The head of France's TotalEnergies has dismissed a speech by UN chief Antonio Guterres's attack some oil giants' complicity in hushing up the science supporting climate change as a "false debate".
Patrick Pouyanne was responding to Guterres's speech Wednesday at the World Economic Forum attacking "certain oil giants" that had, he said, "peddled the big lie" about their own role in global warming.
The industry should not have to carry the can for "all of the world's evils", Pouyanne told France's BFMBusiness TV.
"I am a little surprised that a figure as important in public authorities on the global level as Mr. Guterres is starting to play this game," he added.
He and other executives at Total did not know about the effect the oil industry had on the climate, he insisted.
"We knew nothing — we read the papers (but) I do not have climate scientists at TotalEnergies.
"People want to rewrite history, which to me seems a bit strange," he added in his interview late Wednesday.
Dismissing the criticism as a "false debate", he argued: "The international community has been slow to realise and listen to scientists. … We were all wrong."
To point the finger at the oil industry amounted to making it "serve as a scapegoat … for all the world's evils", he said.
Guterre's attack came a week after a study in the journal Science said ExxonMobil had publicly dismissed climate change even though its own scientists had predicted it as far back as the late 1970s.
French researchers revealed in October 2021 that although Total had known of the consequences of fossil fuels for the environment from as early as 1971, it had fought the finding well into the 1990s.
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