[Bluestrike2]

Or that they just weren't very good business people. Their understanding of climate change back then was good enough to have a damned decent roadmap for how things were going to play out over the next fifty years. They were capable of projecting what was going to happen, the likely regulatory changes that wold be needed to mitigate climate change, and how that would affect them.

One would expect the average CEO would literally kill for a roadmap of the future. They had it, and more. Exxon, ARCO, and others even made early R&D investments that helped pioneer terrestrial solar power, not to mention their extensive R&D capabilities more broadly. Sticking with the metaphor, they had the map and some of the most important tools for the journey ahead.

Fifty years were long enough even a financial moron could have developed a long-term transition plan that avoided stranded assets and massive losses. And they--and their people--weren't financial morons. Hell, much of their capital equipment and facilities investments had expected lifespans of a similar length. They had everything needed to create the mother of all soft landings.

Hell, they could have engineered an outcome where they came out well ahead. Being able to rebrand yourself as the company that chose to sacrifice itself to save the world buys you a hell of a lot of goodwill you can leverage for subsidies in Washington. We’d have paid them for it and thanked them for the privilege.

It couldn’t have been that much harder than convincing an entire political party that the problem didn’t exist. Oil companies convincing the public they were shitty companies that needed to be reborn? If they focused on the dying part of rebirth, that wouldn’t have been a very difficult sell even back then.

Only someone who failed upwards could have been gifted a hand like that and still manage to choose the worst possible path for both the world and their own company. All they managed to do was delay the transition and make it more expensive for their company and the world.

[immibis]

> Being able to rebrand yourself as the company that chose to sacrifice itself to save the world buys you a hell of a lot of goodwill you can leverage for subsidies in Washington. We’d have paid them for it and thanked them for the privilege.

This seems to be incorrect. Given my estimation of the current political climate, if you sacrifice yourself to save the world, you will be dead and then someone else will destroy the world anyway while you're not there to stop them.

When was the last time the government paid someone to save the world?

[Bluestrike2]

> This seems to be incorrect. Given my estimation of the current political climate, if you sacrifice yourself to save the world, you will be dead and then someone else will destroy the world anyway while you're not there to stop them.

Probably, but look at it from the 1970s. The environmental movement was at its greatest legislative power, the major federal environmental legislation passed at the time was often bipartisan since environmental issues weren't nearly so neatly ideologically coded as they are now, and you had a bunch of high-profile environmental disasters that kept the issue at the forefront of politics. You also had energy crises throughout the 70s. All of that severely undermined public trust in the industry.

Despite their horrible public image since then, the fossil fuel industry has accomplished a great deal politically. They managed to convince an entire political party that climate change doesn't exist despite decades of research and ever-increasing amounts of evidence. They've fended off greater legislative and regulatory oversight repeatedly since then. And while we may not be paying them to "save the world," we're still giving them a great deal of subsidies in the form of tax benefits, consumer incentives that end up increasing the usage of their products, and the massive gift of not taxing their significant negative externalities. So we are, at least, paying them.

Put simply, their lobbyists have always been skilled, as evident by their accomplishments despite the decades-long reality that the majority of Americans don't much like or trust them. So is it really that much of a stretch to expect that they could have gotten significant federal support for a clean energy transition that started back in the 1970s and was gradual enough that it didn't shock markets and the consumers? Or that, if they were able to secure subsidies and preferential tax treatment to extract fossil fuels, that they couldn't do the same for not extracting them?

Anyhow, if I didn't make it clear enough, the sacrifice would have been entirely symbolic. Exxon, for example, would have always survived the transition. It's just that their brand would have undergone a sort of phoenix-esque rebirth: Exxon the oil company would have gradually faded out of existence, while Exxon the renewable energy company came into existence at the same time. It would have been a marketing and PR message, but unlike with the attempts at greenwashing, the fossil fuel side of the company would have actually faded away. The message would have even been truthful in a way: it would have been a serious sacrifice of sorts on their part.

It's just that it could have been a sacrifice that didn't actually cost them much--and had they played their cards right, it might have been one that let them come out ahead in the end.