A Paris judicial tribunal has just ruled on a case brought against TotalEnergies by environmental groups and the City of Paris. The judgment does not halt the company’s fossil-fuel expansion. But it does something the industry has spent half a century resisting: it holds TotalEnergies legally responsible not just for
Clémence Dubois
Europe is struggling through an intense summer of climate breakdown. France’s heatwave shut schools and stretched hospitals stretched past their limits, with so many people dying in their apartments that morgues have run out of space.
Outdoor workers have faced conditions beyond what the human body can safely withstand.
It is against this backdrop that a Paris court has delivered a ruling that reshapes who can be held responsible for this unfolding crisis.
On 25 June, the Paris judicial tribunal ruled on a case brought against TotalEnergies by environmental groups and the City of Paris.
The judgment does not halt the company’s fossil fuel expansion. But it does something the industry has spent half a century resisting: it holds TotalEnergies legally responsible not just for the emissions from its operations, but for the emissions produced when the oil and gas it sells are ultimately burned, or what is known as Scope 3 emissions.
For decades, fossil fuel companies have hidden behind a simple defence: we only produce the product. The driver filling a tank, the household heating with gas — they are the ones burning it, not us. The Paris court has now dismantled that argument. It found that TotalEnergies’ investment strategies, industrial choices, and energy portfolio directly shape the emissions that follow. The consumer alibi, the industry’s most lucrative fiction, is over.
50 years of denial
What makes this ruling significant is that it forces the company to acknowledge what it already knew, but spent 50 years trying to cover up.
Internal company documents reaching back to 1971 described the disruptive effects of fossil fuel combustion on the climate.
They predicted, with troubling accuracy, that CO₂ concentrations would reach 400 parts per million around 2010 and warned of potential polar ice melt and sea level rise.
By the early 1980s, the company’s own internal assessments recognised that warming was likely to be irreversible.
By the mid-1980s, executives at Elf — later merged with Total — were advising a lobbying strategy specifically designed to block carbon taxation.
The company understood the science. It chose a different path: funding doubt, resisting regulation, and lobbying governments, all while continuing to expand fossil fuel production. That pattern has not stopped.
In 2025, TotalEnergies invested $13.4bn [€11.72bn] into oil and gas, returned $15.8bn to shareholders, and directed only $2.8bn toward low-carbon electricity. Between now and 2030, the company plans to send three-quarters of its investment toward oil and gas, according to its latest strategic review.
These are not neutral choices, but decisions with a body count — one made in boardrooms decades ago, and affirmed by TotalEnergies’ executives just months earlier.
What actually changes now?
Today, many are calling for the heatwave to be politicised. People are demanding accountability for policy failures regarding public health, labour laws, and climate adaptation. But for climate movements, that work has been underway for more than a decade.
This landmark ruling did not emerge from nowhere. It is the product of years of sustained campaigning to not just move money away from fossil fuels, but to strip companies like TotalEnergies of their social legitimacy. Their standing as acceptable partners for cities, universities and pension funds was questioned and opposed.
In 2015, following a fossil-free campaign, Paris committed to divesting from fossil fuels. In 2018, we successfully pushed elected officials to adopt a motion establishing that the city should explore legal action against fossil fuel companies. What seemed radical then suddenly became reasonable, even necessary.
So we continued to push.
Historical research digging into Total and Elf’s internal archives supplied the evidence that campaigners brought into public view. In 2019, the legal claim was filed — and won on June 25.
TotalEnergies will insist little has shifted: the court has only ordered it to revise its vigilance plan within six months to account for Scope 3 emissions. But the legal terrain has moved. The question is no longer whether TotalEnergies files a compliant climate report. Now, it can be questioned on whether it is genuinely preventing the risks it creates.
Climate breakdown is not a natural disaster. It is a business model that privatises profit and socialises cost. Right now, households across Europe are choosing between food and energy bills while fossil-fuel companies book record returns.
The Paris ruling joins a growing body of climate litigation worldwide that is finally naming who is responsible for the crisis.
What it demands now is political follow-through: windfall taxes, polluter-pays legislation, an end to fossil fuel subsidies, and guaranteed access to affordable clean energy.
