This is where you're wrong. It's not the responsibility of regular businesses, but corporations were specifically created by governments to manage narrow societal interests, such as the railways or a national telephone network. And as an extension of government, corporations do have a reponsiblity towards the broader society.
The fact that now every large business is allowed to name itself a corporation and is allowed to chase any business interest, whether it's related to their original charter or not, is a travesty. Corporations should only be allowed to operate within their charter, and government should be able to revoke that charter if the corporation acts contrary to society's interests.
If a company is not prepared to operate according to a government charter, they should not be called a corporation (and not get the tax benefits), they're an enterprise.
The problem is that the social interests we expect Big Oil to pursue (or at least the ones the Guardian does) are contradictory. The Guardian wants Big Oil to throttle back production in order to reduce CO2 emissions, but at the same time it attacks them for the direct consequence of this which is that fossil fuels and everything produced with them increase in costs until the amount that people can afford to consume shrinks to match that decreased production, making people worse off in real terms. This is an inherent consequence of reducing CO2 emissions this way because it's not possible to burn fossil fuels that aren't there.
How is βlet's pool capital to make profit" not a valid charter? The problem is that the invisible hand, when it comes to stock markets, has a tendency to "maximise evil": wrt climate change this means that everybody who thinks that maybe we should better burn less carbon will be eager to sell if they still own something in that sector, and the highest bidders will be people eager to go on until even the last remaining unoxydized carbon atom in the crust is transferred into the atmosphere. Charters are for protecting investors from "that's not what I paid for!" surprises, if anything they'd make it harder for hydrocarbon extraction corporations to pivot away.
If that's what a corporation is supposed to be sure, but it sure as hell isn't what corporations appear to actually be so I don't think I agree with your assertion that I'm wrong. I could agree that the definition for corporation is wrong or that the concept has been corrupted.
This is where you're wrong. It's not the responsibility of regular businesses, but corporations were specifically created by governments to manage narrow societal interests, such as the railways or a national telephone network. And as an extension of government, corporations do have a reponsiblity towards the broader society.
The fact that now every large business is allowed to name itself a corporation and is allowed to chase any business interest, whether it's related to their original charter or not, is a travesty. Corporations should only be allowed to operate within their charter, and government should be able to revoke that charter if the corporation acts contrary to society's interests.
If a company is not prepared to operate according to a government charter, they should not be called a corporation (and not get the tax benefits), they're an enterprise.