Exxon's scientists accurately projected things its executives didn't want to hear. //

Currently, the major oil companies appear to have settled on an awkward compromise with the reality of climate change: They generally acknowledge that their product is helping drive it but plan to continue to produce as much of that product as they can. But that reflects a major change for these companies, which up until recently were funding think tanks that minimized the risks of climate change and, in many cases, directly denying the validity of the science.

In the case of ExxonMobil, that includes denying its own science. Thanks to documents obtained by the press, we now know that Exxon sponsored its own climate researchers who did internal research, collaborated with academic scientists, and came to roughly the same conclusions about carbon dioxide that the rest of the scientific community had—and executives were made aware of it. //

A climate projection's skillfulness is a measure of how closely it agreed with the historic record. And again, Exxon scientists performed well. The aggregate skillfulness of their internal climate models is over 70 percent. By that measure, they outperformed contemporary models from the scientific community. //

jhodge Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
11y
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Dark Jaguar said:
We can't trust corporations though. That's not how we solve this problem. Taking their autonomy away and making them a branch of the government may just be an absolute necessity to get through this. The fundamental need of any society is survival. All other rights take a back seat to this, because they are dependent upon it. I don't care if someone's an Ayn Rand objectivist, survival is more important than A=A.

No - down that path lies totalitarianism. If survival trumps all other values, and the state is charged with ensuring that survival, then no limits on the power of the state can be tolerated.

We're just going to muddle through this, keeping in mind that people generally don't act until a crisis is immediate. The climate is going to change, and there are going to be widespread impacts with winners and losers.

We are not as ultimately as rational as we like to think, and our actions pretty much always optimize for the short-term.