Most of these 100 companies are oil companies, and the emissions from oil they sold on to consumers is unfairly attributed to them. Exxon don't burn oil for fun, they sell it to people to power their cars.
This statistic is incredibly misleading.
The artificially low price of oil due to postponing / offloading these external costs significantly slows free market innovation of alternatives and efficiencies.
So... what's the best way to pay for these negative externals so we don't simply pass the buck to our kids?
We don't have to throw executives in jail for addressing the market, we just need a more comprehensive (and truer) price (via taxes) applied to oil.
Is it? When I pour motor oil in my motorcycle, drain it 500 miles later, and have it recycled does it put CO2 in the atmosphere? Nope, at least not beyond the refining process.
Burning oil is what puts CO2 in the atmosphere, and it's consumers that do that. Not oil companies. Sure, one could say that oil companies are the ones providing the fuel that consumers are using, but that's sort of like an obese person complaining about food companies making him fat.
We could charge more for fossil fuels, but this effectively functions as a regressive tax. It's a tax based on how long people need to commute through and need more energy to deliver goods over greater distances. This disproportionately impacts less developed areas, which are typically less wealthy.
In terms of gasoline, the technology builds on itself. Infrastructure like roads and fast food, expectations like the ability to commute, etc. If cars and gasoline were prohibitively expensive, commuting would pretty quickly become obsolete. Companies that require workers to drive 2 hours a day would have a hard time hiring people... or we'd find new ways to sustain it (alternatives and / or efficiencies). The price of all goods would go up considerably too (shipping, manufacturing). We rely on it so heavily!
Obviously we can't eliminate dependence overnight, which is why being proactive (arguably not proactive enough anymore though) and gradually implementing programs to phase it out or change it are required.
The goal should be to manage the pain / cost so we don't get hammered by a massive change in the future, or maybe taking too long and getting stuck with an unmanageable situation like massively accelerating climate change. The pain WILL happen regardless, and probably already is.
Just running with it, like we're mostly doing right now, is likely to disproportionally affect less developed areas far more than the price of gas and goods (floods, fires, and apocalypse type stuff).
If you believe climate change is real and negative (I assume you do) this is one part of a potential solution. If you don't believe climate change is real and negative though, then we're just not on the same page yet, and it's too early to have this discussion.
Start sequestering carbon or create funds to research effective ways to sequester carbon. For the US, it’d be as simple as giving the DOE R&D funds and a mandate.
