162 Climatic Change (2015) 132:157–171 Fig. 2 Cumulative emissions from 1854 to 2010 traced to historic fossil fuel production by the largest investorowned and state-owned oil, gas, and coal producers, in percent of global industrial CO2 and methane emissions since 1751. Data source: Heede (2014) Board 1990). 1988 was also the year in which the world nations joined together to create the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to provide a scientific basis for policy action. Fossil fuel corporations might have begun to take steps to limit the damages their products caused to the global environment. Instead, leading investor-owned fossil fuel corporations, including ExxonMobil, Shell, and British Petroleum, created the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) to oppose greenhouse gas emission reduction policies. From 1989 to 2002, the GCC led an aggressive lobbying and advertising campaign aimed at achieving these goals by sowing doubt about the integrity of the IPCC and the scientific evidence that heat-trapping emissions from burning fossil fuels drive global warming. They worked successfully to prevent the United States from signing the Kyoto Protocol after it was negotiated in 1997. When the GCC disbanded, they stated that they had achieved their goals (Mooney 2005). A similar pattern of activities was undertaken in the early 1990s by a group known as the BGreening Earth Society,^ funded by a consortium of U.S. coal corporations (Oreskes 2010). An alternative was possible. In 1997, British Petroleum CEO John (later Lord) Browne gave a major speech at Stanford University pledging to move BP to a new business model that went Bbeyond petroleum.^ Invoking the scientific consensus on climate change described in the IPCC Second Assessment report (Houghton et al. 1995), he said: B[W]e are all citizens of one world, and we must take shared responsibility for its future and for its sustainable development…[T]here is now an effective consensus among the world’s leading scientists and serious and well-informed people outside the scientific community that there is a discernible human influence on the climate and a link between the concentration of carbon dioxide and the increase in temperature .[I]t would be unwise and potentially dangerous to ignore the mounting concern. We in BP… alone