Dismissal of the criminal complaint against TotalEnergies: French justice admits powerlessness in front of climate change

20 February 2025

Faced with the destructive behavior of the oil majors, which continue their fossil fuel expansion despite risks of climate breakdown as highlighted in the recent Planetary Solvency report, the French criminal justice system has just declared itself powerless. 

Last May, eight victims of extreme climatic events lodged a complaint with the Paris judicial court against TotalEnergies, alongside the NGOs BLOOM, Alliance Santé Planétaire and Nuestro Futuro, seeking recognition of the French oil major’s criminal responsibility for reckless endangerment and involuntary manslaughter, among other charges. The public prosecutor has just dismissed the case, considering that the current state of the French law does not allow the multinational to be prosecuted in the context of this complaint. 

“Keeping the temperature rise below 2°C is now impossible”. This is the grim conclusion reached by climatologist James Hansen following a recent study. The 1.5°C global warming threshold has already been exceeded in 2024. At a time when a study has just been published showing the possible destruction of 50% of the world’s GDP from 2070 onwards if our companies persist in opening up new fossil fuel projects, TotalEnergies has announced no less than 21 new investments in fossil fuel projects since COP28 was held 18 months ago. 

Our complaint, submitted to the specialized public health unit of the Paris judicial court, sought recognition of TotalEnergies’ indisputable share of responsibility for the consequences of global warming and the extreme events that result from it. Four offences were targeted: reckless endangerment, involuntary manslaughter, failure to combat a disaster and damage to biodiversity.  

However, after studying the case, the French public prosecutor decided that, despite the evidence of TotalEnergies’ responsibility for global warming and its associated consequences, current criminal law did not allow him to prosecute the multinational. Somewhere between urgency and powerlessness, the decision states that “while it is undisputed that any activity that emits greenhouse gases has a negative impact on global warming, it is not in itself illegal”. “A welcome finding, but one which nonetheless gives cause for concern when it comes to the ability of current criminal law to respond to the vital challenges we are now collectively facing,” points out Aymeric Thillaye du Boullay, head of Litigation at BLOOM.   

This classification underlines the fundamental problem of the ignominious legality of behaviors that undoubtedly lead to the widespread destruction of life. As such, it must urgently lead to a change of political and legal paradigm, so that we can equip ourselves with effective levers, including criminal law. We need to be able to put an end to the unprecedented situations currently at work, which are leading to “globocide ‘1 , i.e., as conceptualized by the German philosopher Gunther Anders, to an irreversible “criminal” disruption of the Earth System and the biosphere as a whole. 

As victims of the fossil fuel industry’s deadly strategy, we still have the option of registering as a civil party in this same criminal complaint. We’re looking into all possibilities that would enable us to make full use of legal leverage to make the main perpetrators of climate chaos accountable before courts. 

***

(1) Globocide: We owe the concept of “globocide” to the German philosopher Günther Anders (1902-1992), who used it to designate the extermination of human beings by the atomic bomb. We propose to use the neologism coined by this thinker to designate the global devastation our way of life is wreaking on the biosphere as a whole, and not just on human beings. “For we know that the allegedly peaceful nuclear power plants have for some time now, consistently and without respite, threatened not only certain people, or even all of humanity, but have also posed a threat to all life on earth. Their construction and operation are worse than the military use of atomic energy: they participate in a “Herostratic” project. Today, after Chernobyl, now that no one can feign ignorance, their defenders have deliberately committed a crime. This crime is not only called “genocide”—I often use the adverb, “only”!—but “globicide”, Ten theses on Chernobyl – Günther Anders. 

Photo : Arthur Weidmann (Flickr – CC BY-SA 3.0)