168 Climatic Change (2015) 132:157–171 over the next two decades into energy companies that produce clean, low carbon energy at reasonable cost and reasonable profit. It would be folly to assume that these companies will make such a transition of their own accord or in anticipation of the swift enactment of carbon regulations that they continue to thwart. Rather, evidence from history strongly suggests that a greatly intensified societal focus on their climate responsibilities will be needed to hasten it. Past shareholder actions, divestment campaigns, consumer boycotts of corporate Bbad actors,^ and litigation have proven effective in changing corporate behavior. Recently, public and shareholder pressure has helped drive BP America’s decision to stop funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (Page 2015), and BP and Royal Dutch Shell’s adoption of shareholder resolutions requiring them to report annually on their low-carbon energy research and development investments and their positions on climate policies (Farrell 2015). These are modest first steps for companies whose core business model assumes and encourages our long-term reliance on fossil energy. But they are indicative of the potential for heightened civil society engagement to drive further change in company behavior. We should make clear that these companies operate with a social license, and consider ways to revoke that license for carbon producers who fail to act on their social responsibility. We should expect, for example, that companies stop supporting disinformation on climate change, including through lobbying groups and trade associations; unequivocally encourage and support state, federal, and international policies consistent with keeping warming below the 2 °C global temperature target; transparently report on and increase their investments in low carbon energy technologies and carbon capture and storage; and fully disclose the financial and physical risks of climate change to their business operations. And we should expect fossil fuel corporations to pay for a share of the harms resulting from the use of their products, both for the damages that have already occurred and the costs of preparing to limit the damages from further, now unavoidable impacts that responsible actions by these companies could have, and should have, helped to avoid. The world’s essential transition to low carbon energy may hinge upon the scale and success of such efforts. Acknowledgments We thank Michael MacCracken, Rebecca Henderson, Carroll Muffett, Ken Kimmell, Seth Shulman, Aaron Huertas, Gretchen Goldman, Dann Mitchell and three anonymous reviewers for constructive comments, and Jayne Piepenburg and Jennifer Guido for editorial assistance. Support for this work was provided by grants from the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, Wallace Global Fund and Energy Foundation to the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Wallace Global Fund and Rockefeller Brothers Fund to the Climate Accountability Institute. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. References Allen D, Bach D (2011) BP: beyond petroleum? Available at: http://openmultimedia.ie.edu/OpenProducts/ British_Petroleum/British_Petroleum/pdf/DE1_153_I_NF.pdf. Accessed 29 Sep 2014