I suspect that people who do unethical things like this live in a delusional world full of self serving rationalizations. All the people they surround themselves with tell them that climate change is overblown, that it’s a liberal lie. They tell themselves that if they didn’t drill for the oil, somebody else would. Or that humanity will fall into a dark age without it.
This is kind of like spine surgeons. They do operation after operation, and statistically for certain types of procedures, the success rate is terrible. No better than no surgery at all. But I bet most of them tell themselves “*I’m *not among that statistical group. Just the other day, someone who’s spine I fixed got better, must have been my surgery skillz…”
Prison wardens who execute death penalties for people they think might be innocent probably either tell themselves “there is NO way they are anything but guilty, anything said otherwise is a bunch of scummy defense liars making up a tale” or “somebody’s got to do it…”
And so on. Heck, Auschwitz guards could easily justify their actions in “I’m only following orders, and at least this way I get to be alive instead of facing near certain death against the Red Army. What I am doing is horrific but being dead is worse”
You don’t actually know what a ‘market’ or ‘the market’ is, right? In any case, let’s say you are right…it’s too late for Miami. Presumably something bad will happen to it and there is nothing we can do about it. What’s your proposed solution to this, since market solutions are out? To have the government, what? Tell people they can’t use their cars or heat their homes or power their computers with any fossil fuels anymore?
You would guess wrong. As I said, you don’t actually know or understand what a market is, how they work, who is involved in them or anything else. This is basic stuff and you kind of need to know it to understand why your question about ‘big oil CEOs’ feeling or not feeling like gods.
So, basically, you are the market. I am the market. Everyone participating in this thread is the market. Our collective actions are the market. When the price of gas, in this case, is low, we use more of it. When it’s higher we use less. To a point…some of that demand is inelastic, meaning at just about any rational price we are going to use it since we need it to, you know, get to work, go to the store and the like. If it’s cheap though, we will use more, travel more, drive more, etc etc. So, a ‘market solution’ in this case would be something as easy (to really simplify all of this) as ‘the government imposes a $2/gallon tax on gasoline’. That’s certainly going to have an impact, no?
Yet, those are more medium or long term threats, which people aren’t really good at dealing with, regardless of which country they come from. Their immediate concerns are more local and more immediate. Just human nature. To affect something like this you need to either impose a fiat solution (such as my government tells everyone they can’t drive thingy…which doesn’t work so well in modern western democracies) or you need some sort of market solution. We don’t use whale oil anymore or wood for the majority of our fuel for heating our homes or making our steel because of market forces…people basically stopped using them and went to alternatives. Currently the alternatives to fossil fuel based personal transport are limited…they are more expensive and they don’t perform as well. So, people don’t buy them, by and large. Currently the alternatives to fossil fuel based power generations are either limited (they don’t scale up to meet our needs, such as solar and wind) or they are politically unattractive (such as hydro-electric wrt new plants or nuclear)…so, the majority of our energy still comes from one form or another of fossil fuel or it’s in a sunk production system that’s slowly shrinking (such as the already mentioned nuclear and hydro-electric which isn’t being built up but instead is slowing dying out).
Whether Miami goes under or not, market solutions are the ONLY way we are realistically going to shift people off of fossil fuels to alternatives. You have to make it attractive to people to WANT to switch to some alternative, meaning you need to make it attractive to companies to try out alternatives and for them to vie in the market place with each other and with fossil fuels until we have a paradigm shift to whatever is going to be the next big thing. The government can distort the market and encourage this by, as mentioned above, increasing the tax on fossil fuels or putting in regulations that discourage their use while encouraging the use of those alternatives. But there isn’t a magic silver bullet here and we are already doing some of this (more so in some countries than others, but just about every major industrialized country is doing some of it today, and there are plans for countries like China to do more in the near term).
In all fairness to the OP. I originally went to college for structural engineering. The science of building massive structures like bridges, skyscrapers, dams and whatnot. “God” might be a bit of a stretch, but there is something about putting together and implementing a plan to reshape the Earth using giant machines that is pretty cool.
Sadly, like most of the other engineers in my class, we quickly sold out to pursue more lucrative careers nerd-wrangling in the data mines in careers like investment banking and consulting. Tote that barge, rationalize that PowerPoint deck.
In any case, let’s say you are right…it’s too late for Miami. Presumably something bad will happen to it and there is nothing we can do about it. What’s your proposed solution to this, since market solutions are out? To have the government, what? Tell people they can’t use their cars or heat their homes or power their computers with any fossil fuels anymore?