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News about Volkswagen's (VW) emerging emissions test rigging  scandal makes one wonder if there is ever a story in business ethics too preposterous to be true. But it certainly raises some interesting and important questions about the nature of corporate responsibility that demand some pretty quick answers. In some ways, it is not a complicated story, and even the CEO Martin Winterkorn today admitted to the firms culpability and apologized. "We totally screwed up" the carmaker's US chief  was also reported as saying . So, VW deliberately manipulated the software that manages their diesel engines so that the emission data in test mode appeared significantly lower (up to 40%) than in reality. And this is not just pretending the cars are more fuel efficient than they really are. The EPA clearly states that the substances whose level of emissions were concealed: "penetrate deeply into sensitive parts of the lungs and can cause or worsen respiratory disease, such as...

Decarbonize Norway’s sovereign wealth fund in this year’s Business for a Better World MBA case  competition Team registration is now open for the third-annual CK-Schulich Business for a Better World case competition, a partnership between Corporate Knights magazine and York University’s Schulich School of Business. With a prize pool in 2015/2016 of $10,000, the final round of this MBA competition will see three top teams present their case analysis in front of a live panel of high-profile judges in Davos, Switzerland, coinciding with the World Economic Forum in January. Student teams will be asked this year to decarbonize the holdings of the Norway Government Pension Fund Global, the largest sovereign fund in the world with a value of $940 billion (USD). Managed by Norges Bank Investment Management, the fund is commonly referred to as The Oil Fund because it has been built from the surpluses of Norway’s petroleum income. Teams will have four key objectives: Minimize the carbon foo...