6 leading corporate majors is notorious.17 Lying on such a monumental scale is, needless to say, also morally wrong. At present one specific effort at continuing deception takes the form of declaring support for the “Baker-Schultz Carbon Tax”. This proposal for a carbon tax, however, would block all legal liability for past harm knowingly inflicted as well as eliminate much regulation of carbon emissions, constituting a “toxic quid pro quo”.18 By contrast, a proposal that is not centred on a get-out-of-jail-free card for carbon majors is, for instance, the “Carbon Fee and Dividend” proposed by the Citizens Climate Lobby. 19 There is no reason whatsoever why any proposal for a carbon tax needs to smuggle in an exemption from liability for violations of basic rights that have been so extreme for so long. The elimination of corporate liability would simply externalize all costs generated by the chosen behaviour of the carbon majors. The carbon majors would retain all the wealth they have gained from providing fossil fuels for dangerous methods of combustion, and the rest of humanity would bear all the costs of dealing with the damage done by those emissions. That is a morally preposterous proposal. Carbon pricing could motivate a strategy of substitution of safe alternatives: a movement from providing fossil energy to providing alternative energy. Alternatively, carbon pricing could motivate a strategy of modification: R & D on technology, such as CCS, that would allow fossil energy to continue to be used without the current climate-disrupting levels of carbon emissions. Responsible governments ought, however, to require that carbon majors promptly either substitute or modify. A sketch of a relatively straightforward mechanism for doing this was developed a few years ago by a group of British climate scientists. Here is the heart of their suggestion: "The proposed mechanism is as follows: to introduce a Certificate system to identify any person extracting, or importing, oil or gas for sale or use as fuel or feedstock or reagent within the economic jurisdiction of the UK. The Certificate carries an obligation to demonstrate permanent storage of a percentage of the fossil carbon content of that oil or gas in the form of carbon dioxide that would otherwise, under normal business practice, have been vented into the atmosphere. The percentage will be set by the OGA [Oil and Gas Authority] in consultation with independent scientific advice, and increase over time to be commensurate with the UK’s long-term climate goals. Permanent storage may be provisionally defined as an expected storage lifetime of 10,000 years. The regulatory burden of such a certificate system is both simple and light. All of the information required is in existence, and much of it already gathered by Government. The only novel element here is a simple combination of information ———————————— 17Robert J. Brulle, ‘The climate lobby: a sectoral analysis of lobbying spending on climate change in the USA, 2000 to 2016’, Climatic Change 149 (2018), 289-303. doi:10.1007/s10584-018-2241-z. Also see Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (London and Sydney: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 169 - 215; Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, ‘Assessing ExxonMobil’s climate change communications’, Environmental Research Letters, 12 (2017) 084019. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/aa815f. http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa815f/pdf; and Justin Farrell, ‘Corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate change’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 113 (2016), 92-97. doi:10.1073/pnas.1509433112. 18Editorial Board, ‘A carbon tax is a good idea - so long as it doesn’t come with industry handouts’, Los Angeles Times (12 October 2018). www.latimes.com/opinion/.../la-ed-carbontax-global-warming-20181012-story.html. Also see Lee Wasserman and David Kaiser, ‘A Bad Tradeoff for the Planet’, New York Times, 26 July 2018. 19https://citizensclimatelobby.org/why-carbon-fee-and-dividend/.