Last week, as wildfires tore through southern Europe, TotalEnergies did something that made headlines for all the right reasons. The company announced it would cover fuel costs for French firefighters – both ground vehicles and the aircrafts dropping water on the flames. Nearly 200 employees who volunteer as firefighters were also given paid leave, no holiday days docked, to go help. It’s the kind of story that writes itself: oil giant steps up for the heroes on the front lines. Except it isn’t a coincidence that the company setting fire to the planet is also the one paying for the water trucks. No amount of PR pays for a life turned into ashes TotalEnergies has spent this year positioning itself as the good guy. Back in March, as the war in Iran and Lebanon sent oil prices spiking, the company capped gasoline and diesel prices at its French stations – and kept extending that cap, month after month, through June. It even ran special discounted pricing on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day weekends. The government publicly thanked them for ‘doing their bit.’ Here’s what that PR campaign conveniently sidesteps: TotalEnergies wasn’t shielding the French public from an unfortunate energy crisis. It was cushioning them from a price shock that its own industry helps manufacture and profit from. And this isn’t generosity: it’s brand management. The firefighter fuel donations follow the identical logic. At the same time TotalEnergies is filling up water bombers for free,Europe is tallying wildfire damage bills that have already reached an estimated €3.1 billion across France, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Romania – and that figure is expected to climb well higher once the full toll is counted. As someone born and raised in the South-West, who lived through this year’s Gironde fires and had to be evacuated, let me say it plainly: there is no check Total can write that will bring back my memories, or resurrect the firefighters who died defending our land, or regrow our forests, our land, and the wild animals that the flames reduced to ash. Wildfires raging in Southern France. Photo: France 24 The real dimension of numbers Covering firefighters’ fuel bills costs TotalEnergies nothing next to what fossil fuel-driven heat, drought and fire are costing everyone else. And also, it costs them cents if compared to what they are making out of the climate and energy crises they are fueling. In July, TotalEnergies posted another blockbuster quarter, with adjusted net income around $6 billion for the three months from April to June – a jump of roughly two-thirds compared to a year earlier. At 350.org, we put it plainly: this isn’t an ordinary earnings report, it’s a receipt for climate chaos. Every spike in fossil fuel prices functions as a kind of tax on ordinary people – driving up the cost of transport, electricity, and food. While governments spend billions subsidizing fossil fuel companies or responding to extreme weather disasters, companies like TotalEnergies reap the windfall from the very volatility they help sustain and pay basically nothing for the climate chaos they feed every day. So put the numbers next to each other in the equation: Three months with a $6 billion profit + a wildfire season with a several-billion-euro damage bill and counting = a free tank of gas for the fire trucks. Something is wrong with this math, isn’t it? This is not ‘doing its bit.’ This is a company spending a fraction of a fraction of its profits to make sure the story people remember is the fuel donation, not the emissions. A firefighter battles a wildfire in San Martin de Valdeiglesias, west of Madrid, on Sunday. (Manu Fernandez / Associated Press) This is not new The fuel donation and the price cap aren’t the first time TotalEnergies has shown up with a check right after helping create the disaster. The company runs the same playbook again and again: a highly visible, low-cost gesture, timed to a crisis, that gets far more attention than its price tag deserves while the operation actually driving the harm keeps growing in the background. Take Mozambique. In February 2026, TotalEnergies donated food and hygiene kits worth around $500,000 to communities hit by devastating floods – less than a dollar per person for the more than 700,000 people affected while leading a $20 billion liquefied natural gas project in Cabo Delgado, in that same country. This is a project which is set to produce billions of tonnes of carbon pollution over its lifetime and one that’s already displaced communities and fueled insecurity in the region. You see the same move in its sports sponsorships: campaigners have called out its backing of the Africa Cup of Nations and the 2023 Rugby World Cup as a way to wrap the brand in African pride and sporting joy, even as its fossil fuel expansion across the continent – including the East African Crude Oil Pipeline – drives the very climate breakdown those communities are living through. Even the company’s own rebrand fits the mold: dropping ‘Total’ for ‘TotalEnergies’ and plastering train stations and airports with ads about reinvention and renewables, while fossil fuels still make up the overwhelming majority of what it actually produces and invests in. It’s the same trick every time: something cheap enough to repeat, photogenic enough to spread, and warm enough to stick in people’s minds. More importantly, it is built to outshine a business model that keeps expanding the exact crises it shows up to look good after. Where the real accountability lives This is exactly why the conversation needs to move from PR gestures to policy – specifically, to strong and permanent taxation. Governments are, right now, negotiating at the UN Convention on International Tax Cooperation, aiming for a global tax treaty by 2027. It’s a genuine opportunity to make oil and gas majors pay not through donated fuel and capped prices, but through binding, permanent contributions that fund the transition out of these crises, for good. A global tax on polluters isn’t just about collecting a bigger bill from Total, Exxon or Chevron and calling it justice. Done right, it’s a funding mechanism for the way out. Revenue from a binding global tax can flow directly into scaling up renewables, into grid upgrades, into the transition infrastructure that’s currently starved of investment while fossil fuel majors funnel billions into dividends and buybacks instead. And there’s a second, quieter win buried in that shift: every dollar that moves from financing fossil fuel expansion to financing renewables is a dollar that makes oil and gas reserves less economically viable to extract. A global tax that funds the transition doesn’t just make polluters pay for the damage behind them; it accelerates the moment their entire business model stops making financial sense. The planet, and the people losing their homes and their loved ones to it, don’t need another goodwill press release. They need the money to go where the damage already is but also to weed out the system behind this crisis, and where the future needs it most. Soraya Fettih is the Global Campaigns Coordinator at 350.org. 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