3 Questions and Answers Q1: Mr. Heede, can you please provide an overview of your body of work, referred to as the “Carbon Majors” research? A1: The Carbon Majors is a science-based project to detail and trace the quantities of carbon dioxide and methane from fossil fuel use and cement manufacturing attributable to specific extractive companies that produced and marketed the carbon fuels to end users worldwide. We take an historical approach and have attributed 65.7% of all fossil fuel and cement emissions since 1751 to the production activities of ninety Carbon Majors since as early as 1854 to 2015. Half of all fossil fuel and cement emissions — the socalled “industrial sources” of man-made CO2 and methane (excluding land use and deforestation sources) — have been emitted since 1989. The ninety “Carbon Majors” include 51 investor-owned companies (IOCs, such as Chevron, Peabody, BP, ExxonMobil, BHP Billiton, and Royal Dutch Shell), 31 state-owned entities (SOEs, such as Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Nigerian National Petroleum, and Coal India), and nine former or current government-run coal producing entities (such as coal production in Poland, Former Soviet Union, Kazakhstan, North Korea, and China). This thoroughly vetted and peer-reviewed project has thus documented the transfer of two-thirds of all fossil carbon that humanity has shifted from the lithosphere to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution began and attributed not only the emissions but also, crucially, the increased atmospheric concentration of CO2 and the resulting temperature and sea level rise attributable to each of the ninety Carbon Majors. Q2: What was the motivation, if any, in conducting this research? A2: To document and trace the origin of the preponderance of human emissions of climate-altering gases such as carbon dioxide and methane to individual companies in the global fossil fuel sector. It has been known for decades that fossil fuels are responsible for the majority of all human-caused climate change (of which fossil CO2 has risen from 55% in 1970 to 65% today, plus ~6% for fossil fuel-related methane), but no one had traced the emissions back to the producing companies, nor done so a long-term historical basis. It was terra incognita. As a geographer interested in in the science and consequences of carbon fluxes it was a scientific project worth doing.5 It has been clear to me since becoming aware of climate change, science, and economics in the 1970s that (a) companies are responsible for their products, (b) the industry would resist being held accountable, and (c) would mount a vigorous defense to perpetuate their financial interests and the carbon economy, come what may. Q3: Why did you decide to research the historic responsibility of carbon producers and, specifically, the fossil fuel companies that are respondents in this National Inquiry? A3: Insofar as the managers and officers of these corporations have both moral and fiduciary responsibilities to respect scientific limits on carbon emissions, as well as having control over the crucial issues of future production and acquisition of new carbon fuel reserves and investments therein, it was 5 Heede, Richard (1983) A World Geography of Recoverable Carbon Resources in the Context of Possible Climate Change, NCAR Cooperative Thesis CT-72, National Center for Atmospheric Research & University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, 135 pp.