From Big Oil to Big Green

How Big Oil can transform itself into Big Green through reparation and decarbonization to rectify the harm it has done through fossil fuels. 
 

In From Big Oil to Big Green, Marco Grasso examines the responsibility of the oil and gas industry for the climate crisis and develops a moral framework that lays out its duties of reparation and decarbonization to allay the harm it has done. By framing climate change as a moral issue and outlining the industry’s obligation to tackle it, Grasso shows that Big Oil is a central, yet overlooked, agent of climate ethics and policy.
 
Grasso argues that by indiscriminately flooding the global economy with fossil fuels—while convincing the public that halting climate change is a matter of consumer choice, that fossil fuels are synonymous with energy, and that a decarbonized world would take civilization back to the Stone Age—Big Oil is morally responsible for the climate crisis. He explains that it has managed to avoid being held financially accountable for past harm and that its duty of reparation has never been theoretically developed or justified. With this book, he fills those gaps. After making the moral case for climate reparations and their implementation, Grasso develops Big Oil’s duty of decarbonization, which entails its transformation into Big Green by phasing out carbon emissions from its processes and, especially, its products.
 Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
I The Climate Crisis: All Roads Lead to Big Oil
1 Flooded by Carbon 13
2 Morally Relevant Facts 37
II Big Oil's Responsibility and Duties 
3 Is There Something Wrong? 63
4 Harming Our World 79
5 A Difficult Coexistence 99
6 The Duties of Reparation and Decarbonization 119
III What Big Oil Must Do
7 How Many Politicians Does It Take to Change Big Oil? 147
8 Destabilizing the Industry 171
9 Making Amends through Climate Reparations 203
10 Coming Clean 235
Conclusion 263
Notes 279
References 283
Index 325“A clear-eyed analysis of Big Oil’s substantial responsibility for causing, perpetuating, and deepening the climate crisis, and therefore its commensurate duty to mitigate and pay reparations.”
—Richard Heede, Climate Accountability Institute
 
“Grasso shows why we must hold fossil fuel companies responsible for the climate crisis and lays out a science-informed path to accountability.”
—Peter Frumhoff, Chief Climate Scientist, Union of Concerned Scientists
 
“Grasso breaks new ground, perceptively specifying duties of financial reparation as well as decarbonization for differentiated categories of fossil fuel companies, imaginatively formulating precise mechanisms for their operationalization.”
—Henry Shue, Senior Research Fellow, University of OxfordMarco Grasso is Professor of Political Geography in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Milano-Bicocca. He is the author of Justice in Funding Adaptation under the International Climate Change Regime and has published extensively in major scientific journals.