So far I’m not impressed at all, your OP was an exercise of pointing out what many others in climate change sites that look at the deniers noticed for years already.
That commodity will not end or stop being used, the issue is to control the emissions of that commodity. Otherwise it would be hard to use that commodity in the form of gasoline when the roads in many coastal cities will be gone if not much is done to increase the development of alternative technologies or better ways at capturing emissions.
A lot can be found in the first link I posted in the next link; of course, even the moderators had to reign on the ones like FX that attempted to make it hard to follow because for contrarians it is on their bests interests to make it hard to follow.
As one article from Blomberg pointed out in that thread:
There is that and other issues that we are ignoring, issues that their costs should be added to the actual price we have to pay for continuing to depend on fossil fuels:
Even if they do, I don’t see how unambiguous pro-AGW statements on their websites are a problem. It would be interesting to get the reaction of an anti-AGW person regarding the statements.
Denmark and, as pointed in the thread too, regions in Texas are showing how one can become carbon neutral and to continue to develop with no emissions.
That is what I wondered too, when the fossil fuel companies are agreeing that there is a problem one wonders what was all that hot air all about that comes from many contrarians.
Of course, as the guy from Murray Energy shows, he did not get the memo.
Pfff. Get real. What about planes, trains, and automobiles, and coal fired electricity plants, and plastics and tarmac and…
Fuckkkkk. A few hundred windmills won’t make air travel possible. All of this shit is touchy-feely politics to make you think a difference is being made: it’s not.
The world lives on oil and we do not have alternatives right now. Fucking windmills, bicycles, and solar panels. Yeah. That might make a 3% difference.
Planes are a big one, but trains, automobiles and many others are and can be made to have less emissions, the big sources of pollutions are still the power plants.
And indeed, I did offer solutions while you **repeated **the **mistaken **idea that I had not offered any. But that was a reply for your sorry query, not to follow the high jack that you want to do so as to avoid the subject of the OP.
The rest of your potty tirade doesn’t deserve a reply. Suffice to say that you only showed that you only are willing to ignore past information and sound insulted when you were wrong about me not mentioning solutions before. And more links and demonstrations of progress were also linked to in the thread.
RE: the OP, I have to say I’m surprised. If Big Oil was secretly trying to undermine AGW I don’t see what they have to gain by these public proclamations. It doesn’t seem like public opinion for AGW is strong enough to force the companies into admitting the role of fossil fuels. If I recall correctly, the tobacco companies fought the cigarette-cancer link to the bitter end and I would have expected the same from Big Oil.
It is not strange, most of the denial tactics observed came from the tobacco industry, some of the same scientists and think tanks that defended big tobacco and funded friendly politicians are the same that now support the polluters. The same front of accepting the science officially is there, while at the same time any regulations that would follow after accepting the science are stalled at the legislative level.
(Short Video on how Dr Seitz and groups like the Heartland Institute supported both)
BTW, even today tobacco and the fossil fuel industry know what kind of politician to support that will prevent any more regulations from coming to both tobacco and global warming gases emissions. That is what I mean by the corrupting effect that companies (or to be more precise, the owners and CEOs) have over the most influential of governments.
(Link to the transcript of the investigation made by Frontline of how groups like Americans for Prosperity are influencing and organizing the defeat of even Republicans that dare to accept the science, financed in good part by fossil fuel CEOs or owners).
Repeating it will not change the fact that you were wrong. As for comments on what groups like Americans For Prosperity are doing with the money from fossil fuel owners we can see only silence coming out so far.
Then drop out of the thread and stop hijacking it.
The thread is not about whether we need fossil fuels or petroleum. The OP explicitly made the claim that Big Oil must not be opposed to climate change science because they posted some bland text on their web sites. Regardless whether or not we need petroleum now or in the immediate future, chanting “we need oil” provides no evidence that the petroleum companies are supporting or opposing the science (and attendant political efforts) regarding climate change.
If you do not have the time to look at sources and you simply want to complain that we need oil, go open a new thread to discuss that issue and ask that everyone post in short paragraphs. What you are doing here is hijacking the thread and then complaining when others have responded to your hijack.
First of all you’re mistaken if you think tobacco companies have given up the fight, in any way shape or form, and there are lessons here in how the coal and oil companies operate, because they are equally malignant industries with very similar methods. Indeed it’s been said that the tobacco industry is really two industries, one that makes and sells cigarettes, and one that works to undermine criticism of tobacco, fosters doubts about science and government, neutralizes opposition and harasses its opponents, and coerces and coordinates allies. Philip Morris just recently ended a ten-year internal effort called the Regulatory Strategy Project that successfully got them exactly the FDA tobacco bill that they wanted – indeed one that they pretty much wrote themselves – passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in 2009, which pretty much prevents the FDA from doing anything to interfere with cigarette design, manufacturing, or marketing.
As far as the pious gibberish that oil companies are spouting on their websites is concerned, this is par for the course, and tobacco companies did it, too, all the while fighting science and knowledge and spreading FUD. It’s the “we’re not the problem, we’re part of the solution” PR technique. A particularly sordid example of this was the tobacco industry’s supposed “youth access” program in the early 90s, ostensibly designed to limit youth access to tobacco through carding and other means. In reality the program had nefarious motives.
Like the oil industry, the tobacco industry tightly controlled legislators at the federal and state levels, so anti-smoking campaigns had moved to local levels and the strategy of creating smoking bans. The youth program not only generated goodwill and helped to undermine anti-tobacco efforts, but it gave the industry a pretext for visiting retailers and paying them to report back to the Tobacco Institute (the industry’s former lobby group) on any political anti-smoking activities that they could then mobilize against – a strategy that was made public in an internal Institute document many years later. And so these things go, unknown and unseen by the public. It’s a three-pronged strategy: control the political process, undermine the public’s confidence in the relevant science, while all the while making yourself look good.
It seems to be your strategy to either ignore evidence or, when you can’t ignore it, to fall back to the refrain “there’s no alternative” to oil and coal. Aside from that not being relevant to the topic here, perhaps you’re not aware that the very province you live in generates 85% of all its electric power from clean energy, more than half from nuclear power and more than a third from hydroelectric, and has also been one of the Canadian epicenters of wind power development.
You mention planes, trains, automobiles, coal power generation, and plastics. It’s not useful to lump all uses of oil into one long run-on sentence and pretend that there’s no solution. Some of these are far more problematic than others, and petrochemical manufacturing, like plastics, isn’t a climate issue at all. Coal power generation and cars represent a huge proportion of the problem, and your own province’s power generation is ample proof that there are indeed clean alternatives. And electric cars and hybrids do exist, and with enough will and demand and further refinement major transition to electric vehicles can be very much sooner than “50 or 100 years”. The trouble is that people are still being heavily influenced by tobacco-industry style denialism and FUD about the magnitude of the problem.
I never said any such bullshit. If you want to feel persecuted, stick words into someone else’s mouth.
Mutual funds are invested as the fund owner sees fit. Some of them do concentrate on singular purpose companies, but by no means all of them.
As for “not since the 1970s” I’ll be sure to let Boeing, Comcast, Parker Hannifin, Procter and Gamble, Johnson Controls, Eaton, 3M, Kimball Industries, General Motors, General Electric, Lockheed, and Raytheon that they are fads and aren’t around, anymore, or buying companies to add into their groups. And those are just the ones I know off the top of my head.
And it’s not “investors looking to diversify,” it’s companies that buy other companies that diversify their holdings to continue to give profits to their shareholders, usually hoping to keep a record of high returns intact, and to guard against their primary product or service dropping revenue and making them less attractive to shareholders.
Oh, goody. Authoritarian hand-waving with no evidence. You have used none of your proclaimed expertise to show I am wrong. Please, educate instead of hand-waving.
And suggesting commodities aren’t sold on a contract basis is…just plain confusing.
Utter bullshit. Sometimes the difference between long term success and failure is having the foresight to recognize the larger true business that a company is really in – for example, an oil company might conclude that it’s really in the energy business. BP, for instance, has interests in biofuels and is an operator of wind farms. ExxonMobil, by contrast, IIRC, sold off their alternative energy holdings under former CEO Lee Raymond, who was also responsible for some of their most notorious campaigns of denialism funding.
Experience in what? This isn’t a discussion about how to get oil out of the ground, it’s a discussion about the public relations industry. See my previous post.
“So what” is a legitimate response to the straw man of the OP.
Different people say different things regarding the actions of the oil companies. Those people and their statements range from people who simply do not like large companies claiming “oil companies are evil” to people who actually invest large portions of their lives involved in the Climate Change debate who have made specific criticisms of specific actions by petroleum companies. Your OP pretends, (without providing a single supporting assertion), that only the haters of large companies have anything to say on the subject. A throwaway line indicating that large companies have a history of giving lip service to one good actions while engaging in actual efforts to derail those good actions is an appropriate response to the OP. Your desperate effort to try to break the analogy on the grounds that the companies you are trying to defend have a “necessary” product fails. Regardless whether oil is or is not necessary, if the companies (tobacco and oil) both make nice sounding statements about the need to change behavior while actively funding efforts to prevent such changes to behavior, the analogy is perfect.
Nope. Posting bland, single line comments on web sites that “recognize” that climate change occurs (so that people such as yourself come to believe that they are not in denial) while continuing to fund “science” and politicians who obstruct every effort to avert more serious climate change simply means that they have engaged in the practice of marketing. They want to encourage people to purchase their products. If Company A says, “climate change is happening” and Company B says "“climate is not happening,” Company A can use the statement from Company B to advertise “Buy from us!” so all the companies say the same sort of bland, content free stuff.
Persuasive evidence would be a refutation of actual claims made against the oild companies rather than unsubstantiated claims that the straw man arguments you have posted are false.
