Oh please… did you believe the American Tobacco Company when it said cigarettes are actually good for you? How about the liquor cartels telling you drinking makes you irresistible to the opposite sex, or maybe how manly or babely you look with a couple carats of diamond embedded in some gold hanging off your body like a gypsy carries her coins.

Did you believe that shit? Nah…

yes, and you could’ve said that without using a slur for and ethnically stereotyping Romany people.

Yeah this was pretty bad. Using the slur is quite understandable because the fact that it is a slur isn’t super widely known in my experience, especially among those who haven’t had much experience with Romani people.

But adding in such an explicitly racist caricature is so much harder to justify as an act of ignorance.

Thin skinned shit, ain’tcha? Romany people… what the fuck is your problem.

It would be sad seeing someone so deep in delusion if your delusion wasn’t so hateful. Anyway, I’ll forget about you in a month or so, bye.

Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s just interesting to see yet more evidence they were lying as dishonestly as the tobacco industry. I think this article presents a pretty cohesive timeline of those lies: what they knew and when they knew it.

And hired the same PR people who did the tobacco misinformation to do theirs.

Almost everyone in the family and community in which I was raised believes that human-caused climate change is not real. They believe that all climate change is a wholly unavoidable phenomenon that is just part of the earth’s natural cycle.

You can imply that no one has actually been fooled by the oil industry’s propaganda all you want, but it’s both incorrect & unproductive to do so.

Gosh… your family and friends and community are wrong! And You too!

What’s the penalty for intentionally misleading the world and severely damaging the climate?

What is the cost of lies

An absurdly high positive short term gain.

why did i think that image was Exxonmobil’s HQ burning down

Wishful thinking?

Uhh… maybe?

So when will the heads roll?

I mean, this is a worse crime against humanity than a genocide.

You are right with your assessment.

I’d guess it might take one generation until the trials begin. But It might be less depending on how rapidly the climate disaster unfolds. And there will probably a transition period where different institutions, governed by different interests, will be literally at war with each other. Look what happens to the car industry.

That’s what’s on the table now, but it doesn’t look good.

The Supremely Court is about to rule, essentially, on whether states can even attempt to sue the oil companies over the states’ climate-change-related expenses.

The danger for the oil companies right now isn’t final Judgement from those lawsuits, but the discovery process. If the states are allowed to proceed, the oil companies have to turn over records, which will then become public. It’s not only damning socially, but they’ll also show that they lied to their investors, and THAT would trigger a mountain of lawsuits that could do real damage.

But with the current Court, I’m not hopeful.

Actual Article.

Thats an interesting thing that absolutely nothing will be done about.

We’ve known they’ve been doing this since at least the 70s …

Even better with Exxon mobile, check out the history of Exxon mobil with the Nazis, which then led to their actions that directly impacted the Soviet Union, and now they took over our government (Chevron owns everyone in the federalist society, and even marco rubio had to hand trump a note that said to talk about Chevron) and used our military to seize Venezuela’s oil.

That company has got to go

Yep. And I’m sure you know this, but we toppled Iran’s democracy at the behest of British Petroleum (BP) through clandestine action of the CIA.

Who knew? I, for one, am flabbergasted.

Exxon did not respond to requests for comment, but it has denied misleading the public or investors about climate change.

That’s a lie.

“We believe the legal and factual theories set forth in these proceedings are meritless and represent an inappropriate attempt to use the court system to usurp the proper role of policymakers in addressing the societal challenges of climate change.”

Read: We only want the people we have direct control over (policy makers they bribe) to have any say in this matter.

Asked whether a 2018 press release, which said Exxon anticipated “10,000 barrels of algae biofuel per day could be produced by 2025,” was misleading, the scientist said “yes,” adding, “All the clauses in there are patently false.”

That’s their own scientist calling them liars.

With the threat of climate action looming, he (Sprow) wrote, the company’s research and development on “Greenhouse” should have two primary goals: “Protect the value of our resources (oil, gas, coal),” and “Preserve Exxon’s business options.”

Sprow then laid out an agenda for how to achieve those ends.

With modeling critical to climate science, he wrote, “it could be considered important to be at the forefront of this modeling effort.” Sprow proposed “supporting a person on staff at one of the leading modeling centers (e.g. Princeton) or by sending one of our people to work in such a center.”

That’s their CEO telling them that “now that climate change is out of the bag, we need to focus on protecting our business (you know, as opposed to the only planet we have), and we need to engage in criminal subterfuge to either bribe a climate modeling expert, or insert one of our own agents into the field.”

“continue to question the scientific basis and cite the high economic cost” of policies to address climate change and “avoid pressures to negotiate a compromise.”

That’s a quote from a meeting of oil executives, laying out the framework of their carpet denial of climate change. The strategy is something you’ve seen before. Disrupt action by “just asking questions, while bringing up the cost” and “avoid accountability.”

This is the same strategy republikkkans use to deny you healthcare and justice. Except in this case it’s being weaponized to help them achieve wealth by destroying our only planet.

There was a ClimateTown video that mentioned more on the algae. It didn't start out quite as a lie, but more a hopeful prediction that they could be both the heroes in finding a "clean" solution, and it would supply the amount they thought. It's when they threw money at it and it kept failing very badly that they just kept lying on its promise instead of just admitting it was too good to be true.

They used another tactic that I didn’t notice until one of the commenters on the Ars article/forum pointed it out:

Promising good stuff that’s not too close (~5 years) so you’ll remember it and say, “Hey, where’s my <good thing>?!” but not so far away (~25+ years) that you’ll say “That’s way too far you need to fix this shit now.” Apparently it was used in Soviet Bloc countries a lot to keep the population from revolting, and now I’m seeing it everywhere in our society. In this case, the O&G companies said things like, “Sure! We’ll be generating all your fuel with algae in ~15 years and then we’ll never need to drill again!” and “We’re developing amazing carbon capture technology that’s a mere ~15 years away and will repair all the damage we’re not doing!”

Ars Technica might be owned by Conde Nast, but it has a really smart userbase on average, so I tolerate that fact.

Everyone knows that Big Oil did the research to prove global warming was real several decades ago and then spent billions of dollars lying about it and covering it up. They have never been held accountable for this though.

I hear we’re doing firing squads again.

Actually their research shows it’s our fault for not recycling enough. /S

Right, shifting the blame to the consumer is probably the dumbest excuse they came up with. Too bad so many people bought into it.

I threw a plastic bottle in the trash about 4 years ago. I’m clearly the problem.

what big corporation lying and lobbying (a.k.a bribing) for profit? that has never happened before.

No doubt, they’re evil scum. Ruining our future for the sake of short term power control.

Remember when Exxon poisoned a large portion of the coastline of Alaska?

Cool dudes

Meh. Companies will always operate in their own interest. What matters is to constrain their behavior with legislation, like California’s Cap and Invest program.

I am shocked. Shocked!