The Fossil Fuel Industry Knew About Climate Change Since 1954 - Slashdot

The Fossil Fuel Industry Knew About Climate Change Since 1954

• Re:

  And food. Without petrochemicals we would be starving.

  I'm not a big fan of drowning in rising seas in a few decades and all that but better that than food riots tomorrow as billions starve.

  • Tech [Re:It's cigarettes and lung cancer all...]

    Have you noticed that pretty much all of the proposals to deal with global warming suggest improving technology to reduce fossil fuel use, not abandoning technology? No?

    Rising sea level is indeed a consequence of global warming, but people forget to mention how very slow this is. The median prediction is about a meter of sea level rise a century from now [www.ipcc.ch], not "in a few decades."

    So, you can relax a little on that one.

    But we're also not about to delete all modern agriculture either. Petrochemical-produced fer

    • Re:

      It doesn't matter if it's 50 years or a hundred if we're talking about global warming time scales, where no serious predictions say anything particularly auto-genociding will occur for at least a hundred years. However, there is a loud group of anti-petro folks running around right now arguing for ending all oil use right now who are having a significant and visible impact on economic and environmental policies around the world.

      My mention of food was not because petro food use is large or small co2 but bec

      • "arguing for ending all oil use right now"

        No such thing. People are arguing for phasing out fossil fuels as fast as realistically possible, which actually would be pretty quick.

        "If we had a reasonable replacement for oil across society which didn't leave us all starving or with a dramatically lesser lifestyle"

        Which we do, and its called "electrification". A number of countries have moved quite far in that direction and they aren't starving or living in shacks.

        • Re:

          Yes they are and no we don't.

          Critical industries that can not be electrified anytime soon: shipping, flight, farming, military, plastics, medicine. That's just off the top of my head.

          You're one of those unrealistic people I'm talking about who has no idea how our society is built or what is depends on to continue.

          How is electricity going to replace the petro currently used in those fields? It can't.

      • Re:

        I think it does matter. Climate change is a real thing, and the current changes are caused by human actions, but it is not an "OMG we're all going to die now" thing, it's a long term problem. Too many people do the "OMG" thing, and it's not helpful. It leads to people saying, in essence, "X solution won't help because it will take years to put in place and we need to solve the problem NOW." And it also leads to other people saying "they were saying the ice caps would melt by the year 2000 and we were all go

        • Re:

          I was adding on to the guy I was replying to who was replying to OP.

          Please go back and look at the thread flow.

          • Re:

            You are replying to strawman arguments.

        • Re:

        • • Time [Re:Tech [Re:It's cigarettes and lung ca...]]

            Good god, the Earth's climate is amazingly stable. "Unstable" means positive feedback, which goes to exponential changes, but the Earth's surface temperature has been between 10 and 35 C (above the freezing point of water and well below runaway greenhouse effect) for nearly four billion years.

            Yes, Milankovitch variations. But they're more on a 100,000 year time scale, not really as short as 30,000.

            And of course that's exactly what paleoclimatologists do. Pretty much all of modern climate science stems origi

    • Have you noticed that pretty much all of the proposals to deal with global warming suggest improving technology to reduce fossil fuel use, not abandoning technology? No?

      Reverting back to powering industry and transportation by wind, solar, and hydro isn't improving technology. We tried that before. I read some history books, that wasn't exactly a great time for human civilization.

      Long ago we were using wind, water, biomass, and beasts of burden to power everything. Then people discovered coal, and that likely saved Europe from deforestation since they were cutting down so many trees for heat, lumber, and forging iron. Kerosene saved the whales. Gasoline saved us from using corn to make ethanol for automobiles. Nuclear fission and natural gas saved the petroleum. What's the plan now? Apparently going back to burning plants, wind, hydro, and likely beasts of burden.

      How about we go back to nuclear fission than roll back the clock on centuries of the development of energy production? That would do plenty to save the trees, whales, and our own lives.

      • Re:

        Are you seriously comparing candles to solar panels? Or was this meant as a funny?

        • Re:

          He's making a strawman argument.

          It doesn't actually make any sense.

          • Re:

            I've noticed that right wingers stop taking well before they start thinking, and left wingers stop thinking well before they stop talking.

            Somebody smart can reword that after I'm dead. Actually, someone probably already said it before I thought of it!

        • Re:

          Solar panels aren't as perfect as you think. Like BEVs, production takes a huge amount of CO2 to produce them and the math I've read on solar panels indicates that you'll never come out ahead as far as CO2 goes because the current methods require too much CO2. And I say this while having a fixed electric bill powered by 15 solar panels. What is great about having these solar panels is power conservation no longer applies so much because my bill for electric service (payment plan plus the minimal hookup fee

          • Re:

            I'm not extolling the virtues of solar panels.

    • Re:

      > pretty much all of the proposals to deal with global warming suggest improving technology

      All the rational ones, absolutely, but the most popular ones are only tax-based and giving that tax money to friends of politicians which is tantamount to lighting 98% of it on fire.

      As always, we need excess wealth to create prosperity and investment which can be selfishly/efficiently coordinated into investment with a RoI , which means working products from sustainable companies.

      I've dropped several grand lately o

      • Tax & tech [Re:Tech [Re:It's cigarettes and l.

        Subsidies for research on energy technology and subsidies of energy tech is such a trivially small segment of taxes that really if you're seriously worried about taxes, this is not what you should spend your time on.

        But it's a great rallying cry against almost anything you can think of. "It's our tax money! They want to raise our taxes!"

        Citation needed. I'm not sure if any subsidies to solar or wind goes to friends of politicians.
        Were you thinking of subsidies to oil companies and defense contractors, who d

    • Re:

      Yes, improving technology is quite a preferable alternative to return to the 16th century. It's a daunting task though. Petrochemicals are in a sweet spot of energy density and so many other uses.

      So yes there are alternatives, but oil is used for so many, because it is so versatile.

      A little relaxation - but not much. A lot depends on where you live. Some places near the shorelines have elevations measured in a few centimeters.

      Somewhere in the past, I posted a scenario where a huge crop failure in the

  • Re:

    Yes, people are correct that the world maintains its 8 Billion (and growing) people on the back of petreochemicals.

    And if that doesn't cause a pucker string moment of existential dread as to what is going to happen in the not too distant future, nothing will.

    Altogether too many people believe that because Malthus was wrong once, his insight will always be wrong. Because that's a calculation that ends up with several infinities of both provisioning population, and resources to sustain life.

• Re:

  It is widely acknowledged that we must use modern technology to get us out of the fix we put ourselves into. Stitching up a strawman that relatively few people believe (i.e., we must go back to the sticks) is just another Fox mumbling point.

• Right. Don't you think that if we had this kind of information 70 years ago, we may have made some different choices as a society before half of the crap you talk about even existed? Don't you think that the pace of adoption of renewable generation sources may have been a little more rapid if we saw the danger 70 years ago and had another 70 years to do something about it?

  So you're saying that we should just give a pass to an industry that knew they were damaging the ecosystem far worse than the "direct" pollution using their product makes, and then fought tooth-and-nail against every single measure ever taken to reduce fossil fuel use, reduce that pollution, or increase fuel efficiency.

  It's one thing to produce a product that is known to have harmful effects. It's quite another to deny the harmful effects, hide the harmful effects, and then fight every single regulation meant to reduce or eliminate those harmful effects all the while knowing what effect you are having, and what that means to the existence of human life.

  • Re:

    > Don't you think that if we had this kind of information 70 years ago, we may have made some different choices

    No, humans aren't built like that.

    Nixon made a deal to create the EPA *and* build 1000 nuclear reactors to obviate the need for crackdown regulation.

    Then they forced him to resign, while the most popular President in history, on minor pretexts (less than most in that job have done) and immediately scuttled the reactor plan.

    Nobody complained. They want cheap food and heat without investment and

    • Re:

      If he actually made a deal then we would have more reactors but he made a speech, maybe he advocated for it but order that created the EPA had no nuclear provision in it and obviously there was no deal made with Congress so either he didn't care all that much or there wasn't the political will to do it. Using weasel words like "they" doesn't make the case any stronger. Was there a House or Senate bill for those 1000 reactors?

      Also who is "they" besides all of Congress, even Republicans eventually had to tu

  • Re:

    >Right. Don't you think that if we had this kind of information 70 years ago, we may have made some different choices as a society before half of the crap you talk about even existed?

    In the early 19th century, scientists were investigating CO2 as a greenhouse gas whose low levels might have been a cause of past ice ages.

    Around 1900, Svante Arrhenius had already done the math to show that increased emissions from industrial activity could bring global warming.

    By 1938, G.S. Callendar had discovered it was

    • Re:

      No, "We" have not known it. Most of the population didn't know, nor were they supposed to care.
      That falls squarely on legislators' shoulders, the main problem is the issue being global.
      If the whole of USA and the EU would stop all fossil fuel usage tomorrow, they won't achieve anything, because there's 7 more billion people out there, in countries that don't give a shit.

• Re: It's cigarettes and lung cancer all over again

  It is not an all or nothing proposition. If the data about the effects of fossil fuel use were known by the general public we might have made choices to reduce their use.
  Imagine how different the world would be today if an effort was made in the 50'sor 60's to improve automobile efficiency. OPEC might not have been in such a strong position. The western governments and corporations that had to bend to the will of middle eastern powers. The 70's oil crisis would not have been so severe if it even happened.

• Re:

  Regarding "Redundant". The 2020 "argument" against complete BS. Concede the other side was right all along without acknowledging you were full of it, then come up with some further BS. "Oh, we've already discussed XYZ."

• Re:

  Think of all the money and effort that has gone into fossil fuels. Finding them, extracting them, going to war to protect them, all the costly damage they have done.

  Throw a fraction of that at battery development in the 60s. A moonshot for battery tech and renewable energy.

  We would be in a much better position than we are now.

• Re:

  And that is kinda the problem... consequences got so buried and ignored that now we are dependent and can't get away from the behavior. We do not forget, we are angry that people who knew the consequences figured that once people were hooked on their products it would no longer matter, and since wealth has flowed to the tiny minority at the top, they can buy insulation from effects that the rest of us can't.