Guy Walton has christened two previous heatwaves this summer Amoco and BP in attempt to name and shame fossil fuel firms

  • @[email protected]
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    461 year ago

    Reminds me of here in Oz, people were getting punched with what was called a “king hit”, basically some drunk idiot grabbing someone and hitting them hard enough to kill them.

    Then the media started to relabel it a “coward punch” (which it really was) which caught on. This had a measurable impact on these idiots punching like that and the number of deaths went down.

    • @[email protected]
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      51 year ago

      We always had another word for it though: sucker punch. Also, where are the stats on it having a measurable impact? It was widely seen as a pretty lacklustre thing at the time. I’d argue the real impact was the massive increase is sentencing guidelines for king hits/coward punches that turned them into murder charges if they died from the hit.

      In the same vein, we should be charging companies that are causing this impact to the climate. I’d say there’d be real change then.

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        That would be called a carbon tax, and Oz was too stupid there and took the fear mongering hook line and sinker :(

        • @[email protected]
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          11 year ago

          Ah nah i know about that, I meant actually charging them with actual crimes and throwing them in gaol

          • @[email protected]
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            -21 year ago

            That would be entirely unreasonable, because the ideal is not zero carbon output, it’s reducing carbon output to a sustainable level.

  • @vin
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    31 year ago

    Brilliant idea! Could do other companies that lobby against decarbonisation. But wouldn’t this have trademark issues?

  • tal
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    1 year ago

    Yelling at Amoco or BP makes no sense.

    Those are oil companies. They operate within the bounds set out for them. If there is an externality present, some kind of positive or negative effect not captured in the market price of what they’re selling – say, that burning oil produces carbon dioxide – it’s not the job of the company to address that, but of market regulators. If a company did refrain from extraction, another company would just step in – a competitive market specifically should not allow any one company to withhold a resource from the market; a company that did that would have monopoly power. As it stands, market regulators have a market says that companies should extract oil, so that’s what they’re doing.

    If sale of oil doesn’t incorporate the cost of carbon emissions, or if oil shouldn’t be sold at all, that’s an issue for the regulators.

    A company getting yelled at is going to make some polite noises and brush complaining people off, not because they’re not doing their job, but because restricting global oil consumption is not their job.

    You want to complain at someone, complain at market regulators, because they’re the ones that are responsible for taking into account said externalities, not the companies that operate in those markets.

    You’d yell at a company if the company were breaking the laws that have been put in place for it, or something like that – if BP were smuggling black-market oil or something, then that’s an issue with BP. But as things stand, they’re acting as the system intends.