A lot of big polluters are publicly traded companies. Owning shares of US public companies means you can go to shareholder meetings, vote, and other rights.
What do all think of a non profit that runs and is funded with an endowment composed of big polluters like oil companies and using the dividends to fund climate initiatives? In the mean time, using the seat at the table to influence other shareholders to reduce emissions, which is in their long term interest anyways.
If the endowment dries up, mission accomplished. If it grows, more money to act with.
What do all think?
There are some groups, which buy shares and use courts and shareholder law to influence large companies already. That has usually two versions. One is working on transparency, as in climate change is a risk and shareholders need to know emissions data and so forth to determine potential impacts of new laws. The other one and more powerfull one is to argue that working on specific fossil fuel projects hurts the profit the companies make. German lignite power plant owner and operator RWE had for example a case to slow down the usage of these plants faster, to allow RWE to sell a huge amount of emissions trading certificates bought for cheap to keep these plants running a few years ago, for a massive profit. You can see perfectly capitalist logic, which other large shareholders might agree with.
However the green alternative has to be better from a profit perspective. Moral good does not work. Capitalism just does not work that way. So to influence massive companies that way you need to own them basicly outright or at least a very high number of votes. For that you need billions or better a few trillions to make it work and quite honestly, with that kind of money start a competitor with green technology and drive fossil fuels out of business.
Again some good can be done this way, but it is unfortunatly not a full scale solution.
Good point