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A court in Paris ruled on Thursday that energy giant TotalEnergies must account for its customer\u2019s greenhouse gas emissions, giving the French company six months to report the environmental risks caused by the consumption of its gas and oil products.<\/p>\n
The decision, which comes amid\u00a0a record heat wave in France, fell short of requests from the climate organizations who brought the lawsuit to force the company to reduce its oil and gas production.<\/p>\n
The court scheduled a new hearing for January 2027 to consider TotalEnergies\u2019 new assessment under a 2017 law that requires companies to prevent human rights abuses and environmental risks. It is the first time that the so-called corporate duty of vigilance law is being applied to\u00a0climate change.<\/p>\n
The law is not intended to make companies \u201cresponsible for the risks linked to climate change, which result from all human activity on the planet since the Industrial Revolution\u201d the court said in a statement, but rather requests them to act \u201caccording to their own situation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Environmental groups Notre Affaire \u00e0 Tous, Sherpa, ZEA, France Nature Environnement, together with the city of Paris, launched the proceedings in 2020.<\/p>\n
They claim that TotalEnergies is one of the largest historical emitters of greenhouse gas and asked the court to require the company to reduce oil production by 37% and gas production by 25% by 2030. The lawsuit also asked for a halt to all new fossil fuel projects.<\/p>\n
The court\u2019s decision comes as Europe is in the midst of a brutal heatwave. Punishing temperatures extended to the United Kingdom and Spain, where weather agencies issued red alerts \u2014 like France \u2014 about the risks of extreme heat for tens of millions of people.<\/p>\n
The iconic Eiffel Tower and the Louvre museum have been forced to restrict visiting hours and school and transportation schedules have been interrupted across the continent.<\/p>\n
Human-caused\u00a0climate change\u00a0is tied to increasingly extreme weather, and U.N. climate agency projections say the next five years are likely to\u00a0shatter more heat records.<\/p>\n
Europe is the world\u2019s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures increasing twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, according to the European Union\u2019s Copernicus Climate Change Service.<\/p>\n
Over the last four years, more than 200,000 people across Europe died from heat-related causes, and most of those deaths were preventable, the World Health Organization\u2019s Europe office said this month.<\/p>\n
The decision is the latest in a series of rulings in climate change cases. Last year, the United Nations\u2019 top court, the\u00a0International Court of Justice,\u00a0said countries could be in violation of international law\u00a0if they fail to take measures to protect the planet from climate change. In 2024, the European Court of Human Rights\u00a0ruled that countries must better protect their people from the consequences of climate change.<\/p>\n
In 2019,\u00a0the Netherlands\u2019 Supreme court handed down the first major legal win\u00a0for climate activists when judges ruled that protection from the potentially devastating effects of climate change was a human right and that the government has a duty to protect its citizens.<\/p>\n
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Quell reported from The Hague, Netherlands.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
#Paris #court #oil #giant #months #reform #climate #policies #dismissing #climate #lawsuit #demands<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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