"When I use Google Maps, it gives me several options, but I usually take the one it highlights without thinking too much about it. Do energy and climate road maps work the same way?," asked Liam Denning in a recent column for Bloomberg. In the text that follows, Denning lays out why more than 60 prominent business leaders, investors, and climate scientists sent a letter to the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) earlier this month.

As we head into annual meeting season, oil majors are under pressure to respond to investors skeptical of their future profitability under climate constraints, or what the Financial Times terms the industry’s "existential crisis." That pressure ratcheted up last week when Norway’s government moved to divest the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund from upstream exploration and production companies.