C E N T E R F O R I N T E R N AT I O N A L E N V I R O N M E N TA L L AW 6 © taddtography/Pixabay and therefore avoidable.) Finally, the extent of human rights obligations owed by corporations is limited to potential and actual human rights impacts resulting from a company’s business activities and relationships connected to those activities.29 (There is a causal relationship between the actor and the harm.) companies and/or their officials when they are complicit in gross human rights abuses.”22 The Commission distilled the principles of civil liability—i.e. responsibility—into four basic questions, which it found equally applicable to determining whether companies were complicit in gross human rights abuses: • Was harm inflicted to an interest of the victim that is protected by law? • Did the company’s conduct • • contribute to the infliction of the harm? Did the company know or would a prudent company in the same circumstances have known that its conduct posed a risk of harm to the victim? Considering this risk, did the company take the precautionary measures a prudent company would have taken in order to prevent the risk from materializing?23 These questions are, ultimately, asking the same questions outlined in the three factors above: foreseeability, causation, and ability to avoid. In 2011, UN Special Rapporteur on Business & Human Rights John Ruggie addressed the human rights responsibilities of corporations in his report Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.24 These “Ruggie Principles,” as they have become known, have been endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council as the foundation for assessing corporate responsibilities to uphold human rights and avoid complicity in human rights violations.25 These companies bear responsibility for climate change and have an opportunity—and obligation—to contribute to solutions. The Ruggie Principles ground the corporate responsibility to protect human rights in both substance and process.26 Substantively, there are a suite of human rights that corporations must not violate.27 Procedurally, corporations must implement human rights due diligence systems, including the adoption of human rights policies, production of impact assessments, and tracking company performance.28 Under the principles, corporations are held to a standard of upholding human rights. (To violate those rights would constitute a harm.) They are obligated to investigate and monitor the circumstances of their operations, and therefore should be on notice of violations of human rights. (The harms should be foreseeable, This framework of elements—ability to foresee a harm, ability to avoid the harm, and a causal link between the actor and the harm—as the basis for responsibility can be applied to the behavior of individual fossil fuel companies, as well as the sector as a whole. As detailed in the pages that follow, there is now extensive evidence that the world’s largest investorowned oil companies—also among the largest of the major carbon producers identified by Heede and others—knew or should have known about the reality of climate change, and the fact that it was caused primarily by the combustion of fossil fuels, more than a half century ago. A 2015 essay by Peter Frumhoff, Richard Heede, and Naomi Oreskes explicitly addresses the issue of industrial carbon producers’ responsibility for climate change.30 The authors conclude both that these companies bear responsibility for climate change and that they have the ability, and obligation, to contribute to solutions.31 Oxford’s Henry Shue drew the same conclusion in considering the moral responsibility of major carbon producers. Shue concluded: Unless carbon producers are somehow exempt from the moral principles that society applies to ordinary mortals, their 50 years of flagrant disregard of their simple negative responsibility to do no harm, beginning by reducing any initially unavoidable harm as rapidly as possible through either modification of or substitution for their products, brings to bear the other basic principle that is the other side of the same coin: clean up your own mess.32