Kai said in class that "the worst actors are invulnerable to almost every [non-legal] mechanism that we have". Well, where do we go from here? Legal restructuring of the finance system, I'd say. Within the economic structure that we live in, I really want to see corporations acting for public good, not for share holder profit–given I value people and the environment, and not wealth in the financial abstract.
The Musk/Twitter sale was an interesting story to follow. Not putting Twitter on a pedestal, but they haven't tried to be a "take-over-the-world-and-make-trillions" company, and they have spent a lot of effort and money on content moderation, trying to ensure that users protesting authoritarian governments are not silenced. Musk buying Twitter is obviously bad for the company and probably bad for the world (Musk's acquisition hasn't exactly promoted high-quality and respectful public discourse). But the Twitter board still took Musk to court and forced him to buy the company when he tried to back out. Why? Shareholder responsibility. Public Twitter shareholders would have collectively lost millions if the sale had fallen through.
This is a total dream, and I don't know much about finance, but what if:
Legislators, along with the SEC, the CSA, and other securities transaction regulators, were able to come up with a financial structure that legally put shareholder responsibility behind some metrics for CSER and 'Public Good'?
Then, publicly traded companies are responsible first to a body that monitors CSER, and second to shareholders–or maybe "nature" (thinking in a rights-based approach) is a shareholder.
So, (i.e., upon bankruptcy or board-level decision making), companies would have to attend to or pay out "nature", or the CSER body, before other shareholders, ensuring that wealth winds up with the public, not in golden parachutes.
I have no idea how you could quantify public good or create a CSER metric, or create a shareholder position for "nature"/"a clean environment". But...some sort of intervention into this structure might sorta/kinda be a neat idea :)