TotalEnergies in court against NGOs and communities accusing it of “climate inaction”

Under pressure, TotalEnergies finds this Wednesday the climate activists at the Paris court. A coalition of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and communities, including the cities of Paris and New York (United States), is asking the courts to force the oil and gas giant to align its climate strategy with the Paris agreement, signed in 2015.

The judges’ decision is not expected before 2024 or even 2025. But today’s hearing will be one of the first opportunities to see the French group scrap against the coalition of six NGOs (Sherpa, France Nature Environnement, etc.) and sixteen local authorities. (the cities of Grenoble, Bayonne or Nanterre, in particular) who accuse him of “climate inaction”.

Without delay, the coalition asks the pre-trial judge, a magistrate responsible for deciding questions prior to the examination of the case, to take an exceptional provisional measure: order TotalEnergies to “suspend exploration and exploitation of new hydrocarbon deposits that have not been the subject of a final investment decision”, until the judgment of the case on the merits.

A model “incompatible with the survival of humanity”

To justify the emergency, the coalition, joined in 2022 by New York and Paris, invokes, among other things, the words of the head of the United Nations Organization: Antonio Guterres pointed the finger, in January, at companies that promote a economic model “incompatible with the survival of humanity”. The coalition also relies on the International Energy Agency (IEA), which deemed it necessary in 2021 to cease all new hydrocarbon exploration projects to comply with the Paris agreement.

Opposite, the lawyers of TotalEnergies will plead to challenge the admissibility of the legal action. This dates back to January 2020 when the coalition sued TotalEnergies for breach of “its duty of vigilance” on the environmental impact of its activities. This duty has been imposed since 2017 by a pioneering French law on corporate responsibility.

For the coalition, the climate strategy of TotalEnergies, one of the twenty largest emitters of CO2 in the world, is “clearly insufficient” with regard to the Paris agreement. She hopes to obtain a French equivalent of the Shell case: in 2021, a court in the Netherlands, seized by NGOs, condemned the oil giant to accelerate its plan to reduce greenhouse gases. Shell appealed.

In another procedure carried out in France in the name of “duty of vigilance”, the NGOs which attacked TotalEnergies for its mega oil project Tilenga-Eacop in Uganda and Tanzania, were dismissed in February by the Paris court.

Faced with pressure from public opinion, the government or even certain shareholders, the CEO of TotalEnergies, Patrick Pouyanné, defended his climate strategy last Friday, during the general meeting of the group. It plans to devote a third of its investments to low-carbon energies in the decade, but remains associated with oil and soon even more with gas, its priority.