NGOs and victims of climate change register as civil party in their criminal complaint against TotalEnergies

15 May 2025

For the first time in the world, on May 21, 2024, an oil company, TotalEnergies, was the subject of a criminal complaint for its contribution to climate change, given the resulting impact on human and non-human lives. The Board of Directors and shareholders of TotalEnergies, the world’s sixth-largest oil and gas company, were charged with the offences of endangering the lives of others, involuntary manslaughter, failing to fight a disaster and damaging biodiversity. Beyond this, the intensifying consequences of global warming raise the question of the risk of widespread destruction of the biosphere, in other words of “globocide”. 

Today, following the dismissal of this complaint by the public prosecutor of the Paris judicial court in February 2025, seven plaintiffs and two associations, BLOOM and Alliance Santé Planétaire, have registered as a civil party in this criminal complaint to trigger the opening of a judicial investigation. In the light of the evidence produced, we expect TotalEnergies and its directors and shareholders to be held responsible, as they have continually fuelled a climate-change strategy while at the same time engaging in the fabrication of climate doubt, all at the peril of human lives and biodiversity. 

With TotalEnergies’ Annual General Meeting scheduled for May 23, 2025, the Board of Directors has decided not to submit the company’s climate strategy to a shareholder vote, a Say on Climate, as in previous years. Yet this strategy is incompatible with limiting global warming to +2°C – a horizon of vital importance for the stability of the Earth System, but already made impossible by the continued expansion of hydrocarbon exploitation by the world’s oil and gas majors, foremost among which is TotalEnergies. Since we filed our criminal complaint last year, Total has announced more than twenty new investments in fossil fuel extraction projects, while the International Energy Agency announced in 2021 that new fossil fuel projects are incompatible with limiting global warming to +1.5°C. Until 2030, TotalEnergies plans to invest nearly six billion dollars a year, or 33% of its total investments, in new fossil fuel projects. The objective of increasing oil and gas production by 3% per year condemns millions of human lives. Total is doing this in total impunity. 

Over the last twelve months, climate catastrophes have intensified and multiplied all over the planet: floods in Valencia, Spain, cyclone Chido in Mayotte and Garance on Reunion Island, hurricane Milton in Florida, gigantic fires in California, Bolivia and South Korea, record heatwaves in India and all around the globe… According to the UN, there is now more than one climate catastrophe every day. Two of the plaintiffs who are suing today have also been victims of new climate disasters since we filed our simple complaint in May 2024: Khanzadi Kapri relived the nightmare of the floods that forced her onto the roads of Pakistan in August 2024, while Frank Nicol Marba in the Philippines watched helplessly between October and November 2024 as six typhoons hit the archipelago in a record-breaking month. 

A new dismissal would demonstrate the inability of the law, and therefore of our societies, to prevent the destruction of the world as it has been stabilized for thousands of years, and to prevent the billions of deaths associated with the annihilation of the Earth System in scenarios of over 2°C warming. Faced with over-powerful multinationals that hold the public sphere in their thrall and have the power of life and death over the human civilization, BLOOM calls on citizens to urge political leaders to support the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty initiative. 

Any new fossil fuel development project condemns the biosphere and humanity to irreversible destruction. A fair and equitable exit from fossil fuels is not the preference of a few, but a vital collective imperative. Preventing globocide is an existential question for mankind, and it is being played out today. 

Hosting the United Nations Conference on the Oceans from June 9 to 13 in Nice, followed by the tenth anniversary of the Paris Agreement at COP30 in Brazil in November, is an opportunity for France to support the opening of negotiations for an international treaty on the non-proliferation of fossil fuels.  

Notes to editor 

Who does this case target specifically? 

When a complaint concerns many potential responsible individuals or entities, the French legal system allows to file a complaint “against X”, leaving it to the prosecutor or investigating judge to decide whom to prosecute. In this instance, our group of plaintiffs is providing the Criminal Court with a rationale which targets the board of directors of TotalEnergies as well as its main shareholders. The individuals and entities we have identified as having superior responsibility are: 

• Mr. Patrick Pouyanné, TotalEnergies’ CEO.
• Members of TotalEnergies’ Board of Directors. They determine the Group’s strategic direction, have an important role in decision-making on investments and asset acquisitions and disposals, and have consistently refused to put resolutions aimed at aligning the Group’s

strategy with the Paris Agreement on the AGM agenda or have openly called on shareholders to vote against them. 

• TotalEnergies’ main shareholders for whom we have evidence that they have consistently voted in favour of climate strategies incompatible with limiting warming to 2°C (for example TotalEnergies’ 2022 climate plan) and against resolutions proposed by shareholders aiming at aligning the Group’s climate strategy with the Paris Agreement (for example the 2023 “Follow This” resolution). These include for example Blackrock (Total’s largest shareholder with more than 6% of shares) and Norges Bank (Total’s 6th largest shareholder with about 3% of shares).

Campaign website 

Our website campaign totalcriminal.org provides ore details and several videos of the plaintiffs’ testimonies, as well as the press release of last year complaint.