Misleading climate claims: French court convicts TotalEnergies

PARIS: A French court Thursday ruled oil and gas giant TotalEnergies had engaged in “misleading commercial practices” by overstating its climate pledges and ordered it to remove some claims, in what activists said was the first such ruling worldwide against a major oil company for climate misinformation.

The case could help set a legal precedent for the kind of environmental claims corporations, which are starting to face tighter regulations in the European Union, can make.

In Europe, courts ruled against Dutch airline KLM in 2024 and Germany’s Lufthansa in March for misleading consumers about their efforts to reduce the environmental impact of flying.

But ClientEarth, an organisation that closely monitors case law against the oil and gas industry, welcomed the ruling as a “historic win against greenwashing”.

Greenwashing is the act of claiming to be more environmentally responsible than in reality. “It is the first judgment in the world ruling that an oil and gas major has misled the public by greening its image,” said ClientEarth.

The Paris court found that TotalEnergies had made environmental claims on its French consumer-facing website that “misled” consumers into believing that it could achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 while increasing oil and gas production. But the court dismissed complaints over TotalEnergies’s fossil gas and biofuels, which activists argued had been deceptively promoted as clean energy.