How much responsibility do corporations have for the climate crisis and for stepping up with solutions?
Here at the ISCFC we are committed to promoting personal, community, national and planetary solutions to reduce our environmental impacts and boldly confront the climate crisis. But as individuals, we can feel powerless when there are huge corporations -such as the fossil fuel industry and factory farms– that are disproportionately responsible for carbon emissions of the past and the present.
What should we do about this? Do you agree that corporations should do more? And if so, what does that mean exactly? How do we persuade or impel polluting industries to change their ways?
Corporate responsibility >
Corporate Responsibility
I think that larger corporations need to start taking responsibility for the number of carbon emissions they put out into the environment. We as a society can do our best to lower our own carbon footprint, but in the US alone “food and beverage companies create almost 650 million metric tons of greenhouse gasses every year”(Axelrod). Many companies have tried to target ways of lowering the number of greenhouse gases they are putting out but a lot of the time don't put into consideration the upstream and downstream admissions their product makes. So the only way to really help lower our greenhouse gas emissions is to hold companies and ourselves responsible and to start trying to make changes today.
Axelrod, Joshua. “Corporate Honesty and Climate Change: Time to Own Up and Act.” NRDC, 28 Feb. 2019, www.nrdc.org/experts/josh-axelrod/corporate-honesty-and-climate-change-time-own-and-act.