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.