A few days after its general meeting, TotalEnergies meets climate activists Wednesday at the Paris court. A coalition of NGOs and local authorities, including the cities of Paris and New York, is calling on the courts to force the oil and gas giant to align its climate strategy with the Paris Agreement. The judges' decision on this issue is not expected until 2024 or even 2025. But the hearing scheduled before the 5th civil chamber of the judicial court, will be, unless further postponed, the first opportunity to see the coalition and the French group sharpen their arguments on this case, which dates back to June 2019.
In the long term, the coalition – which includes six NGOs such as Sherpa and France Nature Environnement, and sixteen local authorities, including the cities of Grenoble, Bayonne and Nanterre – hopes to one day obtain a French equivalent of Shell's conviction in the Netherlands. In 2021, a court ordered the British oil giant to accelerate its plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
In the immediate future, the coalition asks the pre-trial judge (magistrate in charge Wednesday of deciding questions prior to the examination of the file) to take an exceptional provisional measure: order TotalEnergies to "suspend the exploration and exploitation projects of new hydrocarbon deposits that have not been the subject of a final investment decision", and this until the judgment of the case on the merits.
To justify the urgency, the coalition invokes, among others, UN Secretary-General António Guterres. "Fossil fuel producers (...) continue to fight to increase production, knowing full well that their economic model is incompatible with the survival of humanity," he said in January. The coalition also relies on the International Energy Agency (IEA), which deemed it necessary in 2021 to stop all new hydrocarbon exploration projects to hope to respect the Paris Agreement.
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'Duty of care'
Opposite, the lawyers of TotalEnergies will plead to contest the admissibility of this almost unprecedented legal action. The procedure was initiated in January 2020 when the coalition sued TotalEnergies for failing to comply with its "duty of vigilance" on the environmental impact of its activities. NGOs and local authorities, mostly socialists or ecologists, considered that the "vigilance plan" published in 2019 by the group did not respect this duty, imposed since 2017 by a pioneering French law on corporate responsibility.
For the coalition, the climate strategy presented by the oil giant, one of the twenty largest CO2 emitters in the world, was "clearly insufficient" with regard to the objectives of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which aims to limit global warming well below +2 ° C and if possible to + 1.5 ° C compared to the pre-industrial era. Eight months earlier, as required by law, the coalition had "put on notice" TotalEnergies to "take the necessary measures to prevent major risks related to climate change".
Since then, the procedural battle has continued behind the scenes on this burgeoning but still fledgling judicial path. In 2022, the cities of New York and Paris joined the coalition. In another attempt to exploit this judicial innovation opened by the law on the "duty of vigilance", the NGOs that attacked TotalEnergies for the impact of its oil megaproject Tilenga-Eacop in Uganda and Tanzania, were dismissed in February by the Paris court.
In the face of criticism, the CEO of TotalEnergies did not give up on Friday, during the general meeting of shareholders in Paris. "Our company has been the major that has invested the most to build the energy model of tomorrow that will be based on electricity," via renewable energies, defended Patrick Pouyanné, adding that he could not immediately reduce his oil activity since demand "at the global level" is increasing.
In its current strategy, the group plans to devote a third of its investments to low-carbon energies in the decade, but it is still associated with oil and soon even more with gas, its priority.
