Capitalist Criminals

The lead industry, the asbestos industry, and the tobacco companies all knew the dangers of their products, made efforts to suppress the information or instill doubt about it even as they promoted what they made, and went right on producing and selling while others suffered and died. With all three industries, the negative results conveniently arrived years, sometimes decades, after exposure and so were hard to connect to it. Each of these industries knew that the relationship existed. Each used that time-lag as protection.


The most profitable corporations in the world, giant energy companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, and Shell, certainly know what they were doing. These companies have been extracting fossil fuels from the Earth in ever more ingenious ways. The burning of those fossil fuels, in turn, has put record amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. Only this month, the CO2 level reached parts per million for the first time in human history. A consensus of scientists has long concluded that the process was warming the world and that, if the average planetary temperature rose more than two degrees Celsius, all sorts of dangers could ensue, including seas rising high enough to inundate coastal cities, increasingly intense heat waves, droughts, floods, ever more extreme storm systems, and so on. None of this is exactly a mystery. It’s in the scientific literature. Those who run the giant energy corporations know perfectly well. Its top executives continue to plan their futures knowing that their extremely profitable acts are destroying the very habitat, the very temperature range that for so long made life comfortable for humanity.

These companies have even begun taking advantage of climate change itself -- in the form of a melting Arctic -- to exploit enormous and previously unreachable energy supplies. Oil and gas companies evidently has no qualms about making its next set of profits directly off melting the planet. With their staggering profits, these industrial barons could have decided anywhere along the line that the future they were ensuring was beyond dangerous. They could themselves have led the way with massive investments in genuine alternative energies (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, algal, and who knows what else), instead of the exceedingly small-scale ones they made, often only for publicity purposes.

To destroy our planet with malice and forethought, with profits as motive, isn’t that the ultimate crime against humanity?
Adapted from here