This kind of shit happened before, is happening right now and is going to happen again. Something needs to be done.

IMO the best way to stop companies from messing with science and law is to hold them accountable for the actual damage, ideally both company leadership (CEO goes to prison) and shareholders (potentially lose everything) when it comes to light that companies prevented regulation or research into negative externalities that they caused.

We had the exact situation with leaded gas (paid shills, lawfare and discrediting campaigns against critical scientists), the exact same thing is happening right now with the fossil fuel industry and if we don't change anything it is invariably gonna happen again.

I don't agree with this. I think the article does a good job at pointing out the problematic aspects of this particular lobbying campaign, and even how/why to stop it.

A lot of people view lobbyism as basically exchangeable with nepotism and bribery (strictly negative), but this is not the case.

The "happy path" with lobbyism is that local industry gives input on new laws/regulation to prevent unintended negative side-effects. Politicians have typically a much more cursory understanding of how a new law is going to affect any particular industry than people in that industry (obviously).

If you lock down any mechanism like this, you are invariably going to end up with numerous laws that are highly detrimental to local industry in a way that achieves very little (compared to laws designed with input from lobbies).

The article points out exactly how this fossil lobbying case deviated from this ideal (foreign influence instead of domestic, obfuscation and lack of transparency on originators/funding, use of methods to directly affect/manipulate the outputs of lawmaking instead of providing inputs).

I'm not saying they're being straightforward. I'm saying that the regulator needs to be expert enough to not screw this up even if someone does that.

In this case the biggest failure was that ExxonMobil et al were capable of subverting EU lawmaking via external pressure (via US diplomatic channels/trade negotiation) and indirect influence by targetting individual countries.

This seems difficult to systematically prevent to me, and the fact that they went for an approach like that is IMO actually a good sign that its not trivial and cost effective to direct such efforts at EU regulators themselves.

What we actually need to prevent cases like this in my opinion is to hold companies accountable for damages when they sabotage legislation or research in that sector.

A really good historical example is leaded gas: Industry knowingly hobbled research (discredited researchers, paid shills, etc.) and legislation for decades, but there were zero consequences after everything came to light. If there was a credible threat of company leadership going straight to prison and shareholders losing everything in extreme cases like that, companies would be MUCH more circumspect when messing with law/science.

I agree, and it feels like an allergy by now to that style specifically. This is doubly annoying because it ruins the reading experience and just makes me question myself constantly because you often can't be quite certain especially for shorter posts/comments.

On topic: It is always quite easy to be the cynical skeptic, but a better question in my view: Is the current AI boom closer to telecoms in 2000 or to video hosting in 2005? Because parallels are strong to both, and the outcomes vastly different (Cisco barely recovered by now compared to 1999 while youtube is printing money).

How can you be certain that policymakers won't make decisions that help their trading instead of their constituents? The incentive is already there, and the whole thing is legal, too.

Don't get me wrong, I think campaign donations or even more explicit bribes are a huge problem, too, but it is already insane to me that you would ban and prosecute "ordinary insider traders" and just let lawmakers do whatever. If presidents have to give up peanut farming, then asking for congressmembers to be utterly decoupled from stock trading decisions is only fair and sensible in my view.

Peoples understanding of what "corruption" is differs by a surprising amount.

The boundaries between corruption, lobbyism, incompetence and nepotism can get very blurry (sometimes even actually representing your constituents interests can look this way!).

But policy makers enriching themselves by insider trading are seen as corrupt by pretty much everyone.

What is the less benign corruption seen in Washington that you feel is most pressing?

I completely agree with your main point, but the state supervised CO2 budget strikes me as a bad example; I see no real way to prevent companies and citizens from "externalizing costs" in the form of environmental damage except by regulation that restricts (historically, we did not get rid of leaded gas by gentle admonishment either).

This is a good point, but a lot of ressources have a fixed or limited supply (arguably all of them); if wealth inequality increases, the poor fraction of the population will have a harder time competing for those.

Consider urban housing as an example (specifically price development in terms of median income, and how the supply side reacts to wealth distribution by "overdelivering" luxury appartments from the average citizens point of view).

Increasing inequality is also problematic because it fosters rent-seeking behavior which is self-reinforcing (because this siphons income from the poor side of your distribution to the wealthy one).

It might well be better to be less wealthy in a society with lower spread.

You could also argue that most wealth right now is accumulated/grown by "extracting" a bit of the value from the work of others. Consider Valve (the game distribution platform) for a very obvious example: They make something around $50M per employee in revenue. Are their employees working ten times harder than average game developers (by literally any reasonable metric)? I'd argue that their company became very good at extracting value from the whole market, instead. Absurd wealth does not come from doing lots of work yourself, it comes from taking a little bit from lots of people.

The cost of urban development has a lot more to do with regulation and limits on building rights than with income inequality. Zoning rules, permitting, height caps, and other constraints keep supply artificially low, which pushes developers toward higher-end units because the fixed costs are so high. If cities simply allowed more building by right, supply would go up and prices would come down. Things like limiting long-term vacancies can help deal with speculative ownership, but none of this is primarily an inequality problem.

RE Valve: using revenue per employee isn’t a meaningful way to tie this to inequality. High revenue/employee in a software distribution business just reflects scale. Developers use Valve because it gives them access to a big market, not because Valve is “extracting” in some zero-sum way. If Valve disappeared tomorrow, the distribution market would become less efficient, not more equal, and consumers or developers wouldn’t actually be better off.

There are no prizes for effort. People reward you if you please them, not if you spin on a hamster wheel.

> evidence to date is that it's ability to destroy counties ends somewhere around Iran's strength

What kind of evidence? US is not destroying countries because its citizens don't want it to, and are generally not willing to pay the price for it.

If "the US" actually wanted, it could kill every inhabitant of continental Europe within less than a decade in a conventional war; the price in American lifes would be very high, but the outcome (without external intervention) seems pretty certain to me (speaking as a European).

Costs to clean up a mess from an underregulated industry can be bigger then the whole industry causing it. This is not even untypical.

Examples: Leaded gas, tobacco, CO2 emissions, dam breaks, reactor meltdowns, air pollution (really pollution in general; river/groundwater contamination for your septic tank example)...

If you underregulate, you end up with frequent cases where not even imprisoning and dispossessing everyone remotely involved/culpable is gonna get you sufficient compensation; this is extremely undesirable.

Companies are frequently gonna steer towards such scenarios, too, because they can allow them to externalize costs.

There are also constitutional barriers to lie under oath, e.g. about spying and collecting data on US citizens, but those barriers seem very ineffective (I'm talking about the 2013 congressional hearing involving James Clapper).

I see no clear indicator that the situation has improved since.