SMOKE AND FUMES 3 PA RT 1 The Legal Basis for Accountability Fundamental Elements of Responsibility under Tort, Civil Liability, and Human Rights Law Climate Litigation: Causation, Attribution, and the Scientific Case Against Major Carbon Producers A © 12019/Pixabay cross countries, legal systems, and many fields of law, the essential links in the litigation chain are constant—an identifiable plaintiff, identifiable defendants, a causal chain that connects the harms suffered by the fo to the actions or inactions of the other. Establishing the links in that causal chain—particularly in tracing specific climate impacts to individual defendants or groups of defendants—is a common challenge facing potential plaintiffs or others who would hold polluters accountable for their contributions to climate change. Recent years have seen dramatic advances in the science of attribution at every link in this chain. As climate impacts accelerate worldwide, a growing body of evidence is enabling scientists, governments, and litigators to identify and quantify the impacts of climate change on countries, cities, communities, and even individuals. From farmers in the Peruvian Andes,1 to communities in the Philippines2 and Massachusetts,3 to flood control engineers in California,4 ever growing numbers of plaintiffs are able to trace the harms they are suffering or the risks they face to the rising impacts of climate change. climate crisis are identifiable, measurable, and significant. At the same time, analyses of historical production data for fossil fuels has identified a discrete group of potential defendants whose contributions to the Recent years have seen dramatic advances in the science of attribution at every link in this chain. In 2013, Richard Heede of the Climate Accountability Institute5 released a study wherein he traced historical carbon dioxide and methane emissions embedded in all the traceable oil, gas, coal, and cement produced from 1751 through 2010.6 By focusing on fossil fuel producers (and cement manufacturers) at the top of the product chain, Heede could tabulate how much of historical emissions flowed from those companies directly, or from the combustion of their fossil fuel products. This research identified what have become known as the “Carbon Majors,” a group of ninety companies responsible for approximately two-thirds of industrial carbon emissions since the beginning of the industrial revolution in 1751,7 and drawing on records from as early as 1854.8 Fifty of these companies are investorowned (e.g. Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP); thirty-one are state-owned enterprises (e.g. Saudi Aramco, Statoil); nine are industries run entirely by government, such as in China and Poland.9 The study was updated in 2014 to cover emissions through 2013.10 A supplemental analysis released by Climate Accountability Institute and Carbon Disclosure Project in June 2017