We already knew that ExxonMobil, BP and Shell have long denied climate change, which they were sure was serious. That with billions of dollars, the American, British and Anglo-Dutch oil giants circulated false information and financed climate skeptics. That they methodically hindered all policy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A study published by two historians and a sociologist, in the scientific journal Global Environmental Change, Wednesday, October 20, this time overwhelms the French flagship of fossil fuels: TotalEnergies.
It shows that the oil major was aware of the impact “Potentially catastrophic” of its products on global warming since 1971, well before the general public was aware of the subject. After having acquired the certainty of this, the company nevertheless undertook, for many years, to sow doubt on the reality of climate change and to slow down action.
This meticulous investigative work dissects fifty years of reactions from Total, but also from Elf – since the two companies merged in 1999 -, in the face of changes in knowledge and climate policies. Between 1968 and 2021, the major shifted from awareness to denial, then to open attack on scientific consensus, and then to diversion and delay in the fight against climate change. So many forms of “Factory of ignorance”.
“It has been ten years since American historians unearthed and analyzed the strategies of American groups to avoid and delay environmental regulations. But, in France, we have tended to consider our champions to be more virtuous than ExxonMobil. Our study revisits the reassuring story that we have constructed for ourselves ”, warns Christophe Bonneuil, the first author of the study, research director at the Center for Historical Research (CNRS-EHESS).
Evidence of early knowledge of warming
Never researched the question of responsibility major oil companies had only been carried out over such a long period. Above all, no researcher had yet studied Total, even though the company, created in 1924, is one of the main players in the sector on a global scale. To carry out their study, the scientists, two French and one American, had access to the group’s archives at La Défense, to those of several ministries (industry, environment, foreign affairs), and conducted around thirty interviews with former executives of Total and Elf, senior civil servants, climatologists and economists.
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