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 Suggestion
Encourage better business practices. This would encourage them to find better sources of power so they would reduce carbon because they won’t want to pay the carbon tax. The research for pollution clean-up has come a long way. Places like MIT have developed a new system that would basically pull carbon out of the sky, and businesses could pay to enact it. If businesses took responsibility for their pollution and helped to clean it they would be contributing to the solution. Right now businesses just get away with their unsustainable practices and it is a very harmful system. If there was an actually enforced law to make businesses pay for the amount of emissions they produce we may actually be able to afford clean-up. Converting to sustainable practices would boost business popularity as the public would want to support environmentally conscious businesses. It would be more expensive to enact and production might be down for a little while but if it’s between something and nothing a business still wants to make money. It would cost businesses 70 dollars per ton of greenhouse gas emissions. 35 countries currently have a carbon tax, the US does not have one and it needs one. Every country could benefit from a carbon tax on businesses because every country contributes to emissions. Businesses make up 70% of emissions and 5,489 million metric tons came from the US in 2022 alone. If corporations were required to pay the carbon tax we would have $384,230,000, based on the 2022 statistics, that could go toward cleanup technology and or operations to improve the environment. The only place that had a failed implementation of carbon tax so far was Australia. Most carbon tax prices fall somewhere between 69-73 US dollars per ton, 70 USD seems like a relatively reasonable amount if it were implemented worldwide. Businesses would have a choice between contributing to clean-up operations, new technology, or even planting trees. They would be given an opportunity to be a part of groundbreaking technology that would pull their harmful emissions out of the atmosphere. It would be expensive and many businesses would dislike it but if they keep going the way they are, the world won’t be here to continue running their business. We have to save the planet from these corporations that are left to be destructively unchecked.
Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://ww … 74bDHkl0rJ
https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/blog/mo … -companies
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/invent … d%20sector.
(The Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks link)