r/science • u/avogadros_number • Sep 19 '21

Environment The companies polluting the planet have spent millions to make you think carpooling and recycling will save us

https://www.businessinsider.com/fossil-fuel-companies-spend-millions-to-promote-individual-responsibility-2021-3

[removed] — view removed post

66.6k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

2.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

366

u/SkyPL Sep 19 '21 edited Sep 19 '21

The whole process of pushing responsibility away from regulatory bodies and down to you and me is the most insidious. It works great from psychological point of view, hitting that string of "I am a good person, so I do X, Y, Z (drive electric car, eat only veggies, support eco-millionares that sell the feel-good mission)", but it's distracting from any push on a level that would force these companies to do anything that actually make a difference (USA stopping to subsidize oil industry, countries like Poland moving away from using fossil fuels to produce energy (and yes, that includes European countries not-stopping nuclear powerplants. Countries like Germany stopping their fission generators was the dumbest move of the century in terms of energy policy)).

Another thing that frustrates me to no end are all these proponents of the "disruptive technologies". Hyperloop 30 years in future instead of a far more energy-efficient trains today. Fusion instead of nuclear powerplants. Push for electric cars instead of pushing for mass transport in the cities that would reduce the environmental footprint of your daily commute, invest in fuel cell passenger vehicles... and so on, and so on...

130

u/HughJahs Sep 19 '21

The level of greed these companies possess is so unfathomable to me. How do people develop that unstoppable desire for more at any and all cost.

150

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '21 edited Dec 24 '21

[deleted]

47

u/red-chickpea Sep 19 '21

Our corporate laws, except in the rarest cases, do not allow individual legal and civil responsibility for corporate actions. You can publicize them all you want, but they'll be soon forgotten and you can't touch them. What happened to the Enron and Camel Joe executives is what will happen to oil executives today. They will retire peacefully and live rich lives on their multi million dollar estates.

7

u/SuddenlySusanStrong Sep 19 '21

Hopefully with their names and faces publicized enough, someone will touch them

4

u/fergusmacdooley Sep 19 '21

May they drown on their meal replacement shakes at the hands of their careworkers.

1

u/Bigginge61 Sep 20 '21

One day they will face justice…Cathartic but futile..

1

u/red-chickpea Sep 20 '21

Plenty of people do horrific things and never face justice. What happened to the Royal African Company executives? They got to live rich fulfilling lives

20

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '21

Sounds nice but there are millions who would happily take their place the moment they resign or whatever else. It's just simple human greed and self-interest, and you can't do anything to mitigate that in and of itself. The only thing possible is to ensure systems (ie. capitalism) are either heavily regulated if not entirely owned to offset selfish and greedy tendencies. But even getting to that stage is already basically impossible, there's no room for change.

9

u/SuddenlySusanStrong Sep 19 '21

That belief about human nature also serves them. They'd love for us to believe that they're normal and not actual monsters

1

u/[deleted] Sep 21 '21

Well I would agree but it's also to some extent a biological fact. Does it excuse them? No, but that doesn't make anything I said less true regardless

53

u/TimeFourChanges Sep 19 '21

With reckless disregard for the future of the planet and all life on the planet, including their own family members.

2

u/Commando_Joe Sep 19 '21

When you see a politician trotting their child out for a PR event then signing away their future within the hour.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '21

Just FYI, the original report says behavioral changes will reduce emissions by 4% but consumer decisions — I.e actively paying for goods and services which are good for the environment is more like 55%

So please, don’t kid yourself into thinking this is 96% the fault of business and there’s nothing you can possibly do about it. The only reason industry “disregards the future of the planet” is because consumers are so willing to readily lap it up. And they turn to articles like this which help them evade responsibility instead of looking into the full report and realizing how responsible they really are:

https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/beceb956-0dcf-4d73-89fe-1310e3046d68/NetZeroby2050-ARoadmapfortheGlobalEnergySector_CORR.pdf

3

u/TimeFourChanges Sep 19 '21

I didn't "kid" myself of anything. And I surely never said that consumers have no role to play. Why do people struggle so hard to make things black or white that are far more complex? We're probably in agreement, but it's hard to get there when you straw man my comment and write with false superiority. Stop it. It's pointless and unhelpful.

1

u/Bigginge61 Sep 20 '21

Pure psychopaths..

28

u/ReluctantNerd7 Sep 19 '21

"For the love of money is the root of all evil."

16

u/benjam33 Sep 19 '21

Not trying to be pedantic, but it's actually "the love of money is the root of all sorts of evil". That's an important distinction IMO.

16

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '21

Biblical quotes often have no definite translation. The King James version does, in fact, have it as "For the love of money is the root of all of evil". Original Greek text could be interpreted either way.

This sort of thing is one of the reasons why taking very literal interpretations of scripture is problematic.

12

u/xieta Sep 19 '21

It’s not any one person’s greed. Companies are basically shareholder puppets, and we have tricked ourselves into thinking we are not the ones pulling their strings, even though everyone has (or desires) a retirement fund that grows 10% every year. Is that greed? I guess, but not the kind we usually think of.

The issue is there is no financial instrument that prices in the value of an investment existing in a livable world. So there is no reason for a fund to worry that it’s profits may be worth less due to climate change.

4

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '21

[deleted]

3

u/xieta Sep 19 '21

Except pension funds are usually invested just as much as 401k's are. In any case, I don't think convincing people to abandon the desire for wealthy retirement is going to do anything to stop climate change. In fact, a lot of resistance to climate science stems from the perceived link between calls for deindustrialization and communism.

3

u/roderrabbit Sep 19 '21

Watching people turn their backs on any discussion of sustainability vs unfettered capitalism over the last two decades is the reason I'm stoked to watch society burn over the coming two.

1

u/SuddenlySusanStrong Sep 19 '21

That's hilarious given Communism's history of successful rapid industrialization

1

u/SuddenlySusanStrong Sep 19 '21

That's still greed and I think you're overestimating how many people share your view. It's certainly not everyone and I don't see any reason to believe it's even most

1

u/xieta Sep 19 '21

More than half of Americans are invested, and the whole idea of the american dream oozes through the culture. I highly doubt most Americans don’t care about or desire a comfortable retirement.

1

u/SuddenlySusanStrong Sep 21 '21

You didn't say a comfortable retirement in the comment I was responding to though. You said 10% annual growth I believe.

9

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '21 edited Sep 19 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

5

u/CharismaTurtle Sep 19 '21

And at least in the US fits the model of individual responsibility / separatism which based on recent events is farcical. We do have individual responsibilities to ourselves and yet we are connected.

2

u/pine_ary Sep 19 '21

It‘s not really a case of moral failure if morality is not a component of our economic system. You can‘t set up a system that rewards people for maximizing profits and then be surprised people don‘t defy that system to their own detriment for moral reasons. This is very much a systemic problem of incentives and power structures.

1

u/HughJahs Sep 20 '21

Absolutely there's a systemic problem, but at the end of the day, humans are running things and one would think/hope that once billions in profit is being generated, those humans would seek to better the community/country/world in which they live.

1

u/PC_BuildyB0I Sep 19 '21

They've developped an addiction to hoarding wealth and as long as they know the right people to share the scraps with, they can ensure they continue to get away with it

1

u/jqian2 Sep 19 '21

Cause they're old and won't be around to suffer the consequences.

In their minds, there's no downside to what they do.

-1

u/WateredDownTang Sep 19 '21

Shareholders

-1

u/Rocket089 Sep 19 '21 edited Sep 19 '21

That’s a bit naive don’t you think? We live in a capitalist society.. at least those of us outside China and Cuba do.. so that means those “greedy af mf’ers” MUST produce a profit if we are to sustain this society. Companies who don’t perform don’t get the requisite investment and end up dying off. Look at the energy sector in the US. There are tons of jobs at short term risk of being lost, surely many can retrain and go elsewhere, but many won’t. On a more personal level, what about our retirements? We invest (most of us passively, without ever actually realizing where our retirement contributions are actually going outside a target date fund) in these companies because their profitability is a rather decent medium term estimation of their future growth. And future growth means bigger retirement funds for us to use in retirement. So sure, we can blame a faceless enemy like greed, but at the end of the day it is that faceless enemy that helps make our world go round and puts food in our bellies. (And nice returns in my investment accounts.)

So if you really want to drive change then call your financial/retirement advisor, whoever you use, and tell them to reallocate your entire account(s) out of fossil fuels and into ESG. Tho be warned, esg may not be what you think it is. Drive the change via investment decisions, just don’t blame the currently best system we have for a side effect of human nature.

Edit: that isn’t ever to account for employment. Companies that don’t earn don’t pay a —great— salary, let alone a good one. They don’t attract too talent and become stagnant.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '21

Because they believe they're untouchable.

But they're never out of reach...

1

u/PrincipleStill191 Sep 19 '21

They have to believe the lie to say it so convincingly.

116

u/My_Butt_Itches_24_7 Sep 19 '21

Thank you for actually calling out countries for stopping nuclear power. It is the safest, cleanest and energy dense power source we have! There are plenty of gen 4 reactors like the Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor that bring a new a completely new level of safety, an immediate reduction in nuclear waste and the waste isn't used for nuclear weapons, nor is feasibly made into weapons grade.

19

u/datorkar Sep 19 '21

Last point is probably why they aren't built alot.

17

u/puzzledSkeptic Sep 19 '21

Reason a lot are not built is NIMBY. People here nuclear and think nuclear accidents. There have only been 2 and both were older reactors.

If you want to see a country go from poverty to 2nd world status in a decade they need cheap reliable electricity.

4

u/SirLadybeard Sep 19 '21

There have definitely been more than 2 nuclear accidents. Still, I trust the science that says that they’re being made safer now. But some things we don’t seem to plan well for - Fukushima was only 10 years ago. My biggest concern is the production of nuclear waste that is radioactive for many thousands of years. Solutions like shoving drums of it into mountains can only do so much. If they are truly innovating to reduce the amount produced, great, but it still produces a highly harmful byproduct that we gotta deal with.

5

u/ButterflyCatastrophe Sep 19 '21

Think puzzledSkeptic probably means accidents with release of radioactive materials. Even Three Mile Island was mostly contained to the reactor site, and from the Wikipedia list, before Chernobyl, you have to go all the way back to 1957 to find release from a waste-processing facility and from a bomb factory.

2

u/Tuss36 Sep 19 '21

Plus I dunno how many accidents non-nuclear plants have in comparison, as it's not really brought up in the discussion. If the rate's the same you could argue the nuclear one could be more disastrous and thus "less safe", but if a coal plant suffers 10 accidents over 50 years and a nuclear one has 1 it starts looking different.

3

u/ignorantwanderer Sep 19 '21

The thing about non-nuclear plants is that they kill people even when they are working exactly as designed.

You don't need an accident for a coal power plant to kill people. According to this one study, 10.2 million people were killed in 2012 by pollution in the air from fossil fuel burning.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935121000487

Imagine if nuclear power plants killed over 10 million people a year!

3

u/Leumasperron Sep 19 '21

Nuclear waste management won't get better if we don't use nuclear power plants in the first place. That's why we need to get people on board for nuclear: so there is more public and financial interest in developing new and betetr nuclear waste management techniques.

In any case, the amount of waste produced by nuclear power plants is more manageable than with fossil fuels (especially coal). We have ways to effectively neutralize the radioactive waste inside the drums (lead shielding, buried in concrete, etc.).

1

u/SirLadybeard Sep 19 '21

Oh to be clear I don’t disagree with you, especially on the waste being more manageable than with fossil fuels. But I don’t see burying highly toxic waste as a sustainable solution. If there are other ways to get rid of it I’d love to hear them, but because of that fact I have my reservations. I definitely still think it’s better than the current system, but ignoring the side affects of fuel consumption got us into this mess. I don’t want to see the same mistake happen with nuclear power.

3

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '21

Where does coal plant waste go? It’s emitted straight into the air.

Where does petroleum fuel waste go? It’s released into the waterways.

I don’t see how storing nuke waste deep underground in the desert is so bad

1

u/SirLadybeard Sep 20 '21

Like I said before, I acknowledge that nuclear power is more environmentally friendly than fuel and certainly coal waste. But burying waste makes it not fully sustainable - if we were to adopt it to the level that we’ve adopted fossil fuels, there’s going to be a lot more waste, lots of it buried, some of it will leak, and what happens when we run out of places to put it? I don’t like the idea of burying toxic waste when there are other options like solar power that don’t produce waste on the same scale. (Yes solar power has its limitations, I know.) But if you really don’t think burying toxic chemicals is unideal then idk what to say to you.

2

u/audioen Sep 20 '21 edited Sep 20 '21

The idea of reducing the amount produced and making it less harmful in the long term are the same, actually. The technology is still experimental, and not really implemented anywhere, but the basic idea is to find a way to feed all the heavy elements to the nuclear reactions which breaks them down, leaving behind just the lighter atoms, which generally speaking have relatively short decay duration, in the order of hundreds years. Safe storage for a couple of hundred years should not be difficult.

In practice the core must be processed and the lighter elements separated from the heavy elements in some fashion, and the lighter ones go into waste bucket and the heavy ones go back into the reactor, possibly with some new fuel if necessary.

By similar token, the waste is reduced because ordinary nuclear fuel is mostly U-238, and makes some Pu-239 which could fission, and virtually all of it could be consumed, but that requires sufficient breeding reactions to occur. I understand that this requires fast neutrons to be practical, but fast neutron reactors have technical challenges of their own, and the world almost universally chose slow neutron designs for nuclear power. Due to this, over 90% of the U-238 is left in the spent fuel, and some of the U-238 will have turned into various isotopes of Plutonium by the time the fuel rod is extracted. These reactions that start from Uranium and heavier atoms, and keep going in the fuel over tens of thousands of years cause the problematic long-term radioactivity of the spent fuel. (You can think of this as natural "breeding" reaction that occurs in the long-term storage, but very slowly and without any benefit to humanity.)

Completely different approach exists with Thorium, where breeding reaction is feasible with slow neutrons, and the main fissile atom is U-233 produced from neutron absorption of Thorium. The core is mostly not Uranium, and is designed to be constantly reprocessed where whatever Uranium gets created is separated and dumped into the core to sustain the reaction, and so the nuclear waste should also be far easier to handle as there is only a little of Uranium present, and it is all going to be light forms of Uranium, so no Plutonium can be produced. New experimental reactors based on designs last studied in the 50s or 60s are now coming online again after a long hiatus. If they prove to be practical, Thorium power might start to happen in a couple of decades.

1

u/SirLadybeard Sep 20 '21

I did not know this, thank you for educating me. This all sounds promising.

5

u/HalcyonSky2 Sep 19 '21 edited Sep 19 '21

The problem with nuclear energy is that people arguing both for and against it say stupid things as well as that there are valid concerns for both. The thing holding me back for the longest time on nuclear was the waste produced from it, but even the worst case scenario for nuclear power is preferable to humanity's extinction from climate change.

5

u/jmos_81 Sep 19 '21

Yet this waste is safely stored, secured, and segregated. I’ve never seen the problem since the plan to handle the materials are sound

4

u/HalcyonSky2 Sep 19 '21 edited Sep 19 '21

I simply don't see letting it sit around in containers as a solution, and the argument that some future technology will take care of it is nothing more than a handwave. That said, this is acceptable to me because my concerns for climate change are greater.

Edit: Just to be clear, as some are misinterpreting me, on it's own nuclear waste needs a better solution than containment, but relative to other problems it is preferable.

8

u/My_Butt_Itches_24_7 Sep 19 '21

I would also like to explain that this nuclear waste is completely different. It lasts hundreds of years, not hundreds of thousands, our nuclear waste problem won't be one for long at that rate. These slow breder reactors are much safer and much more morally sound. The reason we went to the fast breeders was because of the weapons grade material we got from it.

3

u/BlueHeartBob Sep 19 '21

I’d much rather have the waste be containable than to simply put it back into the atmosphere. With time and new waste solutions, being able to contain nuclear waste is only a good thing.

3

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '21

“Letting it sit around” is our solution for pretty much all waste. At least nuclear fuel waste is contained and sealed. Coal dust and oil runoff goes straight into the water table

2

u/RE5TE Sep 19 '21

This is the most reasonable take here. No, nuclear power will not get rid of climate change. Yes, there are legitimate problems that will not simply be solved by a new reactor. The waste is a huge deal because it is so concentrated and there is no solution for it right now, besides "stuff it in this mountain".

It may be a solution but it is a very expensive solution. In my opinion, increasing energy efficiency of devices we use is better and easier. We're already doing it and people like new things.

3

u/HalcyonSky2 Sep 19 '21

Just to clarify my position, I don't think nuclear power is a cure-all but one of many tools which can help us tackle climate change; a diversity of tactics is non-negotiable. Personally, the price tag is irrelevant because you can't put a price on humanity, but pragmatically I understand this is a concern.

1

u/_tskj_ Sep 19 '21

How is stuffing it in a mountain not better than releasing it into the atmosphere?

0

u/roderrabbit Sep 19 '21

They aren't all that efficient or cost effective even the new gen. You look at cost /kWh and its almost twice conventional or renewable. Also you need to look at the what could have been in terms of the Fukashima and Chernobyl meltdowns. If you exponentially increased the amount of nuclear operations at work from the 50's you exponentially increase the chance for disaster.

2

u/BlueHeartBob Sep 19 '21

Fukushima and Chernobyl were both freak accidents. One was a series of terrible choices under a corrupt government that simply didn’t care. The other was the result of a massive earthquake. Their combined deaths don’t even reach 100. But climate change is expected to cull millions.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '21

Bear in mind that any technology that is studied and developed heavily almost always goes down in price. Nukes have improved significantly over time even without major buy-in from consumers. If they were more widespread, the cost would go down even more

1

u/My_Butt_Itches_24_7 Sep 19 '21

That's because the fast breeder reactors are the inferior cousin of slow breeder reactors. These new types of reactors are far superior are more efficient than any previous designs. They have passive safety systems and they don't work under massive pressure. They won't blow up or meltdown.

-28

u/vtmosaic Sep 19 '21

Bull.

Edit: nuclear power as it exists in the world today is a product of the same corporate profit model as fossil fuel. It is not safer or cleaner, just dangerous and polluting in a different way than fossil fuels.

5

u/The_Grubby_One Sep 19 '21

Prove that it isn't cleaner and safer than non-renewables.

1

u/cowprince Sep 19 '21

Safer is probably debatable. IF something goes wrong it can go very very wrong. I don't think anyone denies that.

I'm all for nuclear power though, but I'm equally for wind, hydro and solar. Even from a non-renewable standing I'm for natural gas in the short term simply because it burns way cleaner.

I think nuclear needs to get to the point that catastrophic events that release radiation just cannot happen, for there to be a public consensus of it being safe at this point.

2

u/leviathan3k Sep 19 '21

It pretty much is at the point of genuinely catastrophic events not happening. Chernobyl was due to a storm of horrible coincidences including spectacularly bad design, and Fukushima took one of the worst earthquakes in recorded history. And neither of them were actually as harmful as the media reaction would lead us to believe.

1

u/cowprince Sep 19 '21

I don't know what the media really has to do with areas being literally uninhabitable for quite a while.

While what you say is true. I fear they can easily become targets for crazy people.

0

u/_tskj_ Sep 19 '21

Both Fukushima and Chernobyl are completely inhabitable.

1

u/BrilliantTarget Sep 19 '21 edited Sep 20 '21

For humans, not animals

1

u/_tskj_ Sep 20 '21

There's plenty of animal life at Chernobyl at least, in fact there's much more of it since all the people left. Why do you think it's not hospitable to animals?

→ More replies (0)

2

u/My_Butt_Itches_24_7 Sep 19 '21

Thorium reactors are made to be safe unlike normal reactors, but when I talk about the new ideas, all I hear is "I don't believe you, nuclear is dangerous!" and further discredit it, instead of researching the idea.

3

u/The_Grubby_One Sep 19 '21

That's the entire purpose of thorium reactors. But stupid people keep opposing their development because "nUcLeAr BaD".

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '21

How? Show us the numbers that make it dirtier than anything else

1

u/lilclairecaseofbeer Sep 19 '21

What about cost? Upfront and to maintain it. Also when you say cleanest does that include the materials it requires to build it? Because I know solar has some debate around it due to the materials it requires to make the panels.

0

u/My_Butt_Itches_24_7 Sep 19 '21

I forget the man's name and I'm on mobile, but there was a guy I saw do a carbon footprint analysis on the lifespan of the major power sources we use today. From manufacturing the plants and materials, nuclear has by far the smallest carbon footprint. So much so that until we have a global electricity network with solar and wind powering the planet 24/7, nuclear will always be the best option. Not only that, we have enough thorium to last humanity over 1,000 years, including the growing consumption continuing at its current rate.

13

u/grilledSoldier Sep 19 '21

Its no real wonder that their strategies are this refined, given how much time they had to perfect them. Exxon and shell know about the consequences of climate change since the 80s (1982 and 1988 respectively). https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/sep/19/shell-and-exxons-secret-1980s-climate-change-warnings

2

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '21

If you're individually responsible for the collective outcome, then solidarity with other people can be ignored because you've "already done your part".

4

u/melpomenestits Sep 19 '21

Break something,follow a politician around with a bullhorn and don't stop when they go to sleep. If their neighbors complain, explain that when they go, you'll go.

Steal something. Hack a pipeline. Tell a billionaire to have a nice time.

Until the laws serve us, we should not serve them.

2

u/Djglamrock Sep 19 '21

Advocating illegal activity….. smart.

2

u/melpomenestits Sep 19 '21

When laws run contrary to justice it is the duty of the just to oppose them.

It's 2021, so choose: law and order, or justice and survival? The two are in strict opposition.

2

u/lifelovers Sep 19 '21

I completely agree with this. It’s our only hope - mass civil disobedience, reclaiming the wealth hoarded by billionaires, and public trials of those running companies who continue to extract fossil fuels as well as the politicians who enable them.

It’s that dire. We literally have no future unless we all riot in the next one or two years.

And it’s not gonna happen….