TotalEnergies' Statement Following the Release of Global Environmental Change's Paper

10/20/2021

News

Elf's and Total's knowledge of climate risk since the 1970s has been no different from that published in scientific journals at the time, which the scientific paper published today fully confirms.
It is therefore wrong to claim that the climate risk was concealed by Total or Elf, either in the 1970s or since.
TotalEnergies notes that the paper itself states that Elf and Total already accepted the findings of climate science, publicly and openly, as long as 25 years ago.
TotalEnergies regrets that it was never approached or consulted by the authors of the paper, which TotalEnergies will study in detail.
TotalEnergies deplores the process of pointing up at a situation from fifty years ago, without highlighting the efforts, changes, progress and investments made since then.
Since 2015, TotalEnergies has been engaged in a profound transformation of its activities with the ambition of becoming one of the world's top five renewable energy players by 2030 and getting to net zero carbon emissions by 2050, by setting specific greenhouse gas reduction targets for 2030.

We have been asked for a few days about a publication in a scientific review that claims TotalEnergies has known about climate risk since the 1970s and has silenced and denied this information for years. We have received similar queries from various stakeholders, but none of them agreed to provide us with the article in question before it was published. We cannot yet provide a specific response to an accusation only released today.

Nevertheless, we can provide the following information, which shows that TotalEnergies’ knowledge of climate risk was no different from that published in scientific journals at the time.

A series of articles did, in fact, appear in Total’s in-house magazine in 1971 (Total Informations no. 47, 1971). A large portion of the magazine concerned the environment, notably atmospheric pollution and anti-pollution protection measures taken by Total. François Durand-Dastès, a university professor of geography and author of Géographie des Airs, published in 1969 by Presses Universitaires de France, contributed an article on atmospheric pollution and climate. The contents fully reflect the state of public scientific knowledge at the time on the links between human activity, rising CO₂ levels and climate change. The Durand-Dastès article was written during the same period as a number of widely read scientific papers, notably Charles Keeling’s 1960 article in Tellus on changes in the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere and Wallace Broecker’s 1975 article in Science on global warming. It was also during this time that international cooperation on climate issues began to take shape, notably with the creation of the Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP) in the late 1960s and the Stockholm conference’s report on the Study of Man’s Impact on Climate (SMIC) in July 1971. It is therefore inexact to say that Total silenced information on climate risk in the 1970s or afterwards, given that Total kept abreast of changes in publicly available scientific knowledge.

In the 1970s, like today, there was a great deal of public debate about energy supply, and notably oil with the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979. This issue’s high profile was not due to Total in particular but to its worldwide impact on society. Climate became a global issue as well starting in the 1980s with the work done by James Hansen and his testimony before the United States Senate in 1988, the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 and the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.

Concerning the accusation that Total denied climate risk, we invite to look at the public statements from Total’s executives recognizing the existence of climate change and its connection with oil industry operations. Thierry Desmarest, for example, declared in an interview with Les Echos on December 13, 1999: “We must also take into account people’s desire to preserve the planet from all types of deterioration, chief among them pollution and climate change. The Kyoto and Buenos Aires conferences indicated the paths to follow for preserving the environment. Our technological challenge is therefore an environmental one as well (…)”.

Since 2015, our Company has been transforming its operations profoundly with the ambition of being a major player in the energy transition, ranking among the top five global producers of renewable electricity and getting to net zero, from production to customers’ use of our energy products, by 2050, together with society. This ambition is described at length in the Climate Report last published in September 2020 and presented in detail during our Investor Day on September 27 & 28, 2021. As part of this event and to provide an in-depth explanation of the world’s energy system and its relationship to climate, TotalEnergies published an Energy Landscape that presents the different types of energy, energy demand, climate change and ways to ensure the energy supply while decarbonizing the economy.