That’s one reason, but also just the impracticality of jailing everyone who was a shareholder at the time. Diffuse responsibility is also a very strong insulator.
That is the lawsuit that caused these documents to be released (there’s actually a cluster of such lawsuits; the Massachusetts one released these documents which they got in discovery)
Yeah, I guess it’s part of doing risk/reward like the taxes thing. It works for many but sometimes it gets ugly for few either by chance or social/political reasons and of course saying everybody does it it’s not helping. I think the Dieselgate was the same thing.
Another recent take is that you could go to jail or bankrupt for sharing some content or you could become billionaire/trillionaire torrenting the whole world. It’s more about the timing and leverage you build along the way.
The concept is thrown around a lot but the most obvious interpretation is that the company is shuttered, disbanded. So who suffers more, the executives who took the decisions and bail out with golden parachutes, the people who executed knowing the implications and got a bonus for it, or the many random employees and who knows how many more in the larger ecosystem who knew nothing more about it than you do?
The fix isn’t to kill the company, it’s to hold people directly accountable for decisions like this one. Unfortunately these are close to impossible to prove especially with n the land of “best justice money can buy”.
That’s seems ass-backwards though. If you want to punish Exxon because they contributed to global warming by satisfying the demand of billions of people for the energy embodied in fossil fuels, it seems like you should directly attack the thing you don’t want: extraction and combustion of fossil fuels.
You'd think the one place in the world where checks and balances would be understood would be the United States of America. What did anyone expect ExxonMobil to do? Release a public statement that terrible things were going to happen, shut down all operations, lay off everybody and switch off the lights. Why was the issue politicised so the two main parties could make sure it served their interests. How come institutions like the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine had to weather severe political pressure to silence them, instead of being taken seriously and something done sooner? It's not much of a system if it's so easy to derail.
Shocking. The people who aim to benefit the most have done something to benefit? I would be surprised if any of the big fossil fuel industries have not been doing this for decades.
Sprow also recommended monitoring alternative energy technologies, including nuclear, solar and biofuels, to understand their viability as alternatives to fossil fuels or, eventually, for possible business development. Finally, he added, Exxon could look for “a research breakthrough” in one of these areas that would align with the company’s business.
Would you also like to know if there was an EV company or environmental group financed or sponsored astroturf campaign against ICE vehicles?
Frankly, I hope that both of those things happened, so that people could make their own minds up after an adversarial process.
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.
> We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.
>It's like our generation has no desire to hold people accountable.
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.
Seems like good tech could solve some of the problems and root causes, no? We can ignore the relevant distributions of political power and propaganda and focus on the science the tech enables?
Unsurprisingly, liberal-aligned society has done a much better job of holding their own accountable than the side that moved Ghislaine Maxwell to "Club Fed", the most desirable federal prison in the US.
I mean, you know the answer, surely? In the USA, the more money you have, the more power.
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.
Ah yes, the "it's your fault I'm acting irrational and behaving badly" attitude.
"You didn't present this in just the right way to appeal to me, so I'm angry at you." Forgetting that of course there is no way to present this sort of information that you could accept, because the cognitive dissonance biases you against any of the actual facts.
This act is tired. You will continue to fool yourself, but nobody else is fooled by this transparent tantrum.
How wonderful it is when people self-select to be case studies on bad argumentation, fallacious reasoning, and poor participants in the betterment of humanity. It makes education so much simpler to point out clear examples of bad strategy and, hopefully, adds a silver lining to interactions with people determined to play the troll.
It sounds like you started from an ideological premise, built a shallow facsimile of a justification around it and then projected partisan outrage onto your creation.
It is because of coping mechanisms like yours we are unable to address this existential threat.
The fact the website you call "not serious" literally won a Pulitzer for its reporting at least adds some comedic relief to this otherwise rather irritating behavior.
So, who will go to jail?
That's rhetorical, obviously. The answer is absolutely nobody because money is the best insulator there is.
More importantly, when will the common folk stop delegating critical thinking to these corporations?
It's really important uphold the law, but nothing really happens if the collective attitude won't change.
The Center for Tobacco Studies is a top tier research organization. Nick wouldn’t deceive us. Look at that smile!
These people doomed humanity to make a buck. Jail would be too good for them.
Ideally, at least the board would do time and lose any rights holding such positions for a long time.
That’s one reason, but also just the impracticality of jailing everyone who was a shareholder at the time. Diffuse responsibility is also a very strong insulator.
I'll settle for the executives and the board serving time.
Maybe how much time you serve correlates to how much money/stock/etc you have made?
Why would you jail every shareholder? You jail everyone who took part in the deception.
It's entirely possible that candidates who are not promising real consequences will be unelectable in the next democratic primaries.
This doesn't work when every candidate holds the same position.
Aren’t they claiming companies are people?
Doesn‘t Texas still have the death penalty?
1+1=…
I wonder if governments will sue to recover climate mitigation costs
That is the lawsuit that caused these documents to be released (there’s actually a cluster of such lawsuits; the Massachusetts one released these documents which they got in discovery)
History says it's like this for decades, centuries... Until it isn't. And then it's guillotines and chaos.
I fear the Children of Men style future we're stepping into.
Yeah, I guess it’s part of doing risk/reward like the taxes thing. It works for many but sometimes it gets ugly for few either by chance or social/political reasons and of course saying everybody does it it’s not helping. I think the Dieselgate was the same thing.
Another recent take is that you could go to jail or bankrupt for sharing some content or you could become billionaire/trillionaire torrenting the whole world. It’s more about the timing and leverage you build along the way.
I got admonished by a moderator here for using that word, be careful.
What word are you referring to? I’m missing something here.
Its time to finally bring in the corporate death penalty.
The concept is thrown around a lot but the most obvious interpretation is that the company is shuttered, disbanded. So who suffers more, the executives who took the decisions and bail out with golden parachutes, the people who executed knowing the implications and got a bonus for it, or the many random employees and who knows how many more in the larger ecosystem who knew nothing more about it than you do?
The fix isn’t to kill the company, it’s to hold people directly accountable for decisions like this one. Unfortunately these are close to impossible to prove especially with n the land of “best justice money can buy”.
Why can’t the shareholders collectively vote to jail the execs and install new leadership?
If you kill the company the shareholders can sue the management for damages
So first of all I agree, definitely hold the directly responsible accountable.
But it's not an either/or thing, we can just do both!
Because I'm sorry, but who works at Exxon and doesn't know its probably not great for our planet?
That’s seems ass-backwards though. If you want to punish Exxon because they contributed to global warming by satisfying the demand of billions of people for the energy embodied in fossil fuels, it seems like you should directly attack the thing you don’t want: extraction and combustion of fossil fuels.
Don’t kill Exxon and let Shell operate.
You'd think the one place in the world where checks and balances would be understood would be the United States of America. What did anyone expect ExxonMobil to do? Release a public statement that terrible things were going to happen, shut down all operations, lay off everybody and switch off the lights. Why was the issue politicised so the two main parties could make sure it served their interests. How come institutions like the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine had to weather severe political pressure to silence them, instead of being taken seriously and something done sooner? It's not much of a system if it's so easy to derail.
Shocking. The people who aim to benefit the most have done something to benefit? I would be surprised if any of the big fossil fuel industries have not been doing this for decades.
If I drive a car and run someone over, I am arrested, not the car.
A limited liability company is just a machine, as is a car. Yet somehow when you drive one you shift your responsibility to the vehicle.
This needs to be fixed.
My car almost got arrested last year for parking without my permit tag hung up.
Sprow also recommended monitoring alternative energy technologies, including nuclear, solar and biofuels, to understand their viability as alternatives to fossil fuels or, eventually, for possible business development. Finally, he added, Exxon could look for “a research breakthrough” in one of these areas that would align with the company’s business.
Truly damning stuff.
Corporations have more rights than people. Money wins again.
You don't have the right to spread false information?
I would get sued and lose?
I'd like to know if there was an oil industry financed or sponsored astroturf campaign to turn the American public against electric vehicles.
Would you also like to know if there was an EV company or environmental group financed or sponsored astroturf campaign against ICE vehicles?
Frankly, I hope that both of those things happened, so that people could make their own minds up after an adversarial process.
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.
Conspiracy people are like "nono, the government is lying to you", but really it was the corporations that make money all along.
Why is it when these types of releases happen, it seems like the perpetrators seem to get away with it?
This release, Epstein files, Panama papers, etc.
It's like our generation has no desire to hold people accountable.
Our generation? This is a mode of production problem, we have no real power, the perpetrators do.
> We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr
>It's like our generation has no desire to hold people accountable.
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.
Let's talk about it.
Not on this forum! This forum is for TECH! And tech is apolitical. lol.
Seems like good tech could solve some of the problems and root causes, no? We can ignore the relevant distributions of political power and propaganda and focus on the science the tech enables?
Absolutely. Good tech and not working for FAANGs / big VC and yet…
Political discourse is a non starter here and everyone will continue to work for abusive companies. Gotta pay for those vacations.
Take that as a given and background noise.
What do you think is one tech deployment today that can help start to mitigate climate change?
No, your neighbours decided that all corporate malfeasance was approved if it gets them a cheaper egg.
The Epstein Files and Panama Papers both have had significant repercussions against people in power outside of the US.
Fair callout. The past few years have really fortified the media bubble for us in the US.
Some in the US as well, but it seems to skew towards wealthy (Gates) and universities, and not politicians.
Unsurprisingly, liberal-aligned society has done a much better job of holding their own accountable than the side that moved Ghislaine Maxwell to "Club Fed", the most desirable federal prison in the US.
I mean, you know the answer, surely? In the USA, the more money you have, the more power.
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.
So what. So fucking what. People not taking climate change seriously is because of nonsense like this drack, garbage articles.
Treating this climate change like a religion and not science is the same mistake being made over and over and over again.
No one will go to jail because no laws were broken.
"https://insideclimatenews.org/" is not a serious website for factual or balanced information. Laughable.
> People not taking climate change seriously
Actually, some people in the US aren't taking it seriously because of propaganda dismissing climate change wholesale.
More people recognize anthropogenic climate change is happening and is in our lap than not.
[0] Time and skeptical opinion content erode the effects of science coverage on climate beliefs and attitudes https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122069119
[1] Inoculating the Public against Misinformation about Climate Change https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31565263/
[2] AI study finds nearly 15% of Americans deny climate change is real, shaped by social media influencers https://seas.umich.edu/news/ai-study-finds-nearly-15-america...
[3] Climate Change in the American Mind: Beliefs & Attitudes, Fall 2025 https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/climate-c...
[4] What the data says about Americans' views of climate change https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/09/what-the-...
[5] Americans on what causes climate change https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2026/05/28/americans-on-...
Yes, reality is harsh. But you can't fool physics.
Ah yes, the "it's your fault I'm acting irrational and behaving badly" attitude.
"You didn't present this in just the right way to appeal to me, so I'm angry at you." Forgetting that of course there is no way to present this sort of information that you could accept, because the cognitive dissonance biases you against any of the actual facts.
This act is tired. You will continue to fool yourself, but nobody else is fooled by this transparent tantrum.
Agreed.
How wonderful it is when people self-select to be case studies on bad argumentation, fallacious reasoning, and poor participants in the betterment of humanity. It makes education so much simpler to point out clear examples of bad strategy and, hopefully, adds a silver lining to interactions with people determined to play the troll.
It sounds like you started from an ideological premise, built a shallow facsimile of a justification around it and then projected partisan outrage onto your creation.
It is because of coping mechanisms like yours we are unable to address this existential threat.
The fact the website you call "not serious" literally won a Pulitzer for its reporting at least adds some comedic relief to this otherwise rather irritating behavior.
I would call it anti-climate-deception-deception.