The climate responsibilities of industrial carbon producers
By P. Frumhoff, R. Heede, Naomi Oreskes. Climatic Change, 2015
172 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Responsibility for climate change lies at the heart of societal debate over actions to address it. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change established the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” among nations, suggesting that industrialized nations that had produced the greatest share of historic emissions bore particular responsibility for preventing dangerous interference with the climate system. But climate responsibilities can be attributed in other ways as well. Here, we explore the conceptual territory of responsibility. We consider the distinctive responsibilities of the major investor-owned producers of fossil fuels, assessing the actions these companies took and could have taken to act upon the scientific evidence of climate change. We conclude that major investor-owned fossil energy companies carry significant responsibility for climate change. It is still possible for these companies to effectively contribute to a solution. Significant progress in reducing emissions and limiting climate change could be achieved if companies 1) unequivocally communicate to the public, shareholders, and policymakers the climate risks resulting from continued use of their products, and therefore the need for restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions consistent with the 2 °C global temperature target; 2) firmly reject contrary claims by industry trade associations and lobbying groups; and, 3) accelerate their transition to the production of low-carbon energy. Evidence from history strongly suggests that a heightened societal focus on their climate responsibilities will be needed to hasten such a transition.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/afbed388e9cb1fe69480d0dd8b09afe64dcfbe28
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In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Responsibility and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (2017, background): “It also increasingly appears in academic debates, for example, on a ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (e.g. Bellamy, 2015), on corporate social responsibility (e.g. Kolks, 2016) and on the need to address climate change (e.g. Frumhoff et al., 2015).”
- Political power and renewable energy futures: A critical review (2017, background): “Strong resistance and staunch opposition to a renewable future from those currently benefiting from the fossil fuel legacy system have proven to have powerful influence on societal priorities in energy [67,137].”
- The Green New Deal in the United States: What it is and how to pay for it (2020, unknown): “Second, an important factor is the direct industrial CO2 pollution of large, fossil fuel emitting fi rms. Heede [74] showed that 90 companies had produced two-thirds of the planet's cumulative global CO2 emissions up to 2010.”