Paris court rules TotalEnergies liable for Scope 3 emissions in landmark climate verdict

Europe is enduring a severe summer of climate breakdown. France's heatwave has forced school closures and pushed hospitals beyond capacity, with so many fatalities in private residences that morgues have run out of space. Outdoor workers have faced conditions exceeding what the human body can safely withstand.

Against this backdrop, a Paris court has delivered a ruling that reshapes accountability for the unfolding crisis.

The Ruling

On 25 June, the Paris judicial tribunal ruled on a case brought against TotalEnergies by environmental groups and the City of Paris.

The judgment does not halt the company's fossil fuel expansion. However, it achieves something the industry has resisted for half a century: it holds TotalEnergies legally responsible not only for emissions from its own operations, but also for the emissions produced when the oil and gas it sells are ultimately burned — known as Scope 3 emissions.

For decades, fossil fuel companies have relied on a simple defence: we only produce the product. The driver filling a tank, the household heating with gas — they are the ones burning it, not us. The Paris court has now dismantled that argument. It found that TotalEnergies' investment strategies, industrial choices, and energy portfolio directly shape the emissions that follow. The consumer alibi — the industry's most lucrative fiction — is over.

50 Years of Denial

What makes this ruling significant is that it forces the company to acknowledge what it already knew, but spent 50 years trying to conceal.

Internal company documents dating back to 1971 described the disruptive effects of fossil fuel combustion on the climate. They predicted, with troubling accuracy, that CO₂ concentrations would reach 400 parts per million around 2010 and warned of potential polar ice melt and sea level rise.

By the early 1980s, the company's own internal assessments recognised that warming was likely to be irreversible. By the mid-1980s, executives at Elf — later merged with Total — were advising a lobbying strategy specifically designed to block carbon taxation.

The company understood the science. It chose a different path: funding doubt, resisting regulation, and lobbying governments, all while continuing to expand fossil fuel production. That pattern has not stopped.

In 2025, TotalEnergies invested $13.4bn (€11.72bn) into oil and gas, returned $15.8bn to shareholders, and directed only $2.8bn toward low-carbon electricity. Between now and 2030, the company plans to allocate three-quarters of its investment toward oil and gas, according to its latest strategic review.

These are not neutral choices, but decisions with a body count — made in boardrooms decades ago and affirmed by TotalEnergies' executives just months earlier.

What Actually Changes Now?

Many are now calling for the heatwave to be politicised. People are demanding accountability for policy failures regarding public health, labour laws, and climate adaptation. For climate movements, however, that work has been underway for more than a decade.

This landmark ruling did not emerge from nowhere. It is the product of years of sustained campaigning — not only to move money away from fossil fuels, but to strip companies like TotalEnergies of their social legitimacy. Their standing as acceptable partners for cities, universities, and pension funds was questioned and opposed.

In 2015, following a fossil-free campaign, Paris committed to divesting from fossil fuels. In 2018, campaigners successfully pushed elected officials to adopt a motion establishing that the city should explore legal action against fossil fuel companies. What seemed radical then suddenly became reasonable, even necessary.

Historical research digging into Total and Elf's internal archives supplied the evidence that campaigners brought into public view. In 2019, the legal claim was filed — and won on 25 June.

TotalEnergies will insist little has shifted: the court has only ordered it to revise its vigilance plan within six months to account for Scope 3 emissions. But the legal terrain has moved. The question is no longer whether TotalEnergies files a compliant climate report. Now, it can be questioned on whether it is genuinely preventing the risks it creates.

Climate breakdown is not a natural disaster. It is a business model that privatises profit and socialises loss.