4 climate change. In fact, one of the shocking findings in Ekwurzel, et al. is: “Strikingly, more than half of all emissions traced to carbon producers over the 1880-2010 period were produced since 1986, the period in which the climate risks of fossil fuel combustion was well established”.11 Even if ignorance had excused the carbon majors during some of the period before 1986, it certainly has not been available as an excuse in the last thirty years when more than half the damage has been done - and continues unabated. Ignorance of climate effects could not have been the real explanation of the behaviour of the carbon majors in any case because, when the ignorance was eliminated, nothing in their behaviour changed. They continue to acquire fossil fuel to be burned with the uncontrolled release of carbon pollution and to explore aggressively for more and more supplies of fossil fuels to be burned in the same unsafe way. 2.5 Less harmful alternatives What would have been the right response no later than 1986 and in all subsequent years? When someone who has been providing a product (or service) that she believed was safe to use discovers that, on the contrary, the product is dangerous as currently used, she has fundamentally two choices: substitution or modification. She cannot simply persist in business-as-usual as if nothing has changed, as the carbon majors largely continue to do to this day. Common-sense dictates that provision of the product cannot simply be immediately stopped if the product is needed for a vital function like the supply of [some] energy. Thus, the substitution or modification could not realistically have been instant. But when the harm being done is of the incomparable magnitude of undermining the physical pre-conditions of society as we know it, the substitution or modification ought to have been implemented as soon as possible with all deliberate speed, making use of all the resources that could possibly be made available. In the case of fossil fuel companies, resources could have been taken out of exploration to discover additional reserves of a product that it had then been realized could not be used safely and turned instead toward prompt substitution or modification. One or both alternatives could have been vigorously pursued decades ago. “The major investor-owned fossil fuel companies did not follow this path. On the contrary, they took essentially the opposite path, denying the reality of the problem of climate change, working to ensure that fossil fuels would remain central to global production and that emissions would continue unabated”.12 The choice between substitution and modification - or any combination of the two - was up to the carbon majors. Substitution - development of a safe alternative to fossil fuel - in this case would obviously have meant research and development on alternative energy. Vigorous R & D on energy alternatives with the vast resources available to carbon majors might well have brought far sooner the plummeting of prices for non-carbon energy that has occurred only recently, thereby avoiding much of the soaring carbon emissions of the last three decades. Some oil company executives now talk in their public relations campaigns about changing their firms from oil companies to ‘energy companies’. That choice to move toward safety for humanity was available decades sooner. The carbon majors decided not to take the safer choice, thereby imposing danger on all humanity, now and in future. Modification, the other safe alternative, would have meant the development at scale of technologies for carbon capture so that if fossil fuel combustion continued, it would not continue progressively to undermine the stability of the established ———————————— 11Ekwurzel, et al. (note 2). Frumhoff, R. Heede, and N. Oreskes, ‘The climate responsibilities of industrial carbon producers’, Climatic Change, 132 (2015), 157–171. doi:10.1007/s10584-015-1472-5. Copy attached to this statement. 12P.C.