Total blamed for minimizing its active role in global warming
According to a publication in the journal Global Environmental Change, Total was aware of the harmful consequences of its activities for the climate as early as 1971. REUTERS - BENOIT TESSIER
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The French oil group Total had been aware since the 1970s of the harmful consequences of its activities on the environment, but preferred to remain silent: this is what reveals an article written by three researchers, published in the journal
Global Environmental Change.
.
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The researchers first came across an article published in Total's internal journal in 1971. At the time, global warming was hardly documented or even really known to the general public.
And yet, the article in the Total review explains that the combustion of fossil fuels leads to the release of enormous quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere which is quite worrying, underlines the text.
However, the group will ignore this subject.
► To read also: Global warming: the UN sounds the alarm on the production of fossil fuels
Worse still according to researchers at the turn of the 1980s, Total and ELF, French oil champions, will successfully lobby against policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The American giant Exxon, via the Environmental Association of the Petroleum Industry (IPIECA), is campaigning to "
challenge climate science and weaken controls on fossil fuels
", explain the researchers.
"
The novelty is that we thought that only Exxon and the American groups were in duplicity
", but "
we realize that our French oil champions participated in this phenomenon at least between 1987 and 1994
", detailed in the AFP Christophe Bonneuil, one of the three researchers. IPIECA "
torpedoed by active lobbying the ecotax projects of the European Commission between 1990 and 1994
" and other projects to regulate fossil fuels, the researcher said at an online press conference. According to him, “
there are internal notes welcoming this lobbying work
” in the archives of the French groups studied.
It was not until the mid-2000s that Total finally publicly recognized the reality of climate change.
Then comes the time of
greenwashing
.
The oil group is putting itself on the side of the solutions and not of the side of the problem.
The oil group defends itself and ensures that the knowledge it had of global warming in 1970 was the same as that of researchers at the time.
No more no less.
►
Read the article published in
the journal Global Environmental Change
The NGOs
Notre affaires à tous
and
350.org
ask in a joint statement that a commission of inquiry be set up within Parliament.
They point to the fact that TotalEnergies persists in wanting to increase its production capacities again and again and "is
developing new devastating projects in protected regions
".
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