this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Bill Gates Is Playing Both Sides of the Climate Crisis. (jacobin.com)
submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Bill Gates presents himself as a climate champion, but his trust has actually increased its fossil fuel investments since his divestment pledge. It's just the latest example of the billionaire appointing himself to solve problems he helps perpetuate.

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[โ€“] Couldbealeotard 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You're talking bullshit.

You have voting weight proportional to how much stock you hold. You are the shareholder. There's no legal obligations for companies to prioritise profits over anything else.

Stop with the fear mongering and hyperbole.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Public for profit companies have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. When you issue shares of a company you are signing a contract to put the companies needs over anything else when administering the company.

If it just worked off proportional representation like you imagine then the majority shareholder could unilaterally sell the company off to themselves for pennies or do self dealing to enrich themselves at the companies expense. No one would ever invest in a company because they could never be sure their interests would be met unless they had a controlling stake.

Companies need a goal in order to judge the administration by and to be able to call foul if they stray from that goal to pursue personal interests. For most public companies that is profit, and if you stray from that goal for your own personal interests, even if it's a noble one like preventing climate change, the other shareholders can sue you for that. They didn't sign up for your personal moral ambitions, they signed up to make money and they have a contract that says so.

If you want to pursue things other than profit you can register as a public benefit corporation which can consider things like climate change in there decision making process without risking a lawsuit from shareholders. This changes the agreement between the shareholder and the company so the shareholder knows that they aren't going to make the most money at all costs. None of the major oil companies are registered that way though.

Read up on the duty of loyalty here before calling bs and thinking you can change big oil from within