5 including sophisticated scientific and technical research operations in the fields of meteorology, geology, climatology, and hydrology. In light of this expertise, and the expertise commonly imputed to those involved in the extraction, production, and marketing of goods, the Carbon Majors can be reasonably assumed to have been experts in the risks of their products at all relevant times for purposes of assessing appropriate standards of care. More fundamentally, their notice of potentially significant risks associated with their products and operations carried a responsibility to adequately warn consumers, investors and the public with respect to those risks. Instead of actively warning the public, these companies instead pursued avenues to expand the production and consumption of fossil fuels, and failed to develop or deploy technologies that could have avoided or dramatically reduced the risks of climate change associated with their products and operations. Q12: On 16 November 2017, CIEL released the report entitled, “Smoke and Fumes: The Legal and Evidentiary Basis for Holding Big Oil Accountable for the Climate Crisis” (Petitioners’ Exhibit “K”), how is this related, if any, to CIEL’s initial release of hundreds of documents in April 2016? A12: The referenced report synthesizes, for the first time, the key documents collected by an array of sources, drawing not only on CIEL’s Smoke & Fumes documents, but on documents gathered by other researchers and organizations, including the Los Angeles Times & Columbia School of Journalism, Inside Climate News, ClimateFiles, New York Times, Union of Concerned Scientists and others. An early summary of this evidence was prepared specifically for the use by the Commission in CIEL’s original amicus submission in the present inquiry. The Smoke and Fumes Synthesis also incorporates important new documents that were not available to CIEL when the original Smoke & Fumes database was launched in April 2016 or when its original amicus was submitted in February 2017. . It combines this evidence regarding corporate knowledge and corporate conduct with important recent advances in the attribution of climate change and climate impacts, including significant publications by Ekwurzel et al. and Oreskes & Supran, among others. Finally, and significantly, the Smoke & Fumes Synthesis presents this evidence in the context of fundamental principles of legal responsibility shared by multiple fields of law, including human rights law, the law of torts in common law jurisdictions, and the law of non-contractual civil liability in civil law jurisdictions. This analysis of the core legal principles underlying the concept of responsibility across regimes thus argues that the available and mounting evidence supports a finding that the major oil companies are ethically and legally responsible for harms caused by climate change where those harms are fairly attributable to emissions resulting from the production, marketing, and sale of their products.

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