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BLOOM has responded to The Green Connection’s appeal for help against TotalEnergies’ new offshore gas project in South Africa. The opening up of South African waters to oil and gas exploration poses a major risk, not only to biodiversity and local coastal communities, but to humanity as a whole, triggering a new climate bomb. United in defense of the ocean and artisanal fishers, our two NGOs have decided to campaign together to put an end to this climatically destructive project.
Here are all the stages of our campaign in chronological order.
2022
5 September: TotalEnergies Exploration & Production South Africa (TEEPSA) applies for a production license to develop two major gas fields off the southern coast of South Africa.
17 October: BLOOM organizes a press conference in Paris, with the participation of activist Camille Etienne and elected members of the National Assembly and European Parliament: François Ruffin, Raphaël Glucksmann and Karima Delli, against TotalEnergies climate destructive project.
BLOOM and The Green Connection also address a letter to Mr Pouyanné asking him to put an immediate end to all TotalEnergies hydrocarbon extraction projects in South Africa. A petition is put online and quickly receives the support of tens of thousands of Internet users.
8 November: Swann Bommier, advocacy officer at BLOOM, refutes TotalEnergies’ attempt to pass off gas as a transition energy in an educational thread shared on Twitter.
22 November: Patrick Pouyanné responds to BLOOM and The Green Connection, continuing to promote TotalEnergies’ “renewable energy portfolio” as proof of immunity. Read TotalEnergies’ response (in French).
2023
BLOOM and The Green Connection join forces with several environmental NGOs to put pressure on TotalEnergies’ financiers.
6 February: Claire Nouvian (BLOOM), Heffa Schücking (Urgewald), Liziwe McDaid (The Green Connection), Lucie Pinson (Reclaim Finance) and Makoma Lekalakala (Earthlife Africa), all Goldman Prize laureates, publish an opinion piece in Le Monde denouncing the financial sector’s silence in the face of climate change.
Last November, the five Goldman Prize winners wrote to 78 banks, investors and insurers asking them to commit to no longer support TotalEnergies’ expansion strategy in Africa. Two months later, only four financial institutions pledged not to support TotalEnergies’ projects in South Africa.
7 February: Goldman Environmental Prize winners Claire Nouvian (BLOOM), Liziwe McDaid (The Green Connection), Heffa Schücking (Urgewald) and Lucie Pinson (Reclaim Finance) visited the European Parliament. They gave a presentation on TotalEnergies’ various fossil fuel projects in Africa, including those carried out by its Dutch branch TEEPSA in South Africa (TotalEnergies Exploration & Production South Africa).
In Brussels, MEPs Raphaël Glucksmann and Karima Delli also revealed a political initiative supported by more than 100 elected representatives (MEPs as well as national and local elected representatives) asking the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, to propose European legislation to “legally compel fossil fuel multinationals and financial actors to abandon any new project in coal, oil and gas”.
8 February: BLOOM and The Green Connection went to the National Assembly and the TotalEnergies Tower to denounce the expansion of the multinational corporation and its dedicated branch TEEPSA (TotalEnergies Exploration & Production South Africa) in Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa and elsewhere despite the climate emergency.
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24 May: In a groundbreaking investigation entitled “The Renewable Energy Joker”, BLOOM reveals how TotalEnergies is using its investments in renewable energies to mask its fossil fuel investments and completely greenwash its oil rigs.
26 May: BLOOM takes part in the environmental protest organized in front of the Salle Pleyel in Paris for TotalEnergies’ Annual General Meeting.
23 June: BLOOM and Liziwe McDaid (The Green Connection) join the mobilization against the financing of new fossil fuel projects, at Place de la République in Paris, on the sidelines of the Summit for a New Global Financial Pact organized by the French government.
November 21: BLOOM highlights a major omission from public debate in the report “TotalEnergies’ dangerous silence on the carbon budget“. We reveal Total’s lie by omission on its “carbon budget”, which allows the company to claim that it complies with the Paris Agreement while continuing to open up new fossil fuel projects.