Badvert of the month: Total
Total advert seen on 28 July 2022 at Eurostar terminal in Brussels
Location: Eurostar terminal, Brussels seen on 28 July 2022
Company: Total (now rebranded Total Energies)
Fossil fuel majors’ unabated greenwash PR
Green rebranding, or what is commonly known as ‘brand stretching’ in marketing lingo, is when major polluting companies - especially fossil fuel firms - attempt to boost their environmental credentials and bolster their social licence to operate in the face of major public scandals and environmental disasters. Companies do this by emphasising and often over exaggerating the “greener” aspects of their business through advertisements and marketing materials, despite them making up a small fraction of their overall operations. This has a dual impact: firstly, it attempts to convince consumers that the company is an active part of the energy transition and has embraced sustainability; secondly, it distracts from the fact that the companies are often expanding the high-carbon elements of their business, in direct contravention to the latest climate science.
A prime example of this is when British Petroleum, in the early 2000s, famously rebranded itself to BP with the tagline ‘Beyond Petroleum’. With this green PR move, the company had the intention to surf over the green wave and detach itself from its image of a major fossil fuel firm. According to researchers, this rebranding paid off, although in a tragic way, by cushioning the company from the major public backlash it would be facing after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Many other fossil fuel firms have followed BP’s example and rebranded themselves as ‘integrated energy companies’ - even though the overwhelming majority of their capital expenditure continues to pour into fossil fuels.
Image 1. Total Energies advert seen on 27 February 2023 at Brussels South Railway station. Caption: Total Energies, the company for all energies
In May 2021, French fossil fuel giant Total changed its name to Total Energies. This rebranding was part of a wider strategic move for the company to advertise its target of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. This green marketing exercise was accompanied by a flurry of adverts, including giant billboards in public space, but also TV and social media ads, portraying the company as a renewable energy provider (with caption: Total Energies, the company for all energies).
Other adverts (image 1 and 2) featured grazing cows in a field and a gas hob spewing rainbow colours. All these adverts have one aim: to confuse the public with the idea that Total has transformed itself beyond the fossil fuel giant that it is. This is laid bare in the advert’s accompanying caption: “Energy is reinventing itself, Total is becoming Total Energies”. This is the logic of brand-stretching.
Image 2. Total advert seen on 25 June 2022 at Brussels South Railway station. Caption: Energy is reinventing itself, Total is becoming TotalEnergies.
High carbon ads on public transport networks
Not only are these adverts blatant examples of greenwashing and intentionally misleading, but they also appear in the most illogical places. All three of these Total Energies adverts were located inside railway stations. It is no surprise that Total would choose this prime location, where hundreds of passengers travel every day, as a billboard for its greenwashing propaganda. In fact, public transport stations are often the target of highly polluting companies’ brazen advertising for the reason that these represent the best locations to communicate to a wide and diverse audience, often multiple times. This is particularly problematic for rail authorities when these adverts end up promoting transport alternatives that are concurrent to the train, which we have illustrated in previous ‘Badverts’ with ads for SUVs, flights and holiday abroad seen repeatedly at large UK railway stations.
All in all, Total’s deceitful and distracting attempts to stretch their brand and greenwash their image highlights the current lack of regulation on high-carbon advertising. As long as these adverts are not being prohibited for good, they will keep popping up in the most random and contradictory places, ultimately driving up consumption emissions at a time when they urgently need to be curtailed.
French NGOs versus Total
In March 2022, following Total’s green PR move, three French NGOs - Greenpeace France, Les Amis de la Terre and Notre Affaire à Tous - supported by the British environmental law firm ClientEarth, brought the company to court over its misleading advertising.
These organisations contested the company’s greenwash claims to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, which they argue was in breach of European consumer law – more specifically the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive. Indeed, in its ambition Total only included its scope 1 and 2 emissions while leaving out scope 3 emissions which account for none other than more than 85% of its total carbon emissions (400 million tonnes of CO2 in 2018). However, a 2019 Greenpeace investigation revealed that Total’s entire carbon emissions (Scope 1, 2 and 3) could be even about four times higher than what it declares (based on 455 million tonnes of CO2 in 2019). This misleading strategy is often used by fossil firms who take advantage of the existing loopholes in advertising guidelines that rule how companies can market themselves and who rely on the general lack of public knowledge over these important details. The organisations also denounced Total’s promotion of gas as a ‘bridging fuel’ for the energy transition - a fact that has widely been debunked.
A year after these NGOs sued Total, the first court hearing took place at the judiciary in Paris on March 14, 2023. The fossil fuel giant attempted, unsuccessfully, to delay and block the procedure by citing reasons for why the complainants were not within their rights to bring Total to court. While the judge attempted to settle the dispute via mediation, the complainants remained firm on their attempt to get Total to remove its greenwashing adverts.
On March 23, the fossil company announced new carbon emission reduction targets of 30% of its scope 3 emissions by 2025 instead of 2030. However the company’s total emissions amount to the size of France’s territorial carbon emissions (around 400 million tonnes) and are not set to decrease drastically in the near future, with the fossil giant planning on opening up new gas fields. While the company plans on investing between 14 and 18 billion dollars in low-carbon energy - and despite a lack of clarity on what these projects are - the remaining two thirds of investments are still in fossil fuel extraction. The next court hearing will take place on May 16.
Company background: Total
Total, now TotalEnergies, is a French multinational energy and petroleum company founded in 1924. Its business operations cover the entire oil and gas chain as well as chemical manufacturing. The company was founded after WWI, as an entirely French company. The idea of a partnership with Royal Dutch Shell was rejected by the French president in power, Raymond Poincarré.
In the 1930s, the company was mainly involved with fossil fuel exploration in the Middle East as well as Normandy in France. After WWII, it opened new fields in Venezuela, Canada and Africa, including Algeria (still a French colony and a leading source of oil in the 1950s).
Archival research shows that the company was already aware of the effects of climate change and its contribution to it since the 1970s. However, the company actively contributed to spreading climate denial between the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Over the years, Total was involved in many environmental and corruption scandals. In 2019, a group of environmental NGOs sued the company over its Tilenga Project in Uganda and Tanzania for violating human rights and environmental law. The project involves drilling through a national park, home to a rich biological habitat which would also lead to hundreds of thousands of partial land expropriations. After being delayed for four years for ‘technicalities’, in February 2023, a French court dismissed the fast-track lawsuit brought by campaigners and ruled that it should go to a standard trial for in-depth examination.
Total is an active sponsor and official supplier of many sporting events, especially car championships, including the famous Dakar rally, the World Touring Car Championship, Formula One and the 24 Hours of Le Mans.