Oil Companies Are Truly Evil

The cigarette companies are proven evil.  It was demonstrated that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, and they continue to sell cigarettes and thus were responsible for millions of early deaths.  They knew there was a problem but they worked very hard to dispute the evidence and produce doubt.



It is now known that oil companies have done the same.  There is solid evidence that ExxonMobil and Shell knew how their product was going to bring about global warming in the 1980's and chose to do the same as the cigarette companies, deny and create doubt even though they knew what would might happen.

They show that as the company pondered its responsibility to act, Shell's scientists urged it to heed the early warnings, even if, as they said, it might take until the 2000s for the mounting evidence to prove greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were causing unnatural climate change.

 "With the very long time scales involved, it would be tempting for society to wait until then before doing anything," company researchers wrote in a 1988 report based on studies completed in 1986. "The potential implications for the world are, however, so large that policy options need to be considered much earlier. And the energy industry needs to consider how it should play its part."

Otherwise, a team of Shell experts said, "it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilize the situation."

The actions of the cigarette companies resulted in the early deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and since their still going, possibly millions more.

But the consequences of the oil companies obstruction and denial in the face of evidence they themselves knew about is an attack on civilization itself.  We don't know yet if we can survive what climate change will bring about, but oil companies have refused to take any responsibility for their actions.

I'm not opposed to a social system that includes entrepreneurship but the behavior of the oil companies, acting in their own interests despite knowing the terrible consequences, is far more malign than companies that dump waste into rivers or harm the environment or poison people.  All of this should give pause to the rampantly destructive business environment we have.