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toast0 • today at 3:28 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

Reaping the benefits of the deception is taking part.


Replies

bix6 • today at 3:31 PM

No it’s not.

A 401k that market weights is not the same as an executive actively lying.

kmeisthax • today at 5:05 PM

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.