The problem is sometimes the lessoned learned is don’t be responsible.

So no longer own oil tankers and instead each ship is owned by its own LLC so just that piece goes down and the liability gets capped to its insurance contract.

I don't condone corporate negligence or violations of environmental protection laws, but some kind of ecosystem damage is an inevitable consequence of humans existing with an advanced industrial civilization. We're going to have an impact.

It's not really your argument, but to be clear nobody is actually claiming the US followed Israel into war with Iran because of oil.

What’s exhausting is shifting the goal posts. BP should be held up as a great example where the responsibility transferred onto the shareholders.

“Oh, but there are other bad actors doing things” is not a counterpoint. That’s the same as claiming a government can’t work by pointing to a different failed policy every time someone points how how a policy failure was corrected.

Essentially how most businesses (big and small) handle this situation. Multi pronged approach.

Sold a bunch of assets to raise funds (about 38b apparently), cut the dividend, borrowed the remaining (you'd think after such an event it's 'hard' to raise capital but in reality BP has a great financial record and there's a chance they had prior agreements in place) and then spread cost out over ~10 years.

The stock price fell by 50ish percent, and they've spent 16 years recovering.

BP share price was over $100 the month before the disaster. They sold $45B in global assets and subsidiaries (including most of their refinery business and land holding 6 billion barrels of proven reserves) and cut their dividend to fund the damages and fines.

Even if it was enormous enough in fines to put them out of business, the industry as it is with all its inherent risks will still exist because that is still legally allowed. Forget a fine; outlaw the behavior that lead to the issue. Incentivize new emergent behavior instead of just hedging.

Don't worry. BP is sorry[1] for the spill. That should be enough, right?

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u0EL_u4nvw

Didn’t you hear? They (gasp) had to suspend the dividend.

Even if we executed everone involved the lesson would have been to segregate responsibility and find a fall guy

We are already massively investing into renewable energy... to the tune of about $1trillion since 2020 in the US. In 2024, 95%+ of all new electricity capacity was solar/wind/batteries.

Seems like you believe the current system is not conducive to clean/sustainable infrastructure, but the world I think you want is actually the one we're already in.

> What can I or you possibly do that can wreak havoc on this scale?

Build a bunch of drones that carry explosives and leave them outside chemical plants, refineries, and nuclear plants across the world and then launch a simultaneous attack on infrastructure.

Budget $1000-$2000 per drone and then whatever your costs of transportation for the road trip are.

Is it? Because at the very least, modern life involves the mass production of plastics, mining of various minerals, and the use of copious amounts of energy. That last one is only kind of solved (as long as everything works and nothing breaks), but I have yet to see any convincing evidence that there is any feasible substitute for the first two.

How would we know such a society is possible? There's zero proof of that to date. Errors and inevitable catastrophes are part of the cost of a highly complex technically advanced society run by humans.

Scale matters. When you have the scale that we do, you will have accidents because of the sheer number and the lack of oversight due to cost pressures. These accidents aren't going anywhere. They have been around since industrial times and will continue to be so. Please tell me how you would ensure 0 accidents - the world would be interested to know since it hasn't been discovered yet. Now please explain who's position is baseless.

Not with humans.

Uncomfortable truths and all that.