BRUSSELS — The European Commission has unveiled a new plan to end the dominance of planet-heating fossil fuels in Europe’s economy — and replace them with trees. The so-called Bioeconomy Strategy, released Thursday, aims to replace fossil fuels in products like plastics, building materials, chemicals and fibers with organic materials that regrow, such as trees and crops. “The bioeconomy holds enormous opportunities for our society, economy and industry, for our farmers and foresters and small businesses and for our ecosystem,” EU environment chief Jessika Roswall said on Thursday, in front of a staged backdrop of bio-based products, including a bathtub made of wood composite and clothing from the H&M “Conscious” range. At the center of the strategy is carbon, the fundamental building block of a wide range of manufactured products, not just energy. Almost all plastic, for example, is made from carbon, and currently most of that carbon comes from oil and natural gas. But fossil fuels have two major drawbacks: they pollute the atmosphere with planet-warming CO2, and they are mostly imported from outside the EU, compromising the bloc’s strategic autonomy. The bioeconomy strategy aims to address both drawbacks by using locally produced or recycled carbon-rich biomass rather than imported fossil fuels. It proposes doing this by setting targets in relevant legislation, such as the EU’s packaging waste laws, helping bioeconomy startups access finance, harmonizing the regulatory regime and encouraging new biomass supply. The 23-page strategy is light on legislative or funding promises, mostly piggybacking on existing laws and funds. Still, it was hailed by industries that stand to gain from a bigger market for biological materials. “The forest industry welcomes the Commission’s growth-oriented approach for bioeconomy,” said Viveka Beckeman, director general of the Swedish Forest Industries Federation, stressing the need to “boost the use of biomass as a strategic resource that benefits not only green transition and our joint climate goals but the overall economic security.” HOW RENEWABLE IS IT? But environmentalists worry Brussels may be getting too chainsaw-happy. Trees don’t grow back at the drop of a hat and pressure on natural ecosystems is already unsustainably high. Scientific reports show that the amount of carbon stored in the EU’s forests and soils is decreasing, the bloc’s natural habitats are in poor condition and biodiversity is being lost at unprecedented rates. Protecting the bloc’s forests has also fallen out of fashion among EU lawmakers. The EU’s landmark anti-deforestation law is currently facing a second, year-long delay after a vote in the European Parliament this week. In October, the Parliament also voted to scrap a law to monitor the health of Europe’s forests to reduce paperwork. Environmentalists warn the bloc may simply not have enough biomass to meet the increasing demand. “Instead of setting a strategy that confronts Europe’s excessive demand for resources, the Commission clings to the illusion that we can simply replace our current consumption with bio-based inputs, overlooking the serious and immediate harm this will inflict on people and nature,” said Eva Bille, the European Environmental Bureau’s (EEB) circular economy head, in a statement. TOO WOOD TO BE TRUE Environmental groups want the Commission to prioritize the use of its biological resources in long-lasting products — like construction — rather than lower-value or short-lived uses, like single-use packaging or fuel. A first leak of the proposal, obtained by POLITICO, gave environmental groups hope. It celebrated new opportunities for sustainable bio-based materials while also warning that the “sources of primary biomass must be sustainable and the pressure on ecosystems must be considerably reduced” — to ensure those opportunities are taken up in the longer term. It also said the Commission would work on “disincentivising inefficient biomass combustion” and substituting it with other types of renewable energy. That rankled industry lobbies. Craig Winneker, communications director of ethanol lobby ePURE, complained that the document’s language “continues an unfortunate tradition in some quarters of the Commission of completely ignoring how sustainable biofuels are produced in Europe,” arguing that the energy is “actually a co-product along with food, feed, and biogenic CO2.” Now, those lines pledging to reduce environmental pressures and to disincentivize inefficient biomass combustion are gone. “Bioenergy continues to play a role in energy security, particularly where it uses residues, does not increase water and air pollution, and complements other renewables,” the final text reads. “This is a crucial omission, given that the EU’s unsustainable production and consumption are already massively overshooting ecological boundaries and putting people, nature and businesses at risk,” said the EEB. Delara Burkhardt, a member of the European Parliament with the center-left Socialists and Democrats, said it was “good that the strategy recognizes the need to source biomass sustainably,” but added the proposal did not address sufficiency. “Simply replacing fossil materials with bio-based ones at today’s levels of consumption risks increasing pressure on ecosystems. That shifts problems rather than solving them. We need to reduce overall resource use, not just switch inputs,” she said. Roswall declined to comment on the previous draft at Thursday’s press conference. “I think that we need to increase the resources that we have, and that is what this strategy is trying to do,” she said.

BELÉM, Brazil — The European Union came into this year’s COP30 summit hoping to exorcise some of its climate demons. It did, to a degree — then found new ones.  After a year of infighting that ended in a last-minute deal on new pollution-cutting targets just before the annual U.N. conference began, the EU sought to make the case for greater global efforts to fight climate change.  But in Belém, the Amazonian host city of COP30, the 27-country bloc was confronted with a stark geopolitical reality. In the absence of the United States, which at past conferences worked with the Europeans to push for more climate action, the EU struggled to fight against the combined weight of China, India, Saudi Arabia and other rising economic powers.  “We’re living through complicated geopolitical times. So there is intrinsic value, no matter how difficult, to seek to come together,” EU climate chief Wopke Hoekstra told reporters after the bloc decided not to oppose the final conference agreement.  “We’re not going to hide the fact we would have preferred to have more,” he said. “And yet the world is what it is, the conference is what it is, and we do think this on balance is a step in the right direction.”  The end result was not what the EU had fought for — though the bloc eked out a handful of concessions after threatening to veto the deal on Friday.  To appease the EU, as well as a small group of other holdouts such as the United Kingdom and Colombia, the Brazilian presidency of COP30 tweaked its draft deal to affirm a previous agreement on transitioning away from fossil fuels and offered to start a discussion on how to achieve that deal over the next year.  A European walkout was on the cards until just after dawn on the final morning. “It was on the edge for us at times during the night — and for the EU — because we just thought actually we’ve got to be able to look people in the eye,” said U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband. Developed countries also won changes to a proposal to triple financing for poorer countries to prepare for climate disasters, which will now be provided later than developing nations wanted and draw funds from sources beyond rich countries’ budgets.  Still, the Europeans had wanted to leave Brazil with a much larger signal, laying out a clear path away from fossil fuels.  But they failed to build an alliance strong enough to counter the Saudi-led opposition — an effort hampered by geopolitical headwinds as well as internal divisions that had followed the EU from Brussels all the way to Belém.  LINGERING DIVISIONS  Divisions over climate change that had dogged the EU throughout the year did affect the bloc’s negotiations. Until Friday morning, hours before the conference was scheduled to end, the EU was forced to take a back seat each time countries from across the globe came together to urge greater ambition.  A European walkout was on the cards until just after dawn on the final morning. “It was on the edge for us at times during the night — and for the EU,” confirmed U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband. | Pablo Porciuncula/AFP via Getty Images On Tuesday, the EU was absent from an 82-country call spearheaded by Colombia to draw up a “roadmap” to deliver on the earlier agreement to transition away from fossil fuels.  Many of the bloc’s governments individually backed the move, but two diplomats said Italy and Poland could not support the agreement at the time, leaving the EU as a whole unable to throw its weight behind the call. The bloc eventually proposed its own version.  Similarly, the EU was not among the signatories on Thursday when a coalition of 29 countries sent a letter to the Brazilian COP30 presidency to complain that a draft proposal in the works did not contain a reference to the roadmap or other efforts.  The majority of the bloc’s governments backed the missive, but 10 EU countries — including Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Slovakia — did not. The split broadly reflected the divisions that had plagued the EU’s climate politics for much of this year.  The bloc spent the past few months trying to agree on a pair of new targets to reduce emissions, a fractious process that met with resistance from countries concerned about the impact of green efforts on their domestic industries.  The 27 governments eventually struck a deal on the eve of COP30, setting new goals that were softer than initially envisaged but nevertheless rank among the world’s most ambitious.  Yet by that point, it was far too late for the EU to leverage its targets and pressure other big emitters, such as China, into stepping up their efforts. (Beijing’s envoy suggested in an interview with POLITICO that if the bloc wanted to be a climate leader, the EU needed to sort out its internal divisions.)  “They used to be more active, more vocal. It feels like their pendulum swing at home is having an impact,” one Latin American negotiator said. “They keep their positions, no backtracking, but it doesn’t feel as strong anymore. Like the passion is gone.”  ISOLATED IN BELÉM Yet when all countries were presented with the Brazilian presidency’s draft deal on Friday morning, the EU decided to take a stand.  Three European diplomats said the entire bloc was united in fury at the text — with everyone from the most climate-ambitious nations such as Denmark to laggards such as Poland fuming about weak language on cutting emissions and crossed red lines on finance.  All ministers were asked to get on the phone to their capitals to request permission to veto a deal if necessary, four diplomats said. Hoekstra told a gathering convened by the Brazilians: “Under no circumstances are we going to accept this.”  COP30 President Andre Correa do Lago. To appease the EU, the U.K., Colombia and others, the Brazilian presidency of COP30 tweaked its draft deal on fossil fuels. | Pablo Porciuncula/AFP via Getty Images “We stayed united until the end, despite the fact that of course we all had differences in our assessment of the overall situation here,” said Monique Barbut, France’s ecological transition minister.  The strength of the EU delegation’s message, however, was somewhat undercut by their own leader: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Speaking around the same time at the G20 in South Africa, von der Leyen asserted: “We are not fighting fossil fuels, we are fighting the emissions from fossil fuels.” “She’s a star in undermining her own negotiators during COP,” one EU diplomat complained.  But the EU also faced a new geopolitical reality in Belém.  German Climate Minister Carsten Schneider on Saturday spoke of a “new world order” that the EU would need to get used to. “Something has changed, and that has become very apparent here.”  Throughout the two weeks, European diplomats complained bitterly about the tactics employed by Saudi Arabia and other major oil producers, which fiercely opposed any call to tackle fossil fuels.  Riyadh and its allies, they said, were emboldened by Washington’s absence and constantly took the floor in meetings to derail the talks. Notes from a closed-door meeting shared with POLITICO also show that Saudi Arabia sought to bash the bloc for imposing carbon tariffs.  “We faced a very strong petro-industry… which organised a blocking majority here against any progress,” Schneider said.  The bloc was frustrated about what they saw as Brazil pandering to its BRICS allies — China, India, South Africa and other emerging economies — in walking right over the EU’s red lines on providing climate aid and pushing the bloc into uncomfortable discussions on trade measures.  But they also left feeling abandoned by traditional allies, such as small island states, that they had counted on to back their push for more climate action. In the end, the Europeans and a handful of Latin American countries stood alone.  “We need to do some real thinking about what the EU’s role in these global talks is,” one senior European negotiator said. “We underestimated the BRICS and overestimated our strength a little bit — and we definitely overestimated the unity of those we consider our allies.” 

BELÉM, Brazil — The European Union is preparing to veto the final deal at this year’s climate summit if countries do not agree to stronger efforts to cut planet-warming emissions, according to four European diplomats. The negotiators said the 27 countries were united in their anger at the draft deal that the COP 30 talks’ Brazilian presidency offered Friday morning, saying it had crossed the bloc’s red lines on financing and did not reflect their push for countries to do more to slash pollution. The European Commission took the unusual step of publishing a short speech that climate chief Wopke Hoekstra gave in a closed-door meeting at noon local time Friday. The current draft deal contains “no science… no transitioning away [from fossil fuels]… But instead, weakness,” Hoekstra said. “Under no circumstances are we going to accept this… You can count on us to do our absolute utmost to deliver. Not for the EU. But for all of us.” At a coordination meeting this morning, EU ministers were asked to secure support from their governments to block the final agreement if no changes are made, the four diplomats said. “We’ve told ourselves in the past that we should have the balls to walk out if the text is not strong enough. But until today I’ve not heard us say it this loudly and as part of an actual strategy,” one of the diplomats said. The diplomat, like others in this article, was granted anonymity in order to discuss the private meetings. The divisions set up a possibility that countries could walk away from these talks without a final outcome. The Brazilian president of this year’s COP30 talks, André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, pleaded in an opening speech for countries to come together and show their support for the 2015 Paris Agreement, especially after the United States walked out of the deal and refused to send delegates to the conference in Brazil. “This cannot be an agenda that divides us,” Corrêa do Lago said. “But at the same time that we have to face the fact that the largest economy in the world has left the Paris accord, we have to remember that we all stay in because we all believe in it. We cannot be divided inside the Paris accord.” But a second European diplomat said that, in the absence of the U.S., a group of emerging economies including China, Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa, known as the BRICS, had seized the initiative to stamp down on efforts to cut emissions. “This is a BRICS COP,” the diplomat said. “They’re circling around now a text which is designed for them and they’re all now saying it’s a take-it-or-leave-it text.” Alden Meyer, a long-time COP watcher and senior associate at climate think tank E3G, said: “There’s definitely a possibility this could fall apart.” A proposed roadmap for tracking and marking national progress in transitioning off fossil fuels, backed by more than 80 countries including most of Europe, did not appear in the text. It has become one of the key asks for governments trying to enhance global progress for ditching fossil fuels that are heating the planet. But a clutch of oil-, gas- and coal-producing countries has resisted the effort, which has become the most divisive issue at the negotiations. “We can only talk about things that are in the text,” Maesela Kekana, South Africa’s lead negotiator, said in an interview. “Why are you talking about something that does not exist?” The text largely accounts for where the world is with respect to hitting national climate goals and a challenging geopolitical situation, said Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at think tank Asia Society. He said that includes U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats on trade and an EU bloc whose nations are responding to domestic calls to restore industrial competitiveness. “I see the current text as actually a pretty accurate reflection of that situation,” he said, describing “the lack of ambition and the fact that many countries are having a hard time on their domestic climate push.” But for the EU and many vulnerable countries, it’s essential to leave Belém with a strategy to address the enormous gap between the world’s collective emissions-cutting efforts and the Paris Agreement targets to curb global warming. “We cannot negotiate with a text that does not include a mention of fossil fuels, a mention of a roadmap to end deforestation. We cannot take as good faith a text that fails to set a global goal on adaptation finance,” said Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s lead negotiator. “It is simply so weak that it’s offensive.” The European countries were also preparing to cross their own red lines on proposals to funnel more money toward developing countries’ efforts to prepare for climate disasters. The draft text includes a commitment to triple the finance now flowing to poorer countries to help them cope with the ravages of climate change, known as adaptation finance, by 2030. That’s an unacceptable timeline, said the second European diplomat. But indicated that 2035 might be acceptable. It “goes well beyond the red lines of what most of us came in with,” said the diplomat. “The trebling is more than most donors can do, but we’re kind of over a barrel.” If the EU gets more on climate action, Hoekstra said in his speech published online, “yes you can ask the EU to move beyond its comfort zone on the financing of adaptation.”

BELÉM, Brazil — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Friday that the fight against climate change was not against the fuels that cause it — only the pollution they emit. “We are not fighting fossil fuels, we are fighting the emissions from fossil fuels,” said von der Leyen at a press conference at the G20 in South Africa. The comment could undermine the EU position, just as European ministers were set to make a stand for a “roadmap” to move away from coal, oil and gas at the COP30 climate talks, taking place on the other side of the Atlantic in Brazil. A draft deal, suggested by the Brazilian presidency, contained no reference to past deals to move away from fossil fuels, nor did it have the roadmap pushed for by many EU countries, though notably not the EU itself. Overnight, 14 EU member states joined 22 other countries, many of them highly vulnerable to climate impacts, threatening to collapse the talks over the absence of fossil fuels from the deal. “We cannot support an outcome that does not include a roadmap for implementing a just, orderly, and equitable transition away from fossil fuels,” said a letter from those countries to the Brazilian organizers, seen by POLITICO. Von der Leyen emphasized Friday that the EU was not resiling from its legal climate goals. “We are staying the course,” she said. “We’re very clear that we want to reach those targets. We are well on track for the 2030 target. On the way forward we have to be adaptable and flexible. because thsi is a huge transition taht is happening. No one has done this before. So we really are in uncharted waters.” Asked about von der Leyen’s comments just as he was walking into a United Nations plenary, EU climate chief Wopke Hoekstra said: “The problem is caused by emissions, and the reality is that the dirtier the fossil fuel, the more damage they are doing.” That, he added, was why the EU was calling for greater efforts to cut planet-warming emissions at COP30. Danish Climate Minister Lars Aagaard, walking beside Hoekstra, said: “Emissions are a consequence of fossil fuels, so I find it a bit hard to see the distinction. What we need to see here is to have the emissions down. That’s what we are aiming for, that’s what we came for.” European lawmakers on the ground in Belém were more critical of von der Leyen’s words. “I believe she’s trying to be diplomatic, but one thing is very clear: We need to exit fossil fuels to lower our emissions,” said Lena Schilling, an MEP from the Greens. “Europe is fighting to increase ambition” on reducing emissions at COP30, “and that’s the goal I think von der Leyen should stand behind, like every member state,” said Mohammed Chahim, vice president of the center-left Socialists & Democrats in the European Parliament. Emissions, he added, “are fully connected to fossil fuels, so I think Europe should support the call of phasing out fossil fuels.” Noting that the focus on tackling emissions rather than their source often implies extensive use of carbon capture technology (CCS), which is as yet unavailable at scale, he referred to something Hoekstra said repeatedly at last year’s climate summit: “Like a very smart commissioner said at the previous COP, you cannot CCS yourself out of everything.”

By ALEX PERRY in Paris Illustrations by Julius Maxim for POLITICO This article is also available in French When Patrick Pouyanné decided to spend billions on a giant natural gas field in a faraway warzone, he made the call alone, over a single dinner, with the head of a rival energy company. Pouyanné, the chairman and CEO of what was then called Total, was dining with Vicki Hollub, CEO of Houston-based Occidental Petroleum. It was late April 2019, and Hollub was in a David and Goliath battle with the American energy behemoth Chevron to buy Anadarko, like Occidental a mid-sized Texan oil and gas explorer. The American investor Warren Buffett was set to back Hollub with $10 billion, but it wasn’t enough. So Hollub flew to Paris to meet Pouyanné. Hollub’s proposal: Pouyanné would pitch in $8.8 billion in exchange for Anadarko’s four African gas fields, including a vast deep-sea reserve off northern Mozambique, an area in the grip of an Islamist insurgency. The Frenchman, who had previously approached Anadarko about the same assets, said yes in a matter of minutes. Advertisement “What are the strengths of Total?” Pouyanné explained to an Atlantic Council event in Washington a few weeks later. “LNG,” he went on, and the “Middle East and Africa,” regions where the company has operated since its origin in the colonial era. “So it’s just fitting exactly and perfectly.” Total, “a large corporation,” could be “so agile,” he said, because of the efficacy of his decision-making, and the clarity of his vision to shift from oil to lower-emission gas, extracted from lightly regulated foreign lands. In the end, “it [was] just a matter of sending an email to my colleague [Hollub],” he added. “This is the way to make good deals.” Six years later, it’s fair to ask if Pouyanné was a little hasty. On Nov. 17, a European human rights NGO filed a criminal complaint with the national counterterrorism prosecutor’s office in Paris accusing TotalEnergies of complicity in war crimes, torture and enforced disappearances, all in northern Mozambique. The allegations turn on a massacre, first reported by POLITICO last year, in which Mozambican soldiers crammed about 200 men into shipping containers at the gatehouse of a massive gas liquefaction plant TotalEnergies is building in the country, then killed most of them over the next three months. The complaint, submitted by the nonprofit European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), alleges that TotalEnergies became an accomplice in the “so-called ‘container massacre’” because it “directly financed and materially supported” the Mozambican soldiers who carried out the executions, which took place between June and September 2021. “TotalEnergies knew that the Mozambican armed forces had been accused of systematic human rights violations, yet continued to support them with the only objective to secure its facility,” said Clara Gonzales, co-director of the business and human rights program at ECCHR, a Berlin-based group specializing in international law that has spent the past year corroborating the atrocity. In response to the complaint, a company spokesperson in Paris said in a written statement: “TotalEnergies takes these allegations very seriously” and would “comply with the lawful investigation prerogatives of the French authorities.” Last year, in response to questions by POLITICO, the company — through its subsidiary Mozambique LNG — said it had no knowledge of the container killings, adding that its “extensive research” had “not identified any information nor evidence that would corroborate the allegations of severe abuses and torture.” This week, the spokesperson repeated that position. Advertisement Asked in May in the French National Assembly about the killings, Pouyanné dismissed “these false allegations” and demanded the company’s accusers “put their evidence on the table.” Questioned about the complaint on French television this week, he again rejected the allegations and described them as a “smear campaign” motivated by the fact that TotalEnergies produces fossil fuels. The war crimes complaint is based on POLITICO’s reporting and other open-source evidence. In the last year, the container killings have been confirmed by the French newspaper Le Monde and the British journalism nonprofit Source Material. The British Mozambique expert Professor Joseph Hanlon also said the atrocity was “well known locally,” and an investigation carried out by UK Export Finance (UKEF) — the British state lender, which is currently weighing delivery of a $1.15 billion loan to Total’s project — has heard evidence from its survivors.  The massacre was an apparent reprisal for a devastating attack three months earlier by ISIS-affiliated rebels on the nearby town of Palma, just south of the border with Tanzania, which killed 1,354 civilians, including 55 of Total’s workforce, according to a house-to-house survey carried out by POLITICO. Of those ISIS murdered, it beheaded 330. TotalEnergies has previously noted that Mozambique has yet to issue an official toll for the Palma massacre. In March, a French magistrate began investigating TotalEnergies for involuntary manslaughter over allegations that it abandoned its contractors to the onslaught.  After the jihadis left the area in late June, Mozambican commandos based at Total’s gas concession rounded up 500 villagers and accused them of backing the rebels. They separated men from women and children, raped several of the women, then forced the 180-250 men into two metal windowless shipping containers that formed a rudimentary fortified entrance to Total’s plant. There, the soldiers kept their prisoners in 30-degree-Celsius heat for three months. According to eleven survivors and two witnesses, some men suffocated. Fed handfuls of rice and bottle caps of water, others starved or died of thirst. The soldiers beat and tortured many of the rest. Finally, they began taking them away in groups and executing them. Only 26 men survived, saved when a Rwandan intervention force, deployed to fight ISIS, discovered the operation. A second house-to-house survey conducted by POLITICO later identified by name 97 of those killed or disappeared. Along with the new ECCHR complaint and the British inquiry, the killings are the subject of three other separate investigations: by the Mozambican Attorney General, the Mozambican National Human Rights Commission, and the Dutch government, which is probing $1.2 billion in Dutch state financing for TotalEnergies’ project. This week’s complaint was lodged with the offices of the French National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor, whose remit includes war crimes. The prosecutor will decide whether to open a formal inquiry and appoint an investigating magistrate.  Should the case move ahead, TotalEnergies will face the prospect of a war crimes trial.  Such an eventuality would represent a spectacular fall from grace for a business that once held a central place in French national identity and a CEO whose hard-nosed resolve made him an icon of global business. Should a French court eventually find the company or its executives liable in the container killings, the penalties could include fines and, possibly, jail terms for anybody indicted. How did TotalEnergies get here? How did Patrick Pouyanné? ‘POUYANNÉ PETROLEUM’ Born in Normandy in 1963, the son of a provincial customs official and a post office worker, Pouyanné elevated himself to the French elite by winning selection to the École Polytechnique, the country’s foremost engineering university, and then the École des Mines, where France’s future captains of industry are made. Following a few years in politics as a minister’s aide, he joined the French state petroleum company Elf as an exploration manager in Angola in 1996. After moving to Qatar in 1999 as Elf merged with Total, Pouyanné ascended to the top job at Total in 2014 after his predecessor, Christophe de Margerie, was killed in a plane crash in Moscow. Pouyanné led by reason, and force of will. “To be number one in a group like Total … is to find yourself alone,” he said in 2020. “When I say ‘I don’t agree,’ sometimes the walls shake. I realize this.” A decade at the top has seen Pouyanné, 62, transform a company of 100,000 employees in 130 countries into a one-man show — “Pouyanné Petroleum,” as the industry quip goes. His frequent public appearances, and his unapologetically firm hand, have made him a celebrated figure in international business. “Patrick Pouyanné has done an extraordinary job leading TotalEnergies in a complex environment, delivering outstanding financial results and engaging the company in the energy transition quicker and stronger than its peers,” Jacques Aschenbroich, the company’s lead independent director, said in 2023. Advertisement Marc-Antoine Eyl-Mazzega, director of energy and climate at the French Institute of International Relations, agreed. “His involvement is his strength,” he said. “He’s able to take a decision quickly, in a much more agile and rapid way.” Still, Eyl-Mazzega said, “I’m not sure everyone is happy to work with him. You have to keep up the pace. There are often departures. He’s quite direct and frank.”  Among employees, Pouyanné’s lumbering frame and overbearing manner has earned him a nickname: The Bulldozer. The moniker isn’t always affectionate. A former Total executive who dealt regularly with him recalled him as unpleasantly aggressive, “banging fists on the table.” The effect, the executive said, has been to disempower the staff: “The structure of Total is trying to guess what Pouyanné wants to do. You can’t make any decisions unless it goes to the CEO.” In a statement to POLITICO, TotalEnergies called such depictions “misplaced and baseless.” ‘DON’T ASK US TO TAKE THE MORAL HIGH GROUND’ What’s not in dispute is how Pouyanné has used his authority to shape Total’s answer to the big 21st-century oil and gas puzzle: how to square demand for fossil fuels with simultaneous demands from politicians and climate campaigners to eliminate them. His response has been diversification, moving the company away from high-emission fuels towards becoming a broad-based, ethical energy supplier, centered on low-carbon gas, solar and wind, and pledging to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The change was symbolized by Pouyanné’s renaming of the company TotalEnergies in 2021. A second, more unsung element of Pouyanné’s strategy has been moving much of his remaining fossil fuel operation beyond Western regulation.  Speaking to an audience at Chatham House in London in 2017, he said the catalyst for his move to favor reserves in poorer, less tightly policed parts of the planet was the penalties imposed on the British energy giant BP in the United States following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout, in which 11 men died and an oil slick devastated the Gulf of Mexico coast. Pouyanné declared that the fines — between $62 billion and $142 billion, depending on the calculation used — represented an excessive “legal risk” to oil and gas development in the West. While other, more troubled territories came with their share of dangers, Pouyanné put the cost of failure of any project outside the West at a more manageable $2 to $3 billion, according to his Chatham House remarks. As a way of assessing risk, it was efficient. “Other players would spend a lot of money on consultancies and write 70 reports to conclude that a project is risky,” Eyl-Mazzega said. “Pouyanné, on the other hand, is prepared to take risks.” Asked by the French Senate in 2024 how he chose where to invest, however, Pouyanné admitted that his math was strictly about the bottom line. “Don’t ask us to take the moral high ground,” he said. ‘A COLLAPSE WILL NOT PUT TOTAL IN DANGER’ The first oil and gas prospectors arrived in northern Mozambique in 2006 as part of a Western effort to broaden supply beyond the Middle East. When Anadarko found gas 25 miles out to sea in 2010, the talk was of Mozambique as the new Qatar. At 2.6 million acres, or about a third of the size of Belgium, Rovuma Basin Area 1 was a monster, thought to hold 75 trillion cubic feet of gas, or 1 percent of all global reserves. An adjacent field, Area 4, quickly snapped up by ExxonMobil, was thought to hold even more. To cope with the volume of production, Anadarko’s Area 1 consortium drew up a plan for a $20 billion onshore liquefaction plant. Together with ExxonMobil’s field, the cost of developing Mozambique’s gas was estimated at $50 billion, which would make it the biggest private investment ever made in Africa. But in 2017, an ISIS insurgency emerged to threaten those ambitions.  By the time Pouyanné was preparing to buy Anadarko’s 26.5 percent share in Area 1 two years later, what had begun as a ragtag revolt against government corruption in the northern province of Cabo Delgado had become a full-scale Islamist rebellion.  Insurgents were taking ever more territory, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and regularly staging mass beheadings. Even under construction, the gas plant was a regular target. It was run by Europeans and Americans, intending to make money for companies thousands of miles away while displacing 2,733 villagers to build their concession and banning fishermen from waters around their drill sites. After several attacks on plant traffic to and from the facility, in February 2019, the militants killed two project workers in a village attack and dismembered a contract driver in the road.  A further risk had its origins in a ban on foreigners carrying guns. That made the plant reliant for security on the Mozambican army and police, both of which had a well-documented record of criminality and repression. Initially, Pouyanné seemed unconcerned. The gas field was outside international law, as Mozambique had not ratified the Rome Statute setting up the International Criminal Court. And Pouyanné appeared to see the pursuit of high-risk, high-reward projects almost as an obligation for a deep-pocketed corporation, telling the Atlantic Council in May 2019, soon after he agreed the Mozambique deal, that Total was so big, it didn’t need to care — at least, not in the way of other, lesser companies or countries. “We love risk, so we have decided to embark on the Mozambique story,” he said. “Even if there is a collapse, [it] will [not] put Total in danger.” Advertisement In September 2019, when Total’s purchase was formally completed, the company declared in a press release: “The Mozambique LNG project is largely derisked.” In one of several statements to POLITICO, TotalEnergies explained the term echoed the boss’s focus on “the project’s commercial and financial fundamentals. To infer this was a dismissal of security concerns amounts to a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the sector operates.” Still, for workers at the project, it was an arresting statement, given that a Mozambique LNG worker had recently been chopped to pieces. Around the same time, the project managers at Anadarko, many of whom were now working for Total, tried to warn their new CEO of the danger posed by the insurgency. It was when they met Pouyanné, however, that “things then all started to unwind,” said one. Pouyanné regaled the team who had worked on the Mozambique project for years with a speech “on how brilliant Total was, and how brilliantly Total was going to run this project,” a second executive added. Pouyanné added he had “a French hero” running the company’s security: Denis Favier who, as a police commander, led a team of police commandos as they stormed a hijacked plane on the tarmac at Marseille in 1994, and in 2015, as France’s most senior policeman, commanded the operation to hunt and kill the Islamist brothers who shot dead 12 staff at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris. “This is easy for him,” Pouyanné said. Asked about the transition from Anadarko to Total, the company maintained it was responsive to all concerns expressed by former Anadarko workers. “We are not aware of any such dismissal of security concerns by TotalEnergies or its senior management,” the company said. “It is incorrect to state that advice from the ground was not listened to.” Still, after meeting Pouyanné, the old Anadarko team called their Mozambique staff together to brief them on their new boss. “Well, holy shit,” one manager began, according to a person present. “We’ve got a problem.” ‘VERY VULNERABLE’ A third former Anadarko staffer who stayed on to work for Total said that on taking over, the company also put on hold a decision to move most contractors and staff from hotels and compounds in Palma to inside its fortified camp — a costly move that Anadarko was planning in response to deteriorating security. “This was a danger I had worked so hard to eliminate,” the staffer said. “Palma was very vulnerable. Almost nobody was supposed to be [there]. But Total wouldn’t listen to me.” Other measures, such as grouping traffic to and from the plant in convoys and flanking them with drones, also ended. One project contractor who regularly made the run through rebel territory described the difference between Anadarko and Total as “night and day.” Then in June 2020, the rebels captured Mocimboa da Praia, the regional hub, and killed at least eight subcontractors. In late December that year, they staged another advance that brought them to Total’s gates. At that, Pouyanné reversed course and assumed personal oversight of the security operation, the first Anadarko manager said. Despite no expertise in security, “[he] had to get into every little last possible detail.” The second executive concurred. “It went from, ‘I don’t care, we’ve got the best security people in the business to run this’ to ‘Oh my God, this is a disaster, let me micromanage it and control it,’” he said. The company was “not aware of any … criticism that Mr. Pouyanné lacks the necessary expertise,” TotalEnergies said, adding the CEO had “first-hand experience of emergency evacuation … [from] when Total had to evacuate its staff from Yemen in 2015.” The insurgents’ advance prompted Pouyanné to order the evacuation of all TotalEnergies staff. By contrast, many contractors and subcontractors, some of them behind schedule because of Covid, were told to keep working, according to email exchanges among contractors seen by POLITICO. “Mozambique LNG did not differentiate between its own employees, its contractors or subcontractors when giving these instructions,” the company said, but added that it was not responsible for the decisions of its contractors. Advertisement Then, in February 2021, Pouyanné flew to Maputo, the Mozambican capital, to negotiate a new security deal with then Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi. Afterward, the two men announced the creation of the Joint Task Force, a 1,000-man unit of soldiers and armed police to be stationed inside the compound.  The deal envisaged that the new force would protect a 25-kilometer radius around the gas plant, including Palma and several villages. In practice, by concentrating so many soldiers and police inside the wire, it left Palma comparatively exposed. “It is incorrect to allege that Palma was left poorly defended,” the company said. “However, it is a fact that these security forces were overwhelmed by the magnitude and violence of the terrorist attacks in March 2021.” TotalEnergies added it is not correct to say that “Mr. Pouyanné personally managed the security deal setting up the Joint Task Force.” ‘TRAIN WRECK’ By this time, the company’s own human rights advisers were warning that by helping to create the Joint Task Force — to which the company agreed to pay what it described as “hardship payments” via a third party, as well as to equip it and accommodate it on its compound — Pouyanné was effectively making TotalEnergies a party to the conflict, and implicating it in any human rights abuses the soldiers carried out. Just as worrying was TotalEnergies’ insistence — according to a plant security manager, and confirmed by minutes of a Total presentation on security released under a Dutch freedom of information request — that all major security decisions be handled by a 20-man security team 5,000 miles away in Paris. That centralization seemed to help explain how, when the Islamists finally descended on Palma on March 24, 2021, Total was among the last to know. One Western security contractor told POLITICO he had pulled his people out 10 days before the assault, based on intelligence he had on guns and young men being pre-positioned in town. In the days immediately preceding the attack, villagers around Palma warned friends and relatives in town that they had seen the Islamists advancing. WhatsApp messages seen by POLITICO indicate contractors reported the same advance to plant security on March 22 and March 23. Advertisement Nonetheless, at 9 a.m. on March 24, TotalEnergies in Paris announced that it was safe for its staff to return. Hours later, the Islamists attacked. “Neither Mozambique LNG nor TotalEnergies received any specific ‘advance warnings’ of an impending attack prior to March 24,” the company said. Faced with a three-pronged advance by several hundred militants, the plant security manager said TotalEnergies’ hierarchical management pyramid was unable to cope. Ground staff could not respond to evolving events, paralyzed by the need to seek approval for decisions from Paris. Total’s country office in Maputo was also in limbo, according to the security manager, neither able to follow what was happening in real-time, nor authorized to respond.  ‘WHO CAN HELP US?!’ Two decisions, taken as the attack unfolded, compounded the havoc wreaked by the Islamists. The first was Total’s refusal to supply aviation fuel to the Dyck Advisory Group (DAG), a small, South African private military contractor working with the Mozambican police. With the police and army overrun, DAG’s small helicopters represented the only functional military force in Palma and the only unit undertaking humanitarian rescues. But DAG’s choppers were limited by low supplies of jet fuel, forcing them to fly an hour away to refuel, and to ground their fleet intermittently. Total, as one of the world’s biggest makers of aviation fuel, with ample stocks at the gas plant, was in a position to help. But when DAG asked Total in Paris for assistance, it refused. “Word came down from the mountain,” DAG executive Max Dyck said, “and that was the way it was going to be.” Total has conceded that it refused fuel to DAG — out of concern for the rescuers’ human rights record, the company said — but made fuel available to the Mozambican security services. DAG later hired an independent lawyer to investigate its record, who exonerated the company. Advertisement A second problematic order was an edict, handed down by Pouyanné’s executives in Paris in the months before the massacre, according to the plant security manager, that should the rebels attack, gate security guards at the gas plant were to let no one in. It was an instruction that could only have been drawn up by someone ignorant of the area’s geography, the man said.  If the Islamists blocked the three roads in and out of Palma, as conventional tactics would prescribe, the only remaining ways out for the population of 60,000 would be by sea or air — both routes that went through TotalEnergies’s facility, with its port and airport. By barring the civilians’ way, the company would be exposing them. So it proved. TotalEnergies soon had 25,000 fleeing civilians at its gates, according to an internal company report obtained under a freedom of information request by an Italian NGO, Recommon. Among the crowd were hundreds of project subcontractors and workers. Witnesses described to POLITICO how families begged TotalEnergies’ guards to let them in. Mothers were passing their babies forward to be laid in front of the gates. But TotalEnergies in Paris refused to allow its guards on the ground to open up. On March 28, the fifth day of the attack, Paris authorized a ferry to evacuate 1,250 staff and workers from the gas plant, and make a single return trip to pick up 1,250 civilians, who had sneaked inside the perimeter. That still left tens of thousands stranded at its gates. On March 29, a TotalEnergies community relations manager in Paris made a panicked call to Caroline Brodeur, a contact at Oxfam America. “He’s like, ‘There’s this huge security situation in Mozambique!’” Brodeur said. “An escalation of violence! We will need to evacuate people! Who can help us? Which NGO can support us with logistics?’” Thirty minutes later, the man called back. “Wait,” he told Brodeur. “Don’t do anything.” TotalEnergies’ senior managers had overruled him, the man said. No outsiders were to be involved. “I think he was trying to do the right thing,” Brodeur said in an interview with POLITICO. “But after that, Total went silent.” Over the next two months, the jihadis killed hundreds of civilians in and around Palma and the gas plant before the Rwandan intervention force pushed them out. The second former Anadarko and Total executive said the rebels might have attacked Palma, whoever was in charge at the gas project. But Total’s distant, centralized management made a “train wreck … inevitable.” Advertisement TotalEnergies said its response to the attack “mitigated as much as was reasonably possible the consequences.” Confirming the phone call to Oxfam, it added: “There was no effort by whoever within TotalEnergies to shut any possibility for external assistance down.” The company was especially adamant that Pouyanné was not at fault.  “The allegation that Mr. Pouyanné’s management of TotalEnergies exacerbated the devastation caused by the attacks in Mozambique is entirely unsubstantiated,” it said. “Mr. Pouyanné takes the safety and security of the staff extremely seriously.” In his television appearance this week, Pouyanné defended the company’s performance. “We completely evacuated the site,” he said. “We were not present at that time.” He said he considered that TotalEnergies, whose security teams had helped “more than 2,000 civilians evacuate the area,” “had carried out heroic actions.” ‘AN ALMOST PERFECT DINNER PARTY’  TotalEnergies’ troubles in Mozambique have come amid a wider slump in the country’s fortunes and reputation. Years of climate protests outside the company’s annual general meetings in central Paris peaked in 2023 when police dispersed activists with batons and tear gas. For the last two years, TotalEnergies has retreated behind a line of security checks and riot police at its offices in Défense, in the western part of Paris. Though the company intended 2024, its centenary year, as a celebration, the company succeeded mostly in looking past its prime. When Pouyanné took over in 2014, Total was France’s biggest company, and 37th in the world. Today, it is France’s seventh largest and not even in the global top 100.  Several French media houses chose the occasion of TotalEnergies’ 100th birthday to declare open season on the company, portraying it as a serial offender on pollution, corruption, worker safety, and climate change. Pouyanné has also presided over a rift with the French establishment. Last year, when he suggested listing in New York to boost the stock, French President Emmanuel Macron berated him in public. Advertisement The division grew wider a few weeks later when the French Senate concluded a six-month inquiry into the company with a recommendation that the formerly state-owned enterprise be partly taken back into public ownership.  The company has faced five separate lawsuits, civil and criminal, claiming it is breaking French law on climate protection and corporate conduct.  In a sixth case, brought by environmentalists in Paris last month, a judge ordered TotalEnergies to remove advertising from its website claiming it was part of the solution to climate change. Given the company’s ongoing investments in fossil fuels, that was misleading, the judge said, decreeing that TotalEnergies take down its messaging and upload the court’s ruling instead. The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has also led protests against TotalEnergies’ East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline. That project, intended to pump oil 1,000 miles from Uganda across Tanzania to the Indian Ocean, is similarly embroiled in accusations of human rights abuses, drawing criticism from the European Parliament plus 28 banks and 29 insurance companies who have refused to finance it. Pouyanné has also taken hits to his personal brand. A low point came in 2022 when he chose the moment his countrymen were recovering from Covid and struggling with soaring fuel prices to defend his salary of €5,944,129 a year. He was “tired” of the accusation that he had received a 52 percent rise, he wrote on Twitter. His pay, he added, had merely been restored to pre-pandemic levels.  Overnight, the CEO became the unacceptable face of French capitalism. “Pouyanné lives in another galaxy, far, far away,” said one TV host. Under a picture of the CEO, an MP from the leftist France Unbowed movement wrote: “A name, a face. The obstacle in the way of a nation.” So heated and widely held is the contempt that in 2023 the company produced a guide for its French employees on how to handle it. Titled “An Almost Perfect Dinner Party,” the booklet lays out arguments and data that staff might use to defend themselves at social occasions. “Have you ever been questioned, during a dinner with family or friends, about a controversy concerning the Company?” it asked. “Did you have the factual elements to answer your guests?” ‘FALSE ALLEGATIONS’ The war crimes case lodged this week against TotalEnergies was filed in France, despite the alleged crimes occurring in Mozambique, because, it argues, TotalEnergies’ nationality establishes jurisdiction.  The case represents a dramatic example of the extension of international justice — the prosecution in one country of crimes committed in another. A movement forged in Nuremberg and Tokyo in the wake of World War II, the principles of international justice have been used more recently by national and international courts to bring warlords and dictators to trial — and by national courts to prosecute citizens or companies implicated in abuses abroad where local justice systems are weak. U.S. courts have ordered ExxonMobil and banana giant Chiquita to stand trial for complicity in atrocities committed in the late 1990s and early 2000s by soldiers or militias paid to protect their premises in Indonesia and Colombia, respectively. Exxon settled a week before the case opened in 2023. A Florida court ordered Chiquita to pay $38 million to the families of eight murdered Colombian men in June 2024; Chiquita’s appeal was denied that October.  In Sweden, two executives from Lundin Oil are currently on trial for complicity in war crimes after Sudanese troops and government militias killed an estimated 12,000 people between 1999 and 2003 as they cleared the area around a company drill site. The executives deny the accusations against them. Advertisement ECCHR has initiated several international justice cases. Most notably, in 2016, it and another legal non-profit, Sherpa, filed a criminal complaint in Paris against the French cement maker Lafarge, accusing its Syrian plant of paying millions of dollars in protection money to ISIS. Earlier this month, Lafarge and eight executives went on trial in Paris, accused of funding terrorism and breaking international sanctions — charges they deny. The war crimes complaint against TotalEnergies cites internal documents, obtained under freedom of information requests in Italy and the Netherlands, that show staff at the site knew the soldiers routinely committed human rights abuses against civilians while working for the company.  There were “regular community allegations of JTF [Joint Task Force] human rights violations,” read one, including “physical violence, and arrests/disappearances.” The report also referred to “troops who were allegedly involved in a [human rights] case in August [2021].” These were deemed so serious that TotalEnergies suspended pay to all 1,000 Joint Task Force soldiers and the army expelled 200 from the region, according to the internal document. The ECCHR complaint accuses TotalEnergies and “X”, a designation leaving open the possibility for the names of unspecified company executives to be added. Among those named in the document’s 56 pages are Pouyanné and five other TotalEnergies executives and employees. Favier, the company’s security chief, is not among them. TotalEnergies declined to make any of its executives or security managers available for interviews. In April 2024, when Pouyanné was questioned about his company’s Mozambique operation by the French Senate, he stated that while the government was responsible for the security of Cabo Delgado, “I can ensure the security of whichever industrial premises on which I might operate.” Asked about the container executions before the National Assembly this May, Pouyanné reaffirmed his faith in the Mozambican state, saying: “I think we help these countries progress if we trust their institutions and don’t spend our time lecturing them.” Apparently forgetting how he helped negotiate a security deal to place Mozambican soldiers on Total’s premises, however, he then qualified this statement, saying: “I can confirm that TotalEnergies has nothing to do with the Mozambican army.” A company spokesperson clarified this week: “TotalEnergies is not involved in the operations, command or conduct of the Mozambican armed forces.” In addition to the war crimes complaint, TotalEnergies’ Mozambique operation is already the subject of a criminal investigation opened in March by French state prosecutors. The allegation against the company is that it committed involuntary manslaughter by failing to protect or rescue workers left in Palma when ISIS carried out its massacre. Though POLITICO’s previous reporting found that 55 project workers were killed, TotalEnergies — through its subsidiary, Mozambique LNG — initially claimed it lost no one. “All the employees of Mozambique LNG, its contractors and subcontractors were safely evacuated from the Mozambique LNG Project site,” Maxime Rabilloud, Mozambique LNG’s managing director, told POLITICO last year. Advertisement That assertion notwithstanding, the death of at least one British subcontractor, Philip Mawer, is the subject of a formal inquest in the U.K.  In December 2024, the company’s Paris press office adjusted its position on the Palma attack. “TotalEnergies has never denied the tragedy that occurred in Palma and has always acknowledged the tragic loss of civilian lives,” it told POLITICO. For the first time, it also admitted “a small number” of project workers had been stationed outside its secure compound during the attack and exposed to the bloodbath.  A resolution to the French manslaughter investigation will take years. A decision on whether to open a formal investigation into the new claims against TotalEnergies for complicity in war crimes, let alone to bring the case to trial, is not expected until 2026, at the earliest. Should anyone eventually be tried for involuntary manslaughter, a conviction would carry a penalty of three years in prison and a €45,000 fine in France, escalating to five years and €75,000 for “a manifestly deliberate violation of a particular obligation of prudence or safety.” For complicity in war crimes, the sentence is five years to life. ‘CAN YOU ACTUALLY LOOK AT YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR?’ The war crimes accusation adds new uncertainty to the 20-year effort to develop Mozambique’s gas fields. In the aftermath of the 2021 Palma massacre, TotalEnergies declared a state of “force majeure,” a legal measure suspending all contracted work due to exceptional events. The following four and a half years of shutdown have cost TotalEnergies $4.5 billion, in addition to the $3.9 billion that Pouyanné originally paid Anadarko for the Mozambique operation. Billions more in costs can be expected before the plant finally pumps gas, which Total now predicts will happen in 2029. The manslaughter case and the war crimes complaint have the potential to cause further holdups by triggering due diligence obligations from TotalEnergies’ lenders, preventing them from delivering loans of $14.9 billion — without which Pouyanné has said his star project will collapse. Total also faces a Friends of the Earth legal challenge to a $4.7 billion U.S. government loan to the project. A TotalEnergies spokesperson said this week that the project was able to “meet due diligence requirements by lenders.” Advertisement All this comes as the situation on the ground remains unstable. After a successful Rwandan counter-attack from 2021 to 2023, the insurgency has returned, with the Islamists staging raids across Cabo Delgado, including Palma and the regional hub of Mocimboa da Praia. The International Organization for Migration says 112,185 people fled the violence between September 22 and October 13. Among those killed in the last few months were two gas project workers — a caterer, murdered in Palma, and a security guard, beheaded in a village south of town. TotalEnergies has consistently said that neither recent legal developments nor the upsurge in ISIS attacks will affect its plans to formally reopen its Mozambique operation by the end of the year. “This new complaint has no connection with the advancement of the Mozambique LNG project,” a spokesperson said this week. Pouyanné himself has spent much of this year insisting the project is “back on track” and its financing in place. In October, in a move to restart the project, the company lifted the force majeure.  Still, in a letter seen by POLITICO, Pouyanné also wrote to Mozambican President Daniel Chapo asking for 10 more years on its drilling license and $4.5 billion from the country to cover its cost overruns.  Mozambique, whose 2024 GDP was $22.42 billion — around a tenth of TotalEnergies’ revenues for the year of $195.61 billion — has yet to respond. A final issue for TotalEnergies’ CEO is whether a formal accusation of war crimes will fuel opposition to his leadership among shareholders. At 2024’s annual general meeting, a fifth of stockholders rejected the company’s climate transition strategy as too slow, and a quarter declined to support Pouyanné for a fourth three-year term. In 2025, several institutional investors expressed their opposition to Pouyanné by voting against his remuneration. In the statement, the TotalEnergies spokesperson pointed to the 2023 comments by Aschenbroich, the independent board member: “The Board unanimously looks forward to his continued leadership and his strategic vision to continue TotalEnergies’ transition.” Yet, there seems little prospect that his popularity will improve, inside or outside the company. “Patrick Pouyanné is everyone’s best enemy,” says Olivier Gantois, president of the French oil and gas lobby group UFIP-EM, “the scapegoat we love to beat up on.” Recently, the 62-year-old Pouyanné has begun to sound uncharacteristically plaintive. At TotalEnergies’ 2022 shareholder meeting, he grumbled that the dissidents might not like CO2 emissions, “but they sure like dividends.” At last year’s, he complained that TotalEnergies was in an impossible position. “We are trying to find a balance between today’s life and tomorrow’s,” he said. “It’s not because TotalEnergies stops producing hydrocarbons that demand for them will disappear.” Advertisement TotalEnergies’ articles of association require Pouyanné to retire before he reaches 67, in 2030, around the time that TotalEnergies currently forecasts gas production to begin in Mozambique. Henri Thulliez, the lawyer who filed both criminal complaints against TotalEnergies in Paris, predicts Pouyanné’s successors will be less attached to the project — for the simple reason that Mozambique turned out to be bad business. “You invest billions in the project, and the project has been completely suspended for four years now,” Thulliez says. “All your funders are hesitating. You’re facing two potential litigations in France, maybe at some point elsewhere, too. You have to ask: what’s the point of all of this?” As for Pouyanné, two questions will haunt his final years at TotalEnergies, he suggests. First, “Can shareholders afford to keep you in your job?” Second, “Can you actually look at yourself in the mirror?” Aude Le Gentil and Alexandre Léchenet contributed to this report.

BELÉM, Brazil — A group of countries is calling for a U.N. agreement to triple the amount of money for preventing the impacts of a hotter planet, as climate pollution keeps rising and funding for adaptation falls further behind. The move to increase adaptation funding to $120 billion annually at the COP30 climate talks comes as wealthy nations have cut back international aid and as President Donald Trump moves to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, hampering global efforts to inject additional funding into climate actions. Even before Trump took office, nations worldwide had a spotty record of meeting their financial commitments to lower pollution and offer interest-free funding for protective infrastructure, agriculture and ecosystems. “Adaptation must move from vague aspirations to concrete action. It requires strong targets backed by finance, technology transfer and capacity building,” Sierra Leone’s climate and environment minister, Jiwoh Abdulai, told U.N. officials Monday. Sierra Leone is among a group of least-developed countries, small island states and African nations that is trying to boost funding for projects that can protect people, property and crops from storms, drought and extreme heat. They’re also working to agree on a set of metrics that measure the effectiveness of adaptation funding — something that’s been used to promote money for reducing climate pollution for years. Negotiators and officials say adaptation funding is more important as temperatures risk breaching the 1.5-degree-Celsius limit — the most ambitious aim of the Paris Agreement. The call for tripling adaptation money would build on a 2021 commitment by wealthy countries to provide poorer nations with $40 billion in adaptation funding by 2025. A recent United Nations report predicted that goal would not be met. It found that $26 billion in adaptation funding flowed to countries in 2023, a fraction of the $310 billion that the U.N. estimates countries will need each year by 2035. The move unfolding at COP30 comes a year after countries agreed to a vague commitment to boost climate finance from $100 billion to $300 billion annually by 2035 — for reducing pollution and increasing adaptation. Countries say it needs to be clear how much money would go toward adaptation and whether it will be offered as grants or loans, reflecting their concern about mounting debt. Much of the interest-free funding they say they need is expected to flow through multilateral development banks and climate-focused institutions like the Green Climate Fund. “Without an outcome that doesn’t just give us indicators — it also gives us money — everything we’re discussing here is symbolic. We will go back home and nothing tomorrow will change,” said Lina Yassin, an adaptation negotiator from Sudan who’s working with the least-developed country group. Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s former climate envoy, said it is legitimate for the poorest, most vulnerable countries to ask for an agreement on the next round of adaptation funding as the previous goal expires. The challenge will be getting donor countries on board. “It’s really important, especially now, that countries like Japan, Australia, Canada, but also those that are able to do so [contribute],” Morgan said. “It’s about the wealthy Arab nations. It’s about, will China contribute as well?” Finding donors is just one challenge. Another is ensuring that vulnerable countries can access the money quickly. Many have had to wait years for funding under current processes. They’re also pushing for changes to ensure poorer nations aren’t saddled with additional debt. U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband drew attention to those challenges earlier this week. “If we are serious about supporting climate action, serious about supporting adaptation and resilience, the quantums matter, but also quality matters, access matters, the funds actually flowing matters,” he said during a renewable energy event in Belém. For years, vulnerable countries warned they would need to adapt to climate dangers as global efforts to reduce warming pollution failed to gain traction. Now those dangers are here, they say, and more adaptation funding is needed. They’re pushing for less paperwork and fewer reporting requirements, as well as faster, more efficient procedures to approve funding requests. Evans Njewa from Malawi, who chairs the 44-member Least Developed Country Group said countries have already agreed to provide adaptation money. Now they need to deliver. “If you need the resources now, you shouldn’t go through so much paperwork, procedures,” he said. Karl Mathiesen contributed to this report.

BELÉM, Brazil — United Nations climate summits have for years ended with bold promises to stave off global warming. But those commitments often fade when nations go home. Three years ago, in a resort city on the Red Sea, delegates from nearly 200 countries approved what they hailed as a historic fund to help poorer nations pay for climate damages — but it’s at risk of running dry. A year later, negotiations a few miles from Dubai’s gleaming waterfront achieved the first-ever worldwide pledge to turn away from fossil fuels — but production of oil and natural gas is still rising, a trend championed by the new administration in Washington. That legacy is casting a shadow over this year’s conference near the mouth of the Amazon River, which the host, Brazil, has dubbed a summit of truth. Days after the gathering started last week, nations were still sorting out what to do with contentious issues that have typically held up the annual negotiations. As the talks opened, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said the world must “fight” efforts to deny the reality of climate change — decades after scientists concluded that people are making the Earth hotter. That led one official to offer a grim assessment of global efforts to tackle climate change, 10 years after an earlier summit produced the sweeping Paris Agreement. “We have miserably failed to accomplish the objective of this convention, which is the stabilization of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” said Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s climate envoy and lead negotiator, during an interview at the conference site in Belém, Brazil. “Additional promises mean nothing if you didn’t achieve or fulfill your previous promises,” he added. It hasn’t helped that the U.S. is skipping the summit for the first time, or that President Donald Trump dismisses climate change as a hoax and urged the world to abandon efforts to fix it. But Trump isn’t the only reason for stalled action. Economic uncertainty, infighting and political backsliding have stymied green measures in both North America and Europe. In other parts of the world, countries are embracing the economic opportunities that the green transition offers. Many officials in Belém point to signs that progress is underway, including the rapid growth of renewables and electric vehicles and a broader understanding of both the world’s challenges and the means to address them. “Now we talk about solar panels, electric cars, regenerative agriculture, stopping deforestation, as if we have always talked about those things,” said Ana Toni, the summit’s executive director. “Just in one decade, the topic changed totally. But we still need to speed up the process.” Still, analysts say it’s become inevitable that the world’s warming will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius since the dawn of the industrial era, breaching the target at the heart of the Paris Agreement. With that in mind, countries are huddling at this month’s summit, known as COP30, with the hope of finding greater alignment on how to slow rising temperatures. But how credible would any promises reached in Brazil be? Here are five pledges achieved at past climate summits — and where they stand now: MOVING AWAY FROM FOSSIL FUELS The historic 2023 agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels, made at the COP28 talks in Dubai, was the first time that nearly 200 countries agreed to wind down their use of oil, natural gas and coal. Though nonbinding, that commitment was even more striking because the talks were overseen by the chief executive of the United Arab Emirates’ state-owned oil company. Just two years later, fossil fuel consumption is on the rise, despite rapid growth of wind and solar, and many of the world’s largest oil and gas producers plan to drill even more. The United States — the world’s biggest economy, top oil and gas producer and second-largest climate polluter — is pursuing a fossil fuel renaissance while forsaking plans to shift toward renewables. The president of the Dubai summit, Sultan al-Jaber, said at a recent energy conference that while wind and solar would expand, so too would oil and gas, in part to meet soaring demand for data centers. Liquefied natural gas would grow 65 percent by 2050, and oil will continue to be used as a feedstock for plastic, he said. “The exponential growth of AI is also creating a power surge that no one anticipated 18 months ago,” he said in a press release from the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., where he remains managing director and group CEO. The developed world is continuing to move in the wrong direction on fossil fuels, climate activists say. “We know that the world’s richest countries are continuing to invest in oil and gas development,” said Bill Hare, a climate scientist who founded Climate Analytics, a policy group. “This simply should not be happening.” The Paris-based International Energy Agency said last week that oil and gas demand could grow for decades to come. That statement marked a reversal from the group’s previous forecast that oil use would peak in 2030 as clean energy takes hold. Trump’s policies are one reason for the pivot. Still, renewables such as wind and solar power are soaring in many countries, leading analysts to believe that nations will continue to shift away from fossil fuels. How quickly that will happen is unknown. “The transition is underway but not yet at the pace or scale required,” said a U.N. report on global climate action released last week. It pointed to large gaps in efforts to reduce fossil fuel subsidies and abate methane pollution. Lula opened this year’s climate conference by calling for a “road map” to cut fossil fuels globally. It has earned support from countries such as Colombia, Germany, Kenya and the United Kingdom. But it’s not part of the official agenda at these talks, and many poorer countries say what they really need is funding and support to make the shift. TRIPLE RENEWABLE ENERGY, DOUBLE ENERGY EFFICIENCY This call also emerged from the 2023 summit, and was considered a tangible measure of countries’ progress toward achieving the Paris Agreement’s temperature targets. Countries are on track to meet the pledge to triple their renewable energy capacity by 2030, thanks largely to a record surge in solar power, according to energy think tank Ember. It estimates that the world is set to add around 793 gigawatts of new renewable capacity in 2025, up from 717 gigawatts in 2024, driven mainly by China. “If this pace continues, annual additions now only need to grow by around 12 percent a year from 2026 to 2030 to reach tripling, compared with 21 percent originally needed,” said Dave Jones, Ember’s chief analyst. “But governments will need to strengthen commitments to lock this in.” The pledge to double the world’s energy efficiency by 2030, by contrast, is a long way behind. While efficiency improvements would need to grow by 4 percent a year to reach that target, they hit only 1 percent in 2024. ‘LOSS AND DAMAGE’ FUND When the landmark fund for victims of climate disasters was established at the 2022 talks in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, it offered promise that billions of dollars would someday flow to nations slammed by hurricanes, droughts or rising seas. Three years later, it has less than $800 million — only a little more than it had in 2023. Mia Mottley, prime minister of Barbados, excoriated leaders this month for not providing more. Her rebuke came little more than a week after Hurricane Melissa, one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever seen in the Atlantic, swept across the Caribbean. “All of us should hold our heads down in shame, because having established this fund a few years ago in Sharm El-Sheikh, its capital base is still under $800 million while Jamaica reels from damage in excess of $7 billion, not to mention Cuba or the Bahamas,” she said. Last week, the fund announced it was allocating $250 million for financial requests to help less-wealthy nations grapple with “damage from slow onset and extreme climate-induced events.” The fund’s executive director, Ibrahima Cheikh Diong, said the call for contributions was significant but also a reminder that the fund needs much more money. Richard Muyungi, chair for the African Group of Negotiators and Tanzania’s climate envoy, said he expects additional funds will come from this summit, though not the billions needed. “There is a chance that the fund will run out of money by next year, year after next, before it even is given a chance to replenish itself,” said Michai Robertson, a senior finance adviser for the Alliance of Small Island States. GLOBAL METHANE PLEDGE Backed by the U.S. and European Union, this pledge to cut global methane emissions 30 percent by 2030 was launched four years ago at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, sparking a wave of talk about the benefits of cutting methane, a greenhouse gas with a relatively short shelf life but much greater warming potential than carbon dioxide. “The Global Methane Pledge has been instrumental in catalyzing attention to the issue of methane, because it has moved from a niche issue to one of the critical elements of the climate planning discussions,” said Giulia Ferrini, head of the U.N. Environment Program’s International Methane Emissions Observatory. “All the tools are there,” she added. “It’s just a question of political will.” Methane emissions from the oil and gas sector remain stubbornly high, despite the economic benefits of bringing them down, according to the IEA. The group’s latest methane tracker shows that energy-based methane pollution was around 120 million tons in 2024, roughly the same as a year earlier. Despite more than 150 nations joining the Global Methane Pledge, few countries or companies have devised plans to meet their commitments, “and even fewer have demonstrated verifiable emissions reductions,” the IEA said. The European Union’s methane regulation requires all oil and gas operators to measure, report and verify their emissions, including importers. And countries and companies are becoming more diligent about complying with an international satellite program that notifies companies and countries of methane leaks so they can repair them. Responses went from just 1 percent of alerts last year to 12 percent so far in 2025. More work is needed to achieve the 2030 goal, the U.N. says. Meanwhile, U.S. officials have pressured the EU to rethink its methane curbs. Barbados and several other countries are calling for a binding methane pact similar to the Montreal Protocol, the 1987 agreement that’s widely credited with saving the ozone layer by phasing out the use of harmful pollutants. That’s something Paris Agreement architect Laurence Tubiana hopes could happen. “I’m just in favor of tackling this very seriously, because the pledge doesn’t work [well] enough,” she said. CLIMATE FINANCE In 2009, wealthy countries agreed to provide $100 billion annually until 2025 to help poorer nations deal with rising temperatures. At last year’s climate talks in Azerbaijan, they upped the ante to $300 billion per year by 2035. But those countries delivered the $100 billion two years late, and many nations viewed the new $300 billion commitment with disappointment. India, which expressed particular ire about last year’s outcome, is pushing for new discussions in Brazil to get that money flowing. “Finance really is at the core of everything that we do,” Ali Mohamed, Kenya’s climate envoy, told POLITICO’s E&E News. But he also recognizes that governments alone are not the answer. “We cannot say finance must only come from the public sector.” Last year’s pledge included a call for companies and multilateral development banks to contribute a sum exceeding $1 trillion by 2035, but much of that would be juiced by donor nations — and more countries would need to contribute. That is more important now, said Jake Werksman, the EU’s lead negotiator. “As you know, one of the larger contributors to this process, the U.S., has essentially shut down all development flows from the U.S. budget, and no other party, including the EU, can make up for that gap,” he said during a press conference. Zack Colman and Zia Weise contributed to this report from Belém, Brazil.

BRUSSELS — For decades, the European Union has relied on the United States to act as shock absorber and chief powerbroker at global climate talks. No longer.  At the COP30 conference starting in Brazil on Monday, the unprecedented absence of its longtime ally leaves the 27-country union bearing the brunt of demands and pressures leveled at rich countries — an awkward role for the EU to take on.  In theory, the EU is the obvious candidate to step into the leadership vacuum left by the U.S. following President Donald Trump’s decision to skip the summit. After all, its climate targets and concrete policies rank among the most ambitious in the world. Yet the bloc, increasingly steeped in doubts about its domestic green transition and short on diplomatic heft, arrives in Belém ill-equipped for the job.  At home, faced with a confident far right and struggling industrial sectors campaigning to hit the brakes on climate action, European governments are weakening green policies and squabbling over the pace of decarbonization.  At COP30, the EU seeks to cajole other countries into upping their ambitions and agree a joint statement pledging to step up pollution cuts, hoping to send a message to the Trump administration that its fossil fuel revivalism leaves the U.S. isolated.  That contrast is already opening the EU to charges of hypocrisy, complicating its efforts to convince big polluters such as China and India to commit to more climate action in Belém.  The bloc’s top climate officials don’t see a contradiction, pointing out that the EU remains not only committed to steep pollution cuts but is on track to meet its targets.  “We are doubling down on that leadership role,” the European Commission’s climate chief Wopke Hoekstra insisted in an interview this week after EU governments signed off on a much delayed and weaker-than-expected new climate target required for this COP.  “Are there dubious actors that always will try to shift the blame on the Europeans? Of course,” he said. “But this doesn’t hinder us.”  The absence of the U.S. will also expose the EU to heightened pressure on thorny issues, such as financing and trade, that tend to pit rich nations against developing countries.  The Americans, a senior EU climate negotiator acknowledged, “are no longer there to deflect attacks” on the negotiation stance of rich countries, putting the bloc in an “uncomfortable” position. “Being the bad cop isn’t a role that comes naturally to the EU.”  Donald Trump derided the annual United Nations talks and withdrew his country from the Paris Agreement in his first term as president. | Jim Watson/Getty Images On top of that, the EU is heading into COP30 lacking experienced political negotiators, who take over the talks in the second week of the conference. Prominent figures such as German climate envoy Jennifer Morgan have changed jobs or were ousted in elections over the past year. In Belém, “there absolutely has to be a strong response” to Trump and new findings showing the world remains far off track to comply with the Paris climate accord, the negotiator said. “But the EU is in a delicate position in terms of calling for that, given all this.”  THE CHINA FACTOR Trump derided the annual United Nations talks and withdrew his country from the Paris Agreement in his first term as president. But due to a quirk in the 2015 climate accord, the U.S. didn’t actually leave until the day after Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020.  During Trump’s entire first term, U.S. negotiators continued to hold a prominent role alongside the Europeans, fighting for global climate rules that would apply as strongly to China as to wealthy countries. On its own, the EU has struggled to continue that fight.  Pushing China won’t be the bloc’s only challenge at this COP. India and host Brazil are also seeking to pressure the EU over trade measures; major polluters oppose the bloc’s campaign for a joint declaration promising more pollution cuts; and countries that share the EU’s desire for an ambitious outcome may give the bloc flak for wavering on its green commitments. But the bloc’s approach to China, more than anything, lays bare its difficulties in stepping up and out of Washington’s shadow. Beijing in September promised to cut its world-leading levels of pollution between 7 percent and 10 percent until 2035, compared to an undefined peak that may have occurred this year. It’s China’s first major emissions-slashing goal, but far below what experts said was feasible.  The EU, which was expecting a Chinese target of around 30 percent, took the announcement badly. Hoekstra denounced it as “clearly disappointing” — comments that prompted an unusual rebuke from the Chinese, who complained of “double standards” and warned his public criticism “undermines the atmosphere of cooperation.” Some argue this is the EU stepping up. “We used to have the U.S. acting as the bad cop and the EU acting as the good cop, so we as the EU have to learn to be both bad and good cop,” said a second EU negotiator. “So politicians may show outrage to push China, and on the diplomatic level we can work with China in making the COP a success.”  Others criticized Hoekstra’s response. “I think it’s counterproductive,” said Cecilia Trasi, a policy advisor at the Italian ECCO think tank. During her recent trip to China, “the common refrain,” including in conversations with officials, “was the EU is hypocritical, and it’s not doing enough to acknowledge the progress that China has made.” New targets for 2035, required from every Paris Agreement signatory, are central to this year’s climate conference.  The EU missed the United Nations’ September deadline for the targets as its governments were unable to agree. The bloc eventually decided on an emissions cut of between 66.3 percent and 72.5 percent below 1990 levels — instead of the fixed 72.5 percent target the Commission had signaled although never clearly stated.  New targets for 2035, required from every Paris Agreement signatory, are central to this year’s climate conference. | COP 30 Press Office/Getty Images Under pressure from surging far-right parties and its high-polluting manufacturing industry, the EU has also embarked on a sweeping effort to deregulate and revise green policies, weakening parts of the legislative web designed to achieve its climate targets.  This hasn’t gone unnoticed in Beijing. At a meeting between high-level EU and Chinese climate officials in July, the Chinese chewed out their European counterparts for what they saw as the bloc backtracking on climate efforts, according to a person in the room.  “The Chinese said that it’s shameful — that’s the word they used, shameful — that the EU is going back on its word and lowering the bar on climate. That was quite embarrassing,” said the EU official, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic talks.  Until early summer, Brussels and Beijing were still talking about presenting their 2035 climate targets together to demonstrate joint leadership, the first diplomat said. But the bloc’s complex decision-making process and Hoekstra’s choice to delay proposing new climate goals until July meant the EU wasn’t ready.  “They weren’t seeing strong leadership from others, including the EU. Us not having a [target] was a factor,” the diplomat said.  “I think China misses the U.S. They had a stable partner — one they didn’t always agree with but could work with, could discuss with,” the diplomat added. “Now in the U.S. absence, they want to step up but are looking for a new partner. The EU is trying, but we’re slow.”  TRADING BARBS EU diplomats say the bloc isn’t the only one not pulling its weight, with the first negotiator complaining that the United Kingdom, for instance, was not stepping up. But they all acknowledged the EU’s challenges in filling the vacuum left by the U.S.  Aside from the internal backlash against the EU’s green agenda, personnel changes across the bloc “have not been helpful either,” the first diplomat said. “We used to have a lot more high-profile envoys and ministers.”  The bloc still has an army of experienced diplomats handling technical talks, but many of the political negotiators that helped usher past COPs to a conclusion are gone.  This year’s German elections saw the new government abolish the climate envoy role, until then held by COP veteran Jennifer Morgan. The Irish elections ousted Green Climate Minister Eamon Ryan, who co-led last year’s negotiations on how to prepare the world for climate disasters, a top issue in Belém. Two longtime climate negotiators, Denmark’s Dan Jørgensen and Spain’s Teresa Ribera, joined the Commission but won’t attend COP30.  While Ribera has held talks this year with not-quite-retired Chinese envoy Xie Zhenhua, the EU has not managed to set up a channel with Beijing to replace the bilateral efforts undertaken by U.S. envoys such as John Kerry.   “We still talk to them, but it was easier when the U.S. was there. Especially when Kerry and Xie spoke every other month,” said a third EU negotiator. “It’s much more ad-hoc now.”  Hoekstra said the EU had put in plenty of effort.  “We have been in very frequent interactions with them at all levels … we have invested very significantly in the relationship and that is something we will continue to do,” he said.  Rising trade tensions between Brussels and Beijing are also looming large over efforts to work together at COP. The bloc’s approach to China, more than anything, lays bare its difficulties in stepping up and out of Washington’s shadow. | Pablo Porciuncula/Getty Images The EU harbors growing disquiet about Chinese dominance in technologies and materials critical for the energy transition. Its domestic green backlash is driven in large part by the decline of the bloc’s traditional manufacturing base, with China’s state-subsidized model outcompeting the EU on everything from electric vehicles to wind turbines.  China and its companies “are massive beneficiaries of the green transition but don’t want to lead by example,” the third diplomat said. Beijing, meanwhile, feels threatened by the bloc’s countermeasure — a carbon tariff, known as CBAM, that seeks to protect European manufacturers from foreign competition not subject to the same climate rules.  Beijing and its allies, which see the measure as a protectionist move to shut emerging economies out of the EU market, have unsuccessfully sought to put CBAM on the agenda at past COPs. They are set to try again on Monday, and this time the bloc cannot rely on the U.S. to help fend off such attacks.  “The elephant in the room between the EU and China is CBAM,” said Trasi. “If the conversation around CBAM is not handled well, it can easily become very toxic and derail perhaps not the entire negotiations but joint efforts of the EU and China.”

BRUSSELS — Loopholes in the European Union’s new interim climate target increase the danger of missing the 2050 net-zero goal, the bloc’s top scientific advisor warned.  The EU’s 27 governments on Wednesday agreed to reduce their planet-warming emissions by up to 90 percent below 1990 levels by 2040, but riddled the legislation with offsetting options and revision clauses that could significantly weaken the target.  “I see this as a political compromise that at least keeps the 2050 target within reach,” said Ottmar Edenhofer, an economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in an interview with POLITICO. “But the risk of not achieving it has, of course, now increased rather than decreased.” Edenhofer chairs the EU’s scientific advisory board on climate change, an independent body tasked with making policy recommendations on global warming, which first suggested the bloc reduce its emissions by 90 to 95 percent by 2040.  While the deal reached Wednesday keeps the headline 90 percent figure, it sets the EU’s domestic emissions cuts at 85 percent, allowing the bloc to meet the remainder by paying other countries to reduce pollution through purchases of so-called carbon credits.  Governments also introduced a clause requiring the EU to reassess the target every five years in light of economic conditions or high energy prices, with the option to allow member countries to purchase additional carbon credits. The European Commission’s climate chief Wopke Hoekstra described the deal on Wednesday as “absolutely science-based.” | Thierry Monasse/Getty Images The board took issue with the use of credits, warning that outsourcing pollution cuts would divert much-needed investments abroad and slow the domestic pace of decarbonization.  Edenhofer reiterated the concerns about credits, but singled out the revision clause as potentially jeopardizing the bloc’s net-zero target.  “If the targets are constantly being watered down via the revision clause, that’s not a good idea, because then the 2050 target will also not be achievable,” he warned.  The European Commission’s climate chief Wopke Hoekstra described the deal on Wednesday as “absolutely science-based.”  Asked whether he agrees, Edenhofer said: “The 90 percent are certainly science-based, but the 5 percentage points [of credits] depend on the circumstances… 85 percent is certainly below the limit. I would say it is a political compromise and should be seen as such.”  Edenhofer also warned against scapegoating climate efforts for the EU’s economic woes.  “The European economy certainly has a competitiveness problem,” particularly in high-polluting industries and car manufacturers, he acknowledged. “But climate policy is very often blamed for a lack of industrial policy.”  He was particularly critical of a recent campaign by parts of the German chemical industry to abolish the EU’s carbon market, the heart of its climate legislation.  “I find that utterly ridiculous,” he said.  The industry’s concerns about the carbon market’s current trajectory, which requires companies to hit net-zero before 2040, are valid, he added, which is why he supports limited reforms. But demands to abolish the EU’s CO2 price are “unhelpful” in his view.  “Fundamentally, messages that climate policy is a nice luxury and now it’s time to get back to the important things are absurd,” he added. “It’s grotesque. Climate impacts are real. And this is not some trivial matter — it’s about securing long-term prosperity.”

BRUSSELS — On the same day world leaders arrived at the COP30 summit in Brazil to push for more action on climate change, Greece announced it will start drilling for fossil fuels in the Mediterranean Sea — with U.S. help. Under the deal, America’s biggest oil company, ExxonMobil, will explore for natural gas in waters northwest of the picturesque island of Corfu, alongside Greece’s Energean and HELLENiQ ENERGY. It’s the first time in more than four decades that Greece has opened its waters for gas exploration — and the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump is claiming it as a victory in its push to derail climate action and boost the global dominance of the U.S. fossil fuel industry. It comes three weeks after the U.S. successfully halted a global deal to put a carbon tax on shipping, with the support of Greece. “There is no energy transition, there is just energy addition,” said U.S. Interior Secretary and energy czar Doug Burgum, who was present at the signing ceremony in Athens on Thursday, alongside U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and the new U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle. “Greece is taking its own natural resources, and we are working all together toward energy abundance,” Burgum added, describing Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis as a leader who “bucks the trend.” Only a few hours later, U.N. secretary-general Antonio Guterrez made an impassioned plea for countries to stop exploring for coal, oil and gas. “I’ve consistently advocated against more coal plants and fossil fuel exploration and expansion,” he said at a COP30 leaders’ summit in Belém, Brazil. Donald Trump was not among the many world leaders present. NOT LISTENING “America is back and drilling in the Ionian Sea,” said Guilfoyle, the U.S. ambassador, at the Athens ceremony. Drilling for natural gas — a fossil fuel that is a major contributor to global warming — is expected to start late next year, or early 2027. Greece’s Minister of Environment and Energy, Stavros Papastavrou, hailed the agreement as a “historic signing” that ends a 40-year hiatus in exploration. Last month, Greece and Cyprus — both major maritime countries — were the only two EU countries that voted to halt action for a year on a historic effort to tax climate pollution from shipping. Greece claimed its decision had nothing to do with U.S. pressure, which several people familiar with the situation said included threats to negotiators. Thursday’s ceremony took place on the sidelines of the sixth Partnership for Transatlantic Energy Cooperation (P-TEC) conference, organized in Athens by the U.S. and Greek governments, along with the Atlantic Council. Greece aims to showcase its importance as an entry point for American liquefied natural gas (LNG), bolstering Europe’s independence from Russian gas. LNG from Greece’s Revithoussa terminal is set to reach Ukraine this winter through the newly activated “Vertical Corridor,” an energy route linking Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Moldova.