So, who will go to jail?
That's rhetorical, obviously. The answer is absolutely nobody because money is the best insulator there is.
So, who will go to jail?
That's rhetorical, obviously. The answer is absolutely nobody because money is the best insulator there is.
Nobody will go to jail. The gubmint will give them trillions of dollars for carbon removal (PR campaign that the benevolent oil companies and Govt are working for them). They will give themselves awards for saving the planet and everyone else.
The captured carbon will be used for Enhanced Oil Recovery. Fossil fuel companies add a few trillion dollars in govt money, in addition to the $7T dollars in subsidies today (yale).
Carbon capture tech a 'complete falsehood', says Fortescue Metals chairman: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373538
Honest Government Ad | Carbon Capture & Storage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZgoFyuHC8
So this 1000 metric ton CO2 DAC plant could offset the activities of 100-400 vehicles in a year... minus the activities of the employees to get to the plant. That's what I wanna know. When are the workers going to stop driving 60 miles round trip to work? And how many need to be at work everyday at the plant? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38237920
Out of the 27 commercially operational CCS projects worldwide, 21 inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs to force out petroleum: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36970085
Big Oil Helped Shape Stanford’s Latest Climate-Research Focus. Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability recently unveiled its first institutionwide research focus: greenhouse-gas removal. Taking tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere will be “essential” to limiting global warming, as a news release last month explained, and ideas will be marshaled from across the school to get it done. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35829500
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.
No one is delegating their critical thinking to corporations, except professional climate catastrophe deniers, media "spokespeople" who are paid to repeat lies, and bought-and-paid-for politicians.
One of the most transformational things that could happen in politics would be a "misconduct through media" law, where promoting known lies, thinly packaged as entertainment, would be fined at some multiple of the actual harms caused.
I agree there's less delegating now in these areas, but these are mostly topics of the past. Which half truths are we swallowing now, unknowingly most of the time, spoonfed by corp propaganda?
How about "AGI is right around the corner"?
> More importantly, when will the common folk stop delegating critical thinking to these corporations?
When were the times when people didn’t outsource the critical thinking to others?
Never I think, it's time we started choosing not to.
Remember what is need not necessarily continue being so.
Any time the basic premise is 'humans should stop doing the thing they've always done' you better have a hell of a mechanism to hold that vector, and the mechanism better keep working forever, or it's a non starter.
Literally no human progress has been based on 'we should be better'. It's been based on exploiting bugs in the human firmware to achieve some result. See: organized religion, the city-state, democracy, etc ...
Individual people can be rational and morally driven. People as a general population cannot.
The person who has to buy 3 gallons of gas to make a round trip to work is often suffering the consequences of other people’s (nimbys, congresspeople, traffic “engineers”) decisions, often made decades earlier.
Every time a home isn’t built in Berkeley, SF, or Oakland a car in Vacaville or Stockton gets its wings.
The Center for Tobacco Studies is a top tier research organization. Nick wouldn’t deceive us. Look at that smile!
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/09/1145728/we-are-p...
lol. And we're worried about sycophantic AI.These people doomed humanity to make a buck. Jail would be too good for them.
Humanity isn't doomed. Worse, it's going to survive, and have to deal with the messes we made.
Humanity, possibly. Science and culture as we know it - absolutely not.
Lest you make them martys. Much better if we somehow turned them, used the one ring against them.
[dead]
The current party which holds 3 of 3 branches of the government that would be responsible for prosecuting such a crime is entirely behind the idea that climate change is a hoax.
And the party that's held 3 of 3 branches for twice as long over the past ~20 years, and at least 2 for 6/10 of those Congresses?
I'm not saying they're the bad guys. I'm saying that they had chances to do something, and didn't. They didn't care about implementing "The green dream or whatever they call it," even when they had a mandate, let alone punishing the people who made it a necessity by manipulating the public for several decades.
The IRA committed $400 billion and was the biggest piece of clean energy legislation ever made, and yet the Democrats were swept out of power 2 years later.
If your essay prompt is 10 pages on methods to preempt climate change, and you write 1 page on how to funnel money to your donors in industry, you should not be surprised when you fail out.
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.
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.
"Took part" should include those who knew about the deception and did nothing.
Maybe it will yeet out all the "investors" who are just parking their money and aren't interested in what their investment is doing. Maybe that will help return the capital markets to serve their original purpose again.
The idea that you can just magically park your money somewhere and it automagically generates numbers, zero risk (because the government always bails you out, directly or indirectly) and zero knowledge requirement has turned out to be incredibly corrosive to society.
Reaping the benefits of the deception is taking part.
No it’s not.
A 401k that market weights is not the same as an executive actively lying.
This is a good way to diffuse responsibility away from the people whose choice it was to condemn the planet to 2-3C warming and onto the people whose choice was made for them by the first group. i.e. this is a good way to put me on trial and keep them out of the court.
I know this because BP coined the term "personal carbon footprint" in order to tell well-meaning liberals like me that we were personally responsible for global warming, and not the oil companies spending to make sure the only practical mode of transportation was individual vehicles burning petrochemicals for energy. Or, prior to that, the oil companies giving Greenpeace money to go heckle nuclear energy and set back the development of clean energy by decades[0].
Likewise, when we do eventually Nuremberg these oil fucks, they are going to throw this exact same argument back at us. They are going to argue that they were just responding to shareholder demand, that fiduciary duty in a for-profit corporation mandates CEOs and board members commit crimes against humanity if it would maximize profits. It doesn't, of course. It'd be insane to argue that corporations are legally obligated to break the law if it makes them a buck. Which, of course, means that there's already a historical record of Nazi-collaborating business owners who used the shareholder value argument specifically to get out of a hanging at Nuremberg. So let's not use that argument. The moral and legal culpability must be concentrated primarily in the people who had the power and made the decisions at the time, and not laundered through the mechanism of the market to an accountability sink.
Besides, are you really going to put everyone in America with a 401k on trial? That would actually be a really good pretext to putting America under martial law and stripping Americans of their rights[1].
[0] To be clear, PV solar is so cheap now it makes any other form of energy look expensive and useless - nuclear included. The point is specifically that we emitted 40 more years of carbon than we needed to because of this.
[1] Which, to be clear, is already happening, has been happening for decades, and is always happening unless you make continuous efforts to revalidate your rights through democratic means outside of merely voting.
The shareholders are literally the ones that paid for the deception and who benefitted from the deception. Why in the world would you punish the hit man but not the one who paid for the hit?
The shareholders did not pay for the deception, even though they benefitted from it. There is no legal precedence for this kind of action because we have an SEC that is meant to root out deception in public companies, that was gutted as a result of the current US administration.
If the law was "you need to hire your own private investigators and external auditors to find deception in all the companies you invest in", then yes, shareholder liability would be reasonable.
So if I give $1000 to Boris the loan shark, and he consistently returns 50% year over year, I’m blameless because I didn’t investigate?
Shareholder liability is the only way to prevent companies from tobacco/oil style abuse of externalities. You can execute the execs and it will make no difference, because the same shareholders are there incentivizing the same behaviors with the same massive salary/stock windfalls. Someone will take the money.
The economy would fall apart if that was how investments worked.
Imagine if money couldn't protect you from the consequences of your choices.
The absolute horror.
> There is no legal precedence for this kind of action because we have an SEC that is meant to root out deception in public companies, that was gutted as a result of the current US administration.
Trump took the gutting to an extreme, but antitrust and investor protection agencies have been gutted for decades. The only thing that will draw actual consequences is defrauding or otherwise hurting other rich people - Liz Holmes, Madoff, Epstein or the Dieselgate scandal. But screw over the little man? You'll probably get some sort of bonus.
Who is suggesting that every shareholder be jailed?
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.
I got admonished by a moderator here for using that word, be careful.
What word are you referring to? I’m missing something here.
Probably French style capital punishment
We don’t need the French, we can live stream executions now.
You could be forgiven for, "Botched execution," and, "First public execution in decades," happening, in that order, within a couple weeks of each other, coming off as a sort of Bronze Age hint given by fate and our hubris-driven refusal to take it.
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 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)
We're already in jail. Nobody is getting off this rock.
I didn't get the money, only the jail term. Nice.
PS: I like the way you think :D
Ideally, at least the board would do time and lose any rights holding such positions for a long time.
One of the chief architects of the coverup died recently - massively wealthy, no consequences, and a fortune passed on to his descendants.
Aren’t they claiming companies are people?
Doesn‘t Texas still have the death penalty?
1+1=…
Oil, the old AI.
I know this will be an unpopular opinion, but the number of politicians and other officials who would benefit from a successful case against one of these companies or even one of their executives is a mile long.
I don’t mean generic “throw someone in jail because we all agree they’re evil amirite” posturing, but actual cases against someone based on evidence of breaking a law. Any law. It doesn’t even have to result in jail time to be a political career builder. Saying you’ve pursued and won cases against a “bad” company or executives is a huge boon to anyone in this current political environment that is highly against establishments. It’s universal, from Elizabeth Warren campaigning on her actions against Wall St to the entire “drain the swamp” phenomenon.
Reading the actual memo, not the journalists trying to make articles out of it, reveals a little more about why there isn’t the classic smoking gun here, which is a much simpler explanation for why nobody is going to jail than assuming that money has bribed, paid off, and outlawyered everyone in the country who stands to benefit politically from going after a real crime.
And that fact should tell you a lot about the politicians we have now, that they are actively resisting such efforts.
This is reading American politics 100% wrong, like George Costanza "I should do the opposite of my instinct on everything" level wrong.
Who's getting punished for corruption these days? Is Elizabeth Warren the President? She ran once and was only used as a stalking horse to keep Bernie out, while finishing 3rd in her home state.
You completely ignored the other half of my example of the “drain the swamp” campaigning that got someone elected.
He didn’t actually do what he promised and his targets differed from Warren’s, but the weight of those anti-establishment vibes are real and underly a lot of what’s happening in American politics.
If you don’t see it, you are the one completely reading it wrong. You tried to cut out everything in my comment except for the Elizabeth Warren part and then you attacked that, but that was only an example to show that this sentiment is prominent in both major parties.
If it helps you understand it, remove Elizabeth Warren from my comment and the point remains valid.
I hear the sentiment that you're projecting but unfortunately it has no legs.
Nobody who chanted "drain the swamp" gives a shit at all about the unprecedented corruption we're seeing. It was always about cultural grievances. If their guy steals from the public, then they're winning.
Its time to finally bring in the corporate death penalty.
>Its time to finally bring in the corporate death penalty.
Corporations are made of people :-)
(Also: I agree.)
Agreed. The business is dissolved, assets confiscated, and the board goes to jail.
And to preempt the inevitable comments about what happens to the employees: anyone who works for an oil or gas (or tobacco or social media or junk food, etc) company who's culture is so broken that it produces such planet- or society-wrecking egregious behaviour, is part of the problem and they know it. Find a new job doing something constructive.
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 in the land of “best justice money can buy”.
The historical case of Enron and Arthur Andersen is instructive. No one from Andersen went to jail but it had to be argued up to the Supreme Court for their charges to be dismissed. The company was disbanded but the conviction against it was overturned afterwards. This is certainly some evidence for "killing the company" not being the right move.
Several Enron execs did go to jail: Kenneth Lay the chairman would have gone for 10+ years but died before sentencing, Jeff Skilling did 12 years, Causey did 5 years, Fastow did 5 years.
In the current environment of DOJ corruption I don't think this sort of thing would happen... unless the executives were conveniently non-supporters of the current President.
Why can’t the shareholders collectively vote to jail the execs and install new leadership?
1) Shareholders can't put people in jail. 2) People generally don't act against their interest.
Shareholders can refer to the DOJ.
They could also sue in civil court. A director lying harms the company which is breach of fiduciary duty.
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.
Setting aside that demand is in no way an excuse - I take it you wouldn't come up with this justification for crack dealers - I want to kill Exxon for the specific thing this article is about.
In the (honestly, not that unlikely) event Shell has done similar, they, too should be killed.
Extraction and combustion of fossil fuels can (and IMO should!) be restricted as an orthogonal measure, but Exxon shouldn't be given the chance to reallocate its investments and pretend it never did what it did.
I don’t think selling street crack is a good thing and oppose everyone who is selling it (and to your last point in your upthread post, I wouldn’t worry about the supply chain players, because “who works to supply crack and doesn’t know that crack is probably not great for you?”)
I don’t pick and choose to punish one of the dealers more harshly than the others because that one dealer had some internal research that cast doubt as to the likelihood that he would, at some time in the future, achieve a workable solution to a healthier/safer crack substitute that he currently publicly claimed to be working on.
People seem to be conflating “this company didn’t publish everything it thought about everything” (a standard we don’t hold companies to in general) with “…and the topic was climate change, so off with the company…”
> I don’t pick and choose to punish one of the dealers more harshly than the others because that one dealer had some internal research that cast doubt as to the likelihood that he would, at some time in the future, achieve a workable solution to a healthier/safer crack substitute that he currently publicly claimed to be working on.
What if they did so purposefully to undercut funding for crack rehab, with the express purpose to keep people addicted?
> People seem to be conflating “this company didn’t publish everything it thought about everything” (a standard we don’t hold companies to in general) with “…and the topic was climate change, so off with the company…”
It's because the topic is an existential threat to human survival that the company was knowingly worsening and manipulating people about. It's not "a standard we don't hold companies to in general", it's an unprecedented scale of harm. At some point the small claims court isn't enough, no matter how commonly it is used. Sometimes the infraction calls for the Nuremberg Trials instead.
Is what a scientist at Exxon wrote in 1988 more relevant than what hundreds of fossil fuel extraction, refining, transportation, and retailing companies are doing today and tomorrow?
An existential threat to human survival demands action to stop all of them not selectively or preferentially only the ones who knew a little more than others 38 years ago.
Doing the latter is not only nearly totally ineffective (as they’d be instantly replaced by others taking market share) but also ensures that companies take great pains to never do in-house research on things that might be harmful.
They are doing what they are doing today because we've been letting them get away with it for decades.
I've already agreed, yes, we need to obviously ban the practice of fuel extraction itself. But we also need to punish the organizations that have led us here and who's impunity set the precedent for the others to follow.
The fact they've been knowingly misleading us because they prioritized their profits over human survival needs to be addressed on top of the banning of future extraction.
These are not two mutually conflicting policies we need to choose from. We can and should address both.
> companies take great pains to never do in-house research on things that might be harmful
This is counter to how companies work, they are driven by market forces to do research to maintain their edge over the competition - they structurally need to do research because of what it can tell them about future market conditions, regulatory and attitude shifts etc etc so they can adapt their own practices. This is true for companies in harmful industries just as much as for any other. You can't just not do R&D in a competitive market.
But you can fund research in other labs/companies and then bring in-house the research you like to commercialize and leave research results you don’t like with companies like “Exxoff Research 37” if having negative research results becomes a liability.
You can then even truthfully claim to be funding basic research that doesn’t directly benefit your commercial interests.
If you hire a contract killer, you will still be punished for it, even though you didn't do any killing yourself.
I don't see why the same can't apply here.
In what contexts is lying to the public a crime? The closest are laws against lying in police investigations or official proceedings, but otherwise it's not a jailable offense.
And all of this is before you get into the question of whether they lied or were engaging in motivated reasoning. During COVID we had anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, seemingly without clear commercial reasons to lie. Should those people be thrown in jail as well?
> In what contexts is lying to the public a crime?
This feels like a disingenuous question. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that claiming X isn't toxic, when you know that it is dangerous. Public health, frequency, scale of impact (more often, who is impacted that has resources to compete in court) et al are all considerations.
Humans act in their own self interest. Relying purely on individual self interest is a degenerate approach in public health issues. One of the many purposes of government, is to act in the collective interest. eg Typhoid Mary
>This feels like a disingenuous question. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure [...]
If all you have is vibes, then it's a pretty legitimate question.
>Public health, frequency, scale of impact (more often, who is impacted that has resources to compete in court) et al are all considerations.
That's exactly not how the legal system is supposed to work. Bending the rules just because some defendant is particularly unsympathetic is exactly how you get politically motivated prosecutions and kangaroo courts.
> That's exactly not how the legal system is supposed to work.
It is. This is a misunderstanding of how justice works. People (judges, juries, et al) determine the impact of situations, not machines following abstract rules.
Find a case of someone found criminally liable for something that normally can't be held criminally liable for, and whose trial isn't considered by legal experts to be a legal farce by international legal experts? The latter might sound like me trying to do a no true scotsman, but it's needed to weed out stuff like struggle sessions in communist regimes.
If you take the post-mortems on the psyops campaigns from our national adversaries at face-value then what they were doing was actually worse.
>If you take the post-mortems on the psyops campaigns from our national adversaries at face-value
Which is a bad premise, because despite how much "russian troll farms" (and now "chinese AI troll farms") is bandied around in the media, it's entirely unclear how big their impact is, if any.