Won't somebody think of the poor multi billion dollar oil companies!?

There are at-least 2 angles required:

1. who caused the effect ( of ClimatePunctuation which is tossing our planet from the TemperatePlanet equilibrium it had generally been in since the Ice Age ended, to the HotPlanet equilibrium which may not include inhabitable tropical land: we haven't even reached peak speed-of-change yet, so we cannot know how far it's going to go that way )

&

2. who benefited/benefits from the process ( oil-companies, obviously, combustion-engine companies, politicians boosted by them, Canada perhaps and Russia, etc. )

i'd say that when alternative existed, like electric & hybtid, then the responsibility is greater than when it didn't,

but remember there was a patent on NiMH batteries which could have enabled hybrids and EV's much earlier, which was why an oil-company bought that patent and wouldn't let anybody use it...

Lithium eventually became the means..

3. becomes obvious, in light of that: who behaved in machiavellian way to prevent right-answer from being held-to, like the tobacco-industry hiding medical-facts to keep immune from accountability, or the oil-industry hiding the known-in-the-1800's CO2 global-warming facts underneath disinformation, or them hiding behind a known-to-not-work recycling, of the "clean" coal movement, etc...

Machiavellian-action should be known as proof-of-responsibility-and-malevolence both.

Without a checklist, and explicit multidimensional-judging-system, though, the odds of right-judgement arising in this, or any, case, is low.

🙏