“Air Pollution and Climate” is the title of a report that appeared in 1971 in the house paper of the French Total group. Its content couldn’t be more up-to-date. “People have been burning more and more fossil fuels since the 19th century. This releases enormous amounts of carbon dioxide […] So the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased significantly. […] The increase has been around 15 percent over the last 150 years, which should not be neglected. ” […]”.
It turned out almost the same. In 2015, the average carbon dioxide concentration exceeded the threshold of 400 ppm for the first time in human history, i.e. 400 out of one million air molecules were carbon dioxide. The report was signed by François Durand-Dastès, who was an associate professor of geography in Paris at the time, in Total magazine, which the oil company published internally and externally. He called the sharp increase in the CO2 concentration “worrying” because there was a fear of a rise in the global average temperature and, as a result, potentially “catastrophic consequences” for the earth.
Durand-Dastès’ essay is just one of a series of contemporary reports and interviews from the early 1970s and thereafter that a trio of researchers from France and the USA has now evaluated. Your article, published on Wednesday in the specialist journal “Global Environmental Change”, struggled to explain the Total Group, which at that time was still operating under the name TotalFina. This also applies to the previous competitor Elf Aquitaine, which merged with TotalFina in 2000. Because if you follow the researchers, it is not just warnings about the consequences of global warming. In fact, from the end of the 1990s onwards, companies actively participated in raising doubts about man-made climate change. The industrial association IPIECA, in which the American competitor Exxon set the tone, played an important role.
Total has a credibility problem
For the “green” course of the total leadership, the time at which the article was published could hardly be less favorable. It was not until May that the company again gave itself a new name to illustrate the duality of fossil and renewable energies; now it’s called TotalEnergies. The group has always tried to signal its credibility when it comes to environmental protection through voluntary commitments and environmental public relations work, according to the scientists. Even later, he was not a pioneer in terms of credibility. In the late 1990s, Total turned away from open discussion of climate science, but at the same time expanded investments in upstream oil and gas production. Rhetorical strategies have also been used that aimed at dispersing uncertainty, downplaying the urgency to act or diverting attention from fossil fuels as the main cause of global warming, the researchers write.
In the mid-2000s, the group then actively emphasized the expertise of climate science to the outside world – at the same time, however, that it was up to the economy to solve the problems. “This framework enables Total to present itself as a socially responsible oil company by wrapping the ongoing investments in the production of fossil fuels in an attractive” energy transition “narrative”, is the conclusion of the research trio.
The Total report was hotly debated on Wednesday not only on the left-wing liberal side, but also in bourgeois French media such as Le Figaro. Activists rubbed their hands and called for the “revelations” to be spread. The environmental protection organizations 350.org and Notre Affaire à Tous started a campaign with the hashtag #TotalKnew. The group itself complained that it had received inquiries in the past few days, but that it had not received the article. “You will understand that under these conditions it is not yet possible for us to react precisely right away,” said a total spokesman for the FAZ
Group refers to progress made so far
Nevertheless, one does not want to leave the allegations uncommented. Especially since the article “fully” proves that Total’s knowledge of climate risk since the 1970s has in no way differed from the scientific findings and publications of that time. The research trio also acknowledge that Elf and Total publicly and openly accepted the findings from climate science 25 years ago. To claim that the climate risk of Total or Elf would have been suppressed in the 1970s or after, calls the company spokesman “wrong”.
It is regrettable that the scientists now pointed the finger at a situation more than 50 years ago, “without underlining the efforts, changes, progress and investments made since then”. After all, TotalEnergies has committed itself to a profound restructuring of its activities since 2015, with the aim of becoming one of the five largest players in the global renewable energy sector by 2030. By the middle of the century, the company wants to operate in a CO2-neutral manner, and in order to achieve this, fixed CO2 reduction targets have already been set for the medium term.
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