from the above...
... where I agree that the money will have left the casino (excellent quote there), there is still a lot of money to be used by Exxon. If they have enough to fight regulation & such, they have enough to make token gestures slowly and claim "they've always been green".
People believe what a company - or president - says, not what it or s/he does.
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Oxes?
but when enough oxes have been gored...
I suppose that climate change has already wiped out the oxen?
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You don't necessarily need to postulate a conspiracy
I am a philosopher, and have devoted a great deal of time examing why people deny global warming and mankind's responsibility for it.
You don't necessarily need to postulate a conspiracy. Occam's razor dictates that the simplest explaination should be preferred.
Simply, man reacts reflexively to stimulus. If our action gets an immediate negative result, we reflexively tend to quit. On the other hand, if our action gets an immediate postitive result (even though it will eventually cause a negative result), that behavior is reinforced.
The CO2 we put into the air now has a lag time of more than two decades before we warm up.
Furthermore, we like to think of ourselves as good people, so any thought that we are doing bad things is shunned by cognitive dissidence. In other words we have a tendency to rationalize our actions as being good
The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that global warming is happening. Their three key conclusions are:
It is "unequivocal" that global warming is occurring.
The probability this is caused by natural climatic processes is less than 5%.
The probability this is caused by human emissions is over 90%.
This scientific fact is hard to swallow because our wealth is intertwined with our emissions, but the thought that we are ruining the climate is abhorrent.
Compounding the problem, a significant number of people aren't reality based, so aren't susceptible to scientific theory.
To summarize, while it is undoubtedly true that Exxon and other profiteers of the status quo are funding a rear guard action against their free ride enabling us to dump greenhouse gas into the air, you don't necessarily need to postulate a conspiracy to explain the political/social/economic inertia to scientific fact as stated by the IPCC's findings.
The ugly truth is that our jungle genes have only emerged a couple of hundred thousand years ago from the plains of Africa. As much as we like to think we are civilized, we share more in common with Pavlov's dog than we like to admit. We may have to experience another bottleneck, and forge our genes in the hell of Polar Cities, to reemerge and achieve a sustainable high technology society.
Beware of false gifts and broken promises. There is much pain, but still hope. The solution is to believe in the truth. The conduit is closing...
One final thing: those that do believe IPCC almost always exclusively prescribe only fast and drastic emissions cuts. On the other hand, Dr James Hansen of NASA says that any feasible planetary rescue plan must include a method of removing CO2 from the air. In other words, carbon dieting alone is an unfeasible solution that will doom us to returning to the hothouse climate of 55 million years ago whem most life died.
Knowing is half the battle, but the other half is correct action.