Activists Zero In on Gas in Supermajor Court Attack
- Environmental activists are suing TotalEnergies for greenwashing.
- The activists accuse the company of misleading consumers by portraying natural gas as a clean energy solution during its 2021 rebranding campaign.
- Even if activists win the lawsuit, the impact would likely be symbolic, as global demand for gas remains strong due to its affordability, reliability, and cleaner profile compared to other fossil fuels.
Activists are suing TotalEnergies for greenwashing. The supermajor’s alleged crime: saying that natural gas is better for the environment than coal and oil. Normally, activists focus on oil when they attack the energy industry, but lately, they have shifted their attention to gas. The TotalEnergies case may be only the beginning of a new offensive.
Less than a decade ago, natural gas was broadly accepted as what many called “a bridge fuel” from the hydrocarbon era to the post-hydrocarbon era of low-emission energy. Gas was going to be around longer than coal and oil as it came to replace them to drive CO2 emissions down. Yet some activists spotted an inconsistency with that strategy. While it emits much less carbon dioxide, natural gas is mostly methane—and methane is a greenhouse gas in its own right. Also, it’s more greenhouse-y than CO2, which activists like to point out, although it gets degraded in the atmosphere much more quickly than CO2.
Perhaps the most notorious attack on natural gas was one study claiming that liquefied natural gas specifically was actually more harmful to the planet than coal. The study—although promptly debunked—led to the Biden administration imposing what it called a pause on new LNG export facility permits. President Trump removed the pause, but elsewhere, the offensive against natural gas continues.
“Total has deployed communication campaign on gas aimed at associating it with renewable energies, in an attempt to make it seem positive, clean, desirable energy and even a ‘fantastic resource for decarbonisation’. This impression is, once again, seriously erroneous,” said Clementine Baldon, one of the attorneys representing a group of environmentalist outlets, including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, as quoted by the Financial Times this week.
Baldon’s clients accuse TotalEnergies of misleading consumers with an information campaign during its rebranding from Total to TotalEnergies in 2021. The misleading consisted of TotalEnergies saying that it planned to achieve “carbon neutrality with society”, which was inconsistent, per the environmentalists, with its core business, which involved an expansion in oil and gas production—especially gas.
The allegations rest on a collection of 44 pieces of corporate communication, including things like social media posts, corporate statements on TotalEnergies’ websites, and advertising materials. TotalEnergies has countered the allegations frankly rather toothlessly, saying that “It is false and artificial to accuse TotalEnergies of greenwashing . . . TotalEnergies has never said that [fossil fuels] are good for the climate.” The company also said a lot of the information referenced by the plaintiffs was not produced for the mass consumer, so consumer laws should not apply.
In the past couple of years, supermajors began to strike back against the activists. Even TotalEnergies itself filed a lawsuit against Greenpeace for misleading information contained in a report claiming that TotalEnergies deliberately underestimated its carbon footprint. The court dismissed the case, prompting celebrations at Greenpeace, but TotalEnergies’ move to sue signaled a change in the industry with regard to activists and their attacks on it.
What this latest lawsuit shows is that these attacks are nowhere near done, which was only to be expected. Climate activists want all hydrocarbons to stay in the ground regardless of emission footprint. But because oil has been overused as a scarecrow, it is now the turn of natural gas, which is objectively cleaner, in terms of CO2 emissions and particulate material emissions, than coal and oil.
Demand for natural gas is rising globally, many countries are trying to switch from coal to gas precisely because it is cleaner in terms of actual physical pollution. From the activists’ perspective, this cannot be allowed to happen because gas is as much a hydrocarbon as is oil and as is coal. Cue the lawfare.
In truth, if the activists win this case, the victory will be mostly symbolic. They could probably get the court to order TotalEnergies to add a tobacco-style warning to its promotional materials but they could not force it to stop its LNG developments around the world—because this world needs gas and the ones supplying this gas are the energy companies like TotalEnergies.
In further truth, there is already a shift underway to reduce methane leaks along the natural gas supply chain. There are even certification providers that guarantee certain gas cargos are low-emission ones, and buyers are willing to pay a premium for them. Reducing methane leaks is more gas for sale, after all.
The activists probably do not delude themselves into thinking a court order that can stop TotalEnergies advertising can also stop it from producing natural gas. They may think such an order would sap consumers’ appetite for gas, but that would be asking for too much because there is a pretty simple reason why gas is and will continue to be in strong demand for decades to come. It is reliable, it is cheap, and it is abundant enough to remain both reliable and cheap for quite a long while. No amount of “misleading commercial practices” lawsuits can change that.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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