CSR Question: Is Climate Change an Artificial Construct?

As I contemplate the current state of CSR, I cannot help but wonder whether there are aspects of corporate social responsibility that play upon fears based in a distorted reality.  As I contemplate this question, I can't help but think about the fact that when I was growing up in the 1980s, I was earnestly afraid that World War III would take place and destroy the world as I knew it.  Years after the end of the Cold War, it seems silly to have worried about such a thing, yet I can't help but wonder if such fears are so natural that they exist in all of us and lie dormant until vehicles for expression surface.

I am not a climate change denier in any way, yet I can't help but wonder if global warming has grown to inhabit a similar place in our psyche as nuclear holocaust once occupied.  Will we one day look back on the current debate about climate change and wonder what all the fuss was about in the early part of the millennium?  And will we start to look upon our current set of fears as not completely crazy, but certainly overblown or misplaced?

If you are reading this post and are wondering what right-wing climate change skeptics have gotten to me, you may be surprised to learn that my doubts arise from conversations with friends deeply rooted in some of the leading environmental NGOs or finance firms specializing in carbon finance.  As climate change legislation has withered and died, these former advocates of climate change are all independently raising questions about whether the wide umbrella of climate change will become replaced in short order by a suite of more concrete issues that can be resolved through technology that directly benefits the user as much as it benefits the planet as a whole.

Will climate change seem like an artificial construct of another era once a decade or two have elapsed?  Only time will tell, but it feels like science fiction to consider how the language of CSR might differ thirty years from now.

Photo credit: Foxtongue