human rights impacts resulting from climate change and ocean
acidification.
The Carbon Majors Study “represents an important milestone in
establishing legal accountability for climate change impacts.”82 According to
the Center for International Environmental Law:
By tracing industrial CO2 emissions to their
underlying source, and to a small group of
companies and entities whose actions have made a
measurable, demonstrable and historically
important contribution to global warming, this
research demonstrates one important route by
which those barriers can and will be overcome by
plaintiffs in future litigation.83
The Carbon Majors collectively contribute to global climate change,
in that the emissions by one company are not distinguishable in their effects
from emissions by other companies. The research therefore provides the best
surrogate or proxy measure of responsibility that has been devised to date.
The Carbon Majors data identifies the Carbon Majors’ responsibility, jointly
and severally, for contributing predominately to climate change and its
resulting impacts that are interfering with the enjoyment of human rights.
Therefore, while it is not possible to attribute a specific harm, or threat
thereof, to the carbon produced by a single Carbon Major, there is a
substantial probability that the climate impacts experienced by Filipinos are
made significantly worse as a result of the Carbon Majors’ past and current
activities. Each company should be held accountable for making some of
that contribution.84 As the Guiding Principles explain, responsibility is not
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82
The Center for International Environmental Law, CIEL Reaction to Carbon Majors Report, Nov. 22,
2013, http://www.ciel.org/Climate_Change/CarbonMajors_22Nov2013.html (last accessed on June 16,
2015).
83
Id.
84
In the landmark US Supreme Court case, Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court held: “The harms
associated with climate change are serious and well recognized. The Government’s own objective
assessment of the relevant science and a strong consensus among qualified experts indicate that global
warming threatens, inter alia, a precipitate rise in sea levels, severe and irreversible changes to natural
ecosystems, a significant reduction in winter snowpack with direct and important economic consequences,
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