Those are oil companies. They operate within the bounds set out for them. If there is an externality present, some kind of positive or negative effect not captured in the market price of what they're selling -- say, that burning oil produces carbon dioxide -- it's not the job of the company to address that, but of market regulators. If a company did refrain from extraction, another company would just step in -- a competitive market specifically should not allow any one company to withhold a resource from the market; a company that did that would have monopoly power. As it stands, market regulators have a market says that companies should extract oil, so that's what they're doing.
If sale of oil doesn't incorporate the cost of carbon emissions, or if oil shouldn't be sold at all, that's an issue for the regulators.
A company getting yelled at is going to make some polite noises and brush complaining people off, not because they're not doing their job, but because restricting global oil consumption is not their job.
You want to complain at someone, complain at market regulators, because they're the ones that are responsible for taking into account said externalities, not the companies that operate in those markets.
You'd yell at a company if the company were breaking the laws that have been put in place for it, or something like that -- if BP were smuggling black-market oil or something, then that's an issue with BP. But as things stand, they're acting as the system intends.
Regulators are never going to regulate unless the public gets mad enough at those companies to do something like vote against every politician that props the anti regulatory environment that benefits those companies at the cost of the world.
Correct! Regulators are going to vote to do whatever benefits the oil companies, because the heads of the companies have the money and don’t care about their fellow humans or the planet.
These companies have lied, withheld info and done everything they can to shape public image and the legal ground they are standing on.
they are not as helpless and subject of others as you paint them to be. They act internationally. Appeal to a single nations law will not curb their actions effectively enough.
There have been so many targeted projects to weaken the publics understanding of climate change as a whole and activists personally. It's high time that these companies reinvest their record breaking profits into fixing the problem they have a large hand in creating.
I agree with you except for the fact that oil companies have known about climate change for many decades and have actively paid for pseudo-science studies and other disinformation, plus lobbying, to minimize regulation and maximize profit. So they can go fuck themselves for that.
This is an Olympic gold medal level of willful ignorance that honestly isn’t believable. This post is just too naive to be from a real person. Oh, companies just operate within a market that they have no influence on, do they? They’re just subject to regulation crafted by others, the poor dears. Please.
Reminds me of here in Oz, people were getting punched with what was called a “king hit”, basically some drunk idiot grabbing someone and hitting them hard enough to kill them.
Then the media started to relabel it a “coward punch” (which it really was) which caught on. This had a measurable impact on these idiots punching like that and the number of deaths went down.
We always had another word for it though: sucker punch. Also, where are the stats on it having a measurable impact? It was widely seen as a pretty lacklustre thing at the time. I’d argue the real impact was the massive increase is sentencing guidelines for king hits/coward punches that turned them into murder charges if they died from the hit.
In the same vein, we should be charging companies that are causing this impact to the climate. I’d say there’d be real change then.
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