3 human rights, the most severe harm that anyone can do is to undermine the most fundamental human rights. I have sketched some of the philosophical arguments that show that the most fundamental rights include rights to subsistence.5 Professor Simon Caney has very briefly provided a lucid explanation of specifically how climate changes violate the right to life, the right to health, and the right to subsistence.6 And Mary Robinson has shown what these abstract philosophical concepts mean in concrete detail.7 But this Commission does not need to be informed about human rights, as it is already their guardian. The question here is: has the conduct of the carbon majors violated human rights in ways for which they are morally responsible by persisting in providing and employing fossil fuels in a form that generates carbon emissions that force the climate to change? The answer, again, is: yes. At the risk of belabouring the obvious we can describe exactly how unexcused harm is brought about by the current handling of fossil fuels. No agent, individual or corporate, has the right to inflict harm on other persons unless she has some adequate excuse. This is overwhelmingly important when the harms are violations of basic rights. There was a time when only a relatively few scientists understood the dynamics of the earth’s climate sufficiently well to see that atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuels would disrupt the state maintained by those dynamics over the last 10,000 years of human flourishing. 8 In those circumstances it would have been appropriate to offer an excuse of necessity based in ignorance: ‘we could not then have avoided forcing change in the climate system and thereby harming many persons because we did not then know that this disruption and its resultant harms were the effects of our actions’. In the first half of the twentieth century ignorance would have been a plausible defense against a charge of wrongfully doing harm by selling or using fossil fuel for combustion with no control over its carbon emissions. 2.4 Excuse of ignorance disappears In the second half of the twentieth century this excuse quickly collapsed. First, the carbon majors employ large numbers of the world’s best scientists, and the corporate scientists understood the dynamics of climate change, and informed their management about it, long before many governments (with fewer resources to pay top scientists) appreciated what was happening. 9 Second, the facts about climate change became sufficiently well known during the 1980s that by the end of that decade the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had been created and negotiations leading toward the Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992 were underway.10 However, the behaviour of the carbon majors did not change in response to their knowledge that they were the primary contributors to ———————————— 5Henry Shue, Basic Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980; 2nd ed., 1996). Simon Caney, ‘Climate change, human rights and moral thresholds’, in Stephen Humphreys (ed.), Human Rights and Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 6990, especially at 75-82. 7 Mary Robinson with Caitríona Palmer, Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience and the Fight for a Sustainable Future (London and Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2018). 8The basic dynamics were published by Irish scientist John Tyndall in the 1860s - see Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 42-45. 9Neela Banerjee, ‘Exxon’s Oil Industry Peers Knew about Climate Dangers in the 1970s too’, Inside Climate News (22 December 2015). https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22122015/exxon-mobil-oil-industry-peers-knew-aboutclimate-change-dangers-1970s-american-petroleum-institute-api-shell-chevron-texaco. Retrieved 18 October 2018. 10Dale Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed — and What It Means for Our Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), at 11- 60. 6