French Court Orders TotalEnergies to Report Customer Emissions Within Six Months
A French court has ruled that TotalEnergies must disclose the emissions produced when its customers burn the oil and petroleum products it sells, extending mandatory reporting beyond the company's own operations and those of its contractors, according to The Conversation.
The company has six months to report on emissions from airlines, auto drivers and other buyers of its energy products, The Conversation reported. The ruling covers a category of emissions that dwarfs the company's direct footprint.
TotalEnergies reported around 34 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year from its own operations, according to The Conversation. The company itself estimated customer emissions at about 10 times that figure.
The court stopped short of the remedy campaigners sought. It declined to directly order TotalEnergies to cut its overall emissions, including those of its customers, which The Conversation notes would have amounted to instructing the company to sell less petroleum.
The legal basis predates the climate case. The French reporting law was passed in 2017 after the 2013 collapse of a clothing factory in Bangladesh that killed more than 1,100 people, according to The Conversation. Written for supply-chain human rights and safety risk, the statute has now been applied to the combustion of fuels sold downstream.
The reach of that approach is set to widen. A new European directive on corporate risk evaluation requires all EU countries to develop national laws on risk reporting by 2028, The Conversation reported. Comparable duties in other member states would give litigants further venues to test the same argument against fuel suppliers.
TotalEnergies is the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas from the U.S., even though its U.S. oil and gas business accounts for only about 4% of the company's global total, according to The Conversation. That split illustrates how a reporting obligation grounded in one jurisdiction reaches trade flows well beyond it.
The six-month clock now determines when the first disclosure lands.
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