Climate advocacy group 350.org has alleged that French multinational energy company TotalEnergies is making scandalous profits from fossil fuels while helping to intensify the climate crisis driving heatwaves, floods, and wildfires.

In a statement on Thursday, 350.org said activists protested in La Défense, Paris’ business district and home to TotalEnergies’ headquarters, to denounce the role of fossil fuel giants in the climate crisis and demand higher taxes on their profits.

This comes as the oil company said it recorded a 67 per cent rise in second-quarter earnings, driven by higher profit margins, despite supply disruptions linked to the crisis in the Middle East.

350.org expressed concern about what it called the “most brutal” summer, citing the intense heatwaves, flash floods, and wildfires across regions, adding, “These are all symptoms of a climate crisis driven by fossil fuel dependence.”

“Amid this unfolding emergency, TotalEnergies has announced another quarter of record profits,” the global climate movement said.

It added, “Those profits have been boosted by the instability that drives higher oil and gas prices, while ordinary people continue to pay the price through higher fuel costs, rising energy bills, and the growing impacts of climate-fuelled disasters.”

The environmental group called on the French government to introduce stronger, permanent taxes on fossil fuel companies’ profits and ensure that the revenue is directed towards climate adaptation and a fair transition away from fossil fuels.

It noted that France has been “unambitious and obstructive in international negotiations, notably resisting efforts to enshrine the polluter-pays principle in the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation.”

350.org said the fifth round of negotiations on the UN Convention on International Tax Cooperation, scheduled to commence on August 3 in New York, presented an opportunity to end the era of impunity for major polluters.

Fanny Petitbon, France country manager for 350.org, said TotalEnergies’ latest financial results were not ordinary corporate earnings but “a receipt for climate chaos.”

Ms Petitbon stated, “The company shamelessly cashes in on monstrous profits generated during a period of worsening climate breakdown that it helped fuel, alongside economic disruption and geopolitical conflict.”

“Every spike in fossil fuel prices acts as an unofficial tax on people: increasing the cost of transport, electricity and food, while governments spend billions responding to disasters and shielding households from volatile energy markets.

“Yet TotalEnergies keeps reaping extraordinary rewards from the very instability it helped create. It is time to end this impunity.”

Also reacting, Zaki Mamdoo, the campaign coordinator of the Stop East African Crude Oil Pipeline (StopEACOP), said the profits celebrated as profit by TotalEnergies’ shareholders and executives came at the expense of communities along the EACOP route, who have suffered land loss, destroyed livelihoods, food insecurity, repression, and displacement.

“These obscene profits are clearly not a measure of success, but an account of organised exploitation.

“Every billion-dollar margin is extracted from the labour of workers, who produce far more than they are paid, and secured at the expense of communities, who are made to carry the entirety of the social and environmental costs of extraction,” Mr Mamdoo said.