Early warnings and emerging accountability: Total's responses to global warming, 1971-2021
Highlights
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Archives, interviews used to trace Total's engagement with global warming since 1970s.
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Total or predecessors aware of harmful global warming impacts since at least 1971.
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Total engaged in overt denial of climate science in late 1980s, early 1990s.
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Various postures and strategies pursued by Total other than overt science denial.
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IPIECA played key role in coordinating international oil industry beginning in 1980s.
Abstract
Building upon recent work on other major fossil fuel companies, we report new archival research and primary source interviews describing how Total responded to evolving climate science and policy in the last 50 years. We show that Total personnel received warnings of the potential for catastrophic global warming from its products by 1971, became more fully informed of the issue in the 1980s, began promoting doubt regarding the scientific basis for global warming by the late 1980s, and ultimately settled on a position in the late 1990s of publicly accepting climate science while promoting policy delay or policies peripheral to fossil fuel control. Additionally, we find that Exxon, through the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association (IPIECA), coordinated an international campaign to dispute climate science and weaken international climate policy, beginning in the 1980s. This represents one of the first longitudinal studies of a major fossil fuel company’s responses to global warming to the present, describing historical stages of awareness, preparation, denial, and delay.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378021001655
( Perhaps consider e-mailing this to your editorial boards, would be nice if it were featured, God forbid, on the front page of a newspaper or two.)