Over the past 25 years, there has been an irrefutable shift in the oil industry towards Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The purpose of this paper is to determine if the adoptions of CSR policies are effective. In other words, does the adoption of CSR programs tangibly affect the way oil companies operate? To answer this question, the paper uses a case study methodology to analyze the shift to CSR through four major events in the oil industry and their ensuing effects concerning CSR. These events, in sequential order, include the 1988 Occidental Petroleum Piper Alpha Disaster, the 1989 Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, Shell in Nigeria throughout the mid-1990’s, and BP’s CSR practices in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s and subsequent Deepwater Horizon Disaster. Unfortunately, much creation of CSR occurs in the wake of a disaster; these cases are here to provide context for the development of CSR. The universe of this paper is the exploration of recent history CSR implementations for the largest publicly traded oil companies in the world.