A Duty to Minimize the Corporation's Environmental Impacts: Corporate Governance and Sustainable Development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The scale and scope of today's economic activity will impact the natural environment several generations into the future. Much of this economic activity is undertaken by corporations. The interests of future generations in the natural environment, which are not protected adequately by traditional forms of environmental regulations, require moving away from the shareholder primacy norm that currently dominates both academic writing and directors' understanding of corporate governance in North America. The nascent "responsible investing" movement may result in some changes to corporate behaviour, but it also is insufficient to protect the interests of future generations. For these reasons, a new legal duty imposed on corporate directors is proposed here. This duty should be enacted through the corporations statute in order to make clear the change in the duties of directors away from simply maximizing shareholder wealth. The duty would require the board of directors to minimize the corporation's environmental impacts. "Minimize" is defined as up to the point of causing "undue hardship" to the corporation's ability to generate a profit. The duty therefore requires directors to balance profitability and environmental sustainability. This balancing is inherent in the concept of sustainable development, and therefore asking directors to take on this task is necessary to achieve sustainable development. Although this proposal raises concerns regarding compliance, enforcement and accountability, these concerns are answerable.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".