PNAS: Shareholder responsibility could spur shift to sustainable energy

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.iiasa.ac.at/web/home/resources/mediacenter/PressReleases/PNAS--Shareholder-responsibility.en.html

[font face=Serif]08 January 2013

[font size=5]PNAS: Shareholder responsibility could spur shift to sustainable energy[/font]

[font size=4]Allowing shareholders to be held liable for the damages that companies cause to the environment and people could help transform the world’s energy system towards sustainability, according to new research published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).[/font]

[font size=3]The research carried out at IIASA in collaboration with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research demonstrates that there is fundamental rigidity, known as lock-in, within the energy economy that favors the use of fossil fuels and nuclear power despite their large environmental and social costs. The researchers identify that this rigidity of the existing energy economy could be considerably reduced by introducing new rules that hold shareholders of companies liable for the damages caused by the companies they own. Allocating the liability between the company and its shareholders could spur a shift toward a sustainable energy system.

“The world’s energy system today relies heavily on fossil fuels and uranium, and its output regularly causes damage to the environment in the form of pollution, oil spills, or nuclear leaks,” says Jérôme Dangerman, lead author of the study and Research Scholar at IIASA at the time of writing the article. But while companies can be penalized for damages to the environment, their owners are not. “As a shareholder you are generally speaking never liable for those damages,” says Dangerman.

The paper examined the historical transitions of the energy system, examining the factors that led to previous transitions in energy use, for example from wood to coal, and then from coal to oil. The researchers argue that the 1970’s represent a time period in which a new large-scale transition towards renewable energy may have been kick-started by the then unfolding technological revolution.Instead, since the early 1970s the global system has ‘frozen’, with fossil fuels and nuclear remaining the major energy sources. “From a healthy resilience point-of-view you would normally expect a system to adapt to a situation which is causing so much damage,” says Dangerman. “But it’s not fundamentally changing.”

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1219791110 (Not live yet.)
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/01/02/1219791110.abstract

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. That would overturn generations of legal precedents

And clearly is a non starter in the US

[truebluegreen]

2. Then they need to be overturned.

It's about time corporations and businesses stopped out-sourcing their real costs-of-doing-business onto the taxpayers and the world in general. And we all know that they won't stop on their own.