Corporate Responsibility and Global Warming

Posted posted by Cory Jones @ 10:07 AM

While we were talking about Wal-Mart the other day in class, Erin wrote “Wal-Mart” on the white board and placed a big circle around it. As you probably remember, the purpose of this was to illustrate how many different individuals have an impact on the company and what their degree of responsibility should be. The end result of this discussion was that everybody (including CEOs, suppliers, and customers) had a degree of responsibility.

I would like to take this same concept and apply it to the issue of global warming; particularly focusing on the auto industry. I argue that although we as consumers bear some of the responsibility, the greatest portion of social responsibility rests on the auto producer. There is no doubt that cars are the biggest problem for the production of carbon dioxide. So why have automakers not taken more proactive steps towards reducing fuel consumption? Would they ever make these steps without a federal initiative? They would likely not. Due to this, some people could argue that change will only come about if we the consumers take initiative to boycott the producers that are not going green; thus consumers have the greatest responsibility.

Although this statement makes sense, I think that we should not bear the greatest amount of responsibility. The greatest responsibility should rest upon the automaker. The U.S. lags behind many other countries in the world regarding this issue. Many auto producers in Europe have already taken a step towards being socially responsible by drastically increasing their vehicle’s MPG. More amazingly, these companies did it on their own initiative and not because of a law. U.S. auto companies should follow examples like these because we as consumers can only do so much.

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