A court in Paris ruled on Thursday (26 June) that energy company TotalEnergies can no longer ignore its indirect emissions and the environmental risks caused by the consumption of its products.
The French oil and gas giant has been given six months to formally assess and report on the environmental risks generated by the use of its fuels and natural gas by consumers, and not only those from its own plants.
For the oil major, this includes the transport of goods, employee travel, and above all, the use of the products it sells.
The simplest example: when you go to a TotalEnergies service station and fill your car with petrol, the CO2 that comes out of your exhaust pipe as you drive automatically forms part of TotalEnergies' indirect 'Scope 3' emissions.
The court has not, however, gone so far as to consider TotalEnergies legally responsible for all its customers' behaviour, nor, as the claimants had wanted, to order it to halt its new oil and gas projects around the world and reduce its oil and gas production by 37 per cent and 25 per cent respectively by 2030.
