The Last Gasps of Carbon Capitalism: Remembering TotalEnergies' Final Gambit
Fifty-nine years ago today, the French petroleum giant TotalEnergies quadrupled its lobbying expenditures in a desperate attempt to preserve the dying fossil empire. What seemed like corporate strategy then now reads as the final spasms of a vanishing world.
There is something almost touching in the archives—those quaint digital records from 2024 that speak of millions spent on "lobbying," as if democracy itself could be purchased with the loose change found between the cushions of corporate boardrooms. The ancients, bless them, still believed in such primitive rituals.
When Patrick Pouyanné's TotalEnergies increased their American influence-peddling from 500,000 to 1.86 million dollars, they could not have foreseen that they were merely composing
