tal , 11 months ago (edited 11 months 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.