The complaint filed with the Paris judicial court targets the Board of Directors of French oil and gas company TotalEnergies, its Chairman and CEO Patrick Pouyanné and its shareholders. These include the American asset manager BlackRock and the Norges Bank.
These major players in the oil and gas sector are being prosecuted for “manslaughter, endangering the lives of others, failing to combat a disaster and damaging biodiversity”. The complaint was lodged by a group of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) made up of Bloom, the Paris-based Alliance Santé Planétaire and Mexico’s Nuestro Futuro. It also includes eight victims of climate change from every continent, including Zimbabwean Hilda T., a survivor of cyclone Idai, which displaced millions of people in several southern African countries in 2019.
Plaintiffs on every continent
The other plaintiffs, also victims of natural disasters, come from France, Pakistan, Greece, Belgium, Australia and the Philippines. Once the complaint has been lodged, “the public prosecutor will have full discretion to open a preliminary investigation or a judicial enquiry to establish who is responsible for the acts complained of”, says the group.
It adds that the aim of such an initiative is “to put a definitive stop to the expansion of fossil fuel extraction, which is leading to an unprecedented situation: ‘globocide’, i.e. the irreversible disruption of the Earth System and the biosphere as a whole”. For the time being, TotalEnergie continues to open fossil fuel wells on the African continent.
TotalEnergies reaffirms its strategy in Africa
The French oil and gas giant recently gave the go-ahead for a $6 billion investment to develop the Cameia and Golfinho oil fields, located 100 km off the coast of Angola. At a depth of 1,700 metres, TotalEnergies will be pumping 70,000 barrels of crude oil a day by 2028.
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This investment decision confirms TotalEnergies’ strategy of continuing to produce fossil fuels. However, “scientists have now established that so-called ‘natural’ disasters are less and less so: the increase in their intensity and frequency is a direct consequence of climate change, for which fossil fuels are 80% responsible”, says the group of NGOs and victims of the climate crisis.
The determination of NGOs
Faced with this situation, “we are determined to stop the climate criminals. It has quite simply become a matter of life and death”, says Claire Nouvian, founder and director of Bloom. The NGO also warns that “if no action is taken by the public prosecutor within the next three months, the complainants have the option of filing a civil action and referring the matter to an examining magistrate to request the opening of a judicial investigation”.
The complaint has been lodged just a few days before TotalEnergies’ Annual General Meeting, scheduled for Friday 24 May 2024 in Paris. This legal action will no doubt be on the agenda of discussions between shareholders of the oil group, which made profits of more than 19 billion euros in 2023, the highest in its history.
Jean Marie Takouleu