The world is moving rapidly on withdrawing the social licence of carbon polluters. As the impacts of climate change become clearer and the urgency for rapid action impresses itself on the public psyche in the lead up to the Paris climate talks in December 2015, the major carbon polluters will increasingly find it more difficult to operate with social support.
The longer these fossil fuel companies delay making amends for the damages their businesses have already caused and will cause in the future, the more culpable they will become.
Up until relatively recently, responsibility for addressing climate change has largely been seen as the role of the Governments of nation states and the necessary multi-lateral action through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to regulate carbon pollution. But action through the UNFCCC has been extremely slow, often hindered by corporate lobbying and voting block interests.
But recent research by Heede (2014) has shown that individual investor or state owned corporations are responsible for a substantial majority of greenhouse gas pollution causing climate change. Heede's landmark paper was on Tracing anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane emissions to fossil fuel and cement producers, 1854-2010.
