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TotalEnergies’ directors and top shareholders including BlackRock are the targets of a novel climate change case claiming criminal wrongdoing including involuntary manslaughter, as campaigners attempt to criminalise polluting.
Individuals who lost family members during extreme weather events including Greek wildfires, Storm Alex across Europe and Cyclone Idai in Zimbabwe, or survived these events, filed the case in a French court alongside non-profit groups, the environmental group Bloom said.
The case filed on Tuesday names TotalEnergies’ directors, led by chief executive Patrick Pouyanné, and comes ahead of the energy major’s annual meeting on Friday.
The accusation of criminal responsibility for the widespread fallout from extreme weather events is unique, legal academics say, and relies on a body of science that attributes such events to climate change caused by greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels.
Environmental crime cases against large corporations have typically focused on specific events, such as oil spills, where the impact is able to be clearly assessed, leaving the field relatively untested.
Other ongoing criminal cases against TotalEnergies have focused on green claims in its advertising and on the potential impact of its oil pipeline project in Tanzania and Uganda.
The Paris criminal prosecutor will have three months to decide whether to launch an investigation into the case, the plaintiffs said, after which they will have the option of referring the case to an investigating judge.
TotalEnergies, BlackRock and Norges Bank Investment Management did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Significant legal action by campaign groups against polluters, including British energy company Shell, German utility RWE and Swiss cement producer Holcim, have so far involved activists pressing for financial damages or changes to companies’ business models, without alleging criminal behaviour.
The maximum penalty for involuntary manslaughter in France is five years in prison, while other accusations in the complaint, including damaging biodiversity and deliberately endangering the lives of others, can also carry prison terms.
The possibility of a sentence would be a “significant” deterrent to oil and gas companies continuing to expand production, said Donald Braman, associate professor at George Washington University Law School and co-author of a paper on the potential use of homicide charges in climate litigation.
“The public censure and exposure of wrongdoing that comes with a criminal prosecution is significantly more influential on shareholders, executives and companies in general than civil actions,” he said. “It’s not murder because they’re not intending to kill people, but it [climate change] is killing . . . more than you would typically see in a homicide case.”
The Bloom activist group said the case aimed to “bridge the gap that exists between the absolute scientific certainty of who bears the responsibility for the destruction of the world by climate change and the absence of clear sentencing by courts against climate crimes”.
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