> K.K. and S.M. reported no conflicts of interest.
People need to understand that "conflict of interest" does not mean "proof of wrongdoing", it means being in a situation where serving one interest could be a detriment to another. There is 100% a conflict of interest here.
This is like when the food vendor at my old work raised the prices on soda. They claimed it was a health initiative, but they also increased the prices on diet soda and even bottled water.
Anyone in the automotive space that says "by 20xx" can be essentially immediately discredited at this point. You can blame Google/Waymo for saying self-driving cars would be available to the general public by 2017.
The real question would be how much did the owners of these oil companies pocket before declaring bankruptcy.
It’s exactly as the commenter says...taxpayers fund schools that buy land; the school leases mineral/oil rights to private companies (Likely self dealing with these leases too); private energy companies take the public land resources and pay themselves profits leaving the entity insolvent and then files bankruptcy protection; taxpayers Are left liable.
What incentive does an oil company have to not liquidate the company after they exhaust the well and seek bankruptcy protection? In other words say it cost $10M to properly close up the well, you have that in the bank but you pay it to the owners as profit instead of covering the well, company is now insolvent and receives protections.
Why would any oil company not do this on public lands? Do you think these owners disappeared or just set up new companies and got new leases on new public lands rinse and repeat?
You make the companies put that money upfront before starting the well. If that money no longer exist during liquidation the owner goes to prison for fraud.
Very well put! Even when it's not a clear-cut distinction for gains-and-losses, too many proposals and even implementations in America for government programs are public/private hybrids, and the misaligned incentives caused a lot of the problems.
Why wouldn't we socialize the losses here? It's not a handful of elites that just swooped in and took a bunch of money then stuck us with the bill for their garbage. We're all the consumers here. We create the problem with our demand for their product.
Then do like Norway and get a US's own Statoil to also socialise the profits.
We can't shame the population to solve a tragedy of the commons problem, it won't ever work, you need a strong power managing the commons to avoid the tragedy.
Because sufficient voters like to think they will be part of the group who are or one day will benefit from the privatized profits, and therefore imagine themselves enjoying the spoils it would afford.
If you socialize the losses, you incentivize others to cause more additional losses than they would otherwise, as they know they won't have to deal with it.
A better society would have incentives and structures that guide people to reduce these harmful effects and externalities.
Coffee companies are businesses, not charities or art projects. They exist to make money, that is their justification for existing.