Piercing the corporate veil: Towards a better assessment of the position of transnational oil and gas companies in the global carbon budget

Abstract

In recent years, research in climate science has increasingly emphasized the need to reduce fossil fuel supply in order to avoid an overshoot of the global carbon budget and to meet the Paris Agreement target to keep global warming ‘well below 2°C’. This article aims to outline a balanced appreciation of the particular responsibility held by transnational oil and gas companies in the global challenge to organize an equitably managed decline in fossil fuel extraction. It does so by focusing on a case study. The latter consists of the stylized reconstruction of the internal social dynamics that shape the power structure of the French firm Total and of questioning its ability to make investment decisions aligned with the imperative to preserve the stability of the climate system, as its public position makes clear. The persistence of short-termed compensation schemes in the higher corporate hierarchy impedes the elaboration and implementation of deep decarbonization strategies at the firm level. These would imply a significant upscaling of investments in renewable energy and/or carbon-capture storage technologies, in order to avoid the foreseeable destruction of corporate jobs linked to oil and gas extraction in an increasingly carbon-constrained world.

Keywords

carbon budgets climate justice fossil fuels supply side policies transnational corporations

Introduction

Anthropogenic global warming constitutes a significant threat to the prosperity of human societies and to the stability of the interlinked ecosystems in which they are ultimately embedded (Holy Father Francis, 2015; IPCC, 2014; Steffen et al., 2015). In the wake of the Paris Agreement, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC, 2015) has committed its parties to implement strong policies so as to ‘hold the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C’. It is now admitted that preventing the risk of a dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system implies to extract only a limited fraction of the existing reserves of fossil fuels, since the proportionality of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions to warming is now firmly established (Allen et al., 2009). This amounts to say that there is a difference in magnitude between the limited amount of gaseous carbon that the compartments of the Earth system (atmosphere, ocean, land) can respectively absorb and the vast quantity of solid carbon that is contained in the lithosphere under the form of hydrocarbons. After having warned in 2012 that ‘no more than one-third of proved reserves of fossil fuels [could] be consumed prior to 2050 if the world [was] to achieve the 2°C goal, unless carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology [was] widely deployed’ (International Energy Agency (IEA), 2012: 3), the IEA has reiterated its diagnosis more recently, pointing out that there was a ‘pervasive [. . .] risk that all existing proved fossil-fuel reserves [would] not be fully utilised, future investment into upstream oil assets [would] be curtailed and the returns of fossil-fuel companies [would] be severely affected’ (IEA, 2016: 112). From the perspective of catastrophic climate change, one of the most pressing challenges thus consists of identifying how this ‘carbon mismatch’ is likely to affect business-as-usual trajectories across the spectrum of the fossil fuel industry. Although the intensity of coal extraction is the most critical variable of this equation, I do not scrutinize it in this article – for most transnational oil and gas companies (TOCs) have now divested from this business. Taking as a starting point the macro-diagnosis established by Heede and Oreskes (2016) about the potential emissions from the expected production of major fossil companies, I aim to refine it further in order to characterize more particularly the specific position of TOCs in the carbon budget nexus. This article thus addresses the following questions: what type of reserves tends to be in the books of investor-owned TOCs – and to what extent can they be considered ‘critical’, as far as the 2°C goal is concerned? How do patterns of financial wealth distribution throughout Total’s hierarchical structure shape both its internal power system and its wider institutional dynamics? How do these patterns configure in turn the concrete features of activities of extraction, thereby re-assembling collective relationships to hydrocarbon deposits located beneath the Earth’s surface, and accelerating the disruption of the global carbon cycle?

Materials and methods

This article is the first scientific outcome of a wider research project on Total, which I undertook between 2014 and 2017, and in the context of which I conducted several fieldwork sessions in the corporate realm – mainly by organizing ±40 semi-structured interviews with employees and managers. Yet, this research article does not directly build on the qualitative ethnographic material gathered during this research. If I do not engage in a quantitative, systematic analysis of upstream investments across the oil and gas industry, I seek nonetheless to transpose this analytical framework to the firm level, by endorsing a ‘case study approach’ that enables to reconstruct Total’s trajectory. In this endeavour, I harness publicly available corporate data drawn from documents disclosed for financial regulation authorities (which notably include information on financial compensation packages to senior managers and executive officers between 2000 and 2017), and I interpret them through the lens of the available scientific literature on the oil and gas industry in a variety of fields (economic geography, organization studies, sociology of corporate elites, etc.). I also highlight how scientific debates surrounding the concept of a global carbon budget matter when it comes to assessing the position of TOCs in a 2°C world.

Overall context

Global carbon budget and fossil fuel reserves

The concept of global carbon budget is often thought of as a smart, simplified metrics that can be harnessed by policy-makers in order to implement measures designed to cut emissions. Back in 2009, one of the first comprehensive studies on carbon budgets established that ensuring a 66% probability to keep global warming below 2°C by 2050 implied to limit cumulative emissions to 1158 GtCO₂ between 2000 and 2050 – knowing that at the time of publication, emissions between 2000 and 2006 had already totalized 234 GtCO₂ (Meinshausen et al., 2009). The quick-paced development of the scientific literature consecrated to carbon budgets soon revealed the complexity of this indicator, as well as its sensitivity to a number of parameters. In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) evaluated in its fifth assessment report that no more than 400 GtCO₂ could be emitted from 2011 onwards for a 66% chance of avoiding 1.5°C warming (IPCC, 2014: 69) – of which only 118 GtCO₂ would be remaining from the beginning of 2018, according to estimated 2011–2017 emissions (Hausfather, 2018b). More recently, the IPCC significantly revised this estimation, suggesting that 420 GtCO₂ could be emitted from 2018 onwards for a 66% chance of avoiding 1.5°C warming (IPCC, 2018: 16). This considerable increase in the estimation of the remaining global carbon budget resulted from the correction of a slight mismatch between modelled and recorded historical emissions. Hausfather (2018a) has recently outlined a comprehensive meta-discussion of some of the most recent attempts to assess the remaining global carbon budget, which range from near-to-zero estimates (e.g. Lowe and Bernie, 2018; Rogelj et al., 2018) to higher numbers (e.g. 779 GtCO₂ to be emitted from 2018 onwards for a 66% chance of avoiding 1.5°C warming according to Richardson et al., 2018; 693 GtCO₂ according to Goodwin et al., 2018). Both the significant upward re-evaluation of the IPCC ‘standard’ estimate and the persistence of a large interval between minimal and maximal estimates signal how sensitive to parameters the calculation of the global carbon budget remains. This has led some observers to suggest that in these conditions, the idea of a remaining carbon budget could simply not be relevant anymore (Peters, 2018): with the rise of global temperature now approaching 1°C, the 1.5°C target becomes so close that infinitesimal differences in sets of initial hypothesis have disproportionate impacts on the resulting carbon budget estimates. In any case, if the current rates of emissions persist (Le Quéré et al., 2018 evaluate anthropogenic emissions to 39 GtCO₂/year for the decade 2008–2017), the global carbon budget associated with a warming well below 2°C would most likely get exhausted in less than 20 years (for the largest estimate) – and in little less than 11 years for the last IPCC (2018) assessment.

In 2009, forerunners Meinshausen and co-authors had made clear that achieving the goal of stabilizing global warming below 2°C with a 50% probability implied that ‘less than half the proven economically recoverable oil, gas and coal reserves [could] still be emitted up to 2050’. Global anthropogenic emissions are indeed predominantly generated by fossil fuel combustion (82% of emissions over the last half-century – the remaining 18% being caused by land-use change; Le Quéré et al., 2018). Meinshausen and co-authors derived from the figures of proven fossil fuel reserves¹ an estimation of the emissions that would be released by their combustion and suggested it amounted to ±2800 GtCO₂, with an 80% uncertainty range of 2541–3089 GtCO₂. In its fifth assessment report, the IPCC evaluated the potential emissions from known reserves between 3670 and 7100 GtCO₂ (IPCC, 2014: 69). Applying the emission factors proposed by the IPCC for fuel combustion (IPCC, 2006) on BP’s (2018) reserves assessment suggests that the full production of proved oil, gas and coal reserves would generate respectively 630, 365, and 2037 GtCO₂ (3029 GtCO₂ in total).

Despite the significant methodological complexities associated with the estimation of a global carbon budget, it thus seems that the assessments of potential emissions from hydrocarbon reserves reveal orders of magnitude that confirm the mismatch between the amount of fossil fuels available for extraction and the quantity of carbon that the atmosphere can absorb.

Investor-owned oil and gas firms: an unconvenient exposure?

After the publication of Meinshausen and co-authors’ works in 2009, it appeared necessarily to outline fine-grained descriptions of hydrocarbon reserves, so as to help policy-makers in their effort to organize an equitably managed phase out from fossil fuel extraction.

In 2011, the Carbon Tracker Initiative (CTI) published a report focusing on the reserves held by the top 100 listed coal and top 100 listed oil and gas companies, in order to warn institutional investors that these assets, totalizing potential emissions of 389 GtCO₂ and 356 GtCO₂, respectively, could become ‘stranded’ if consistent public policies (e.g. a clear plan of emissions ceiling) were implemented to meet the 2°C target (CTI, 2011). A subsequent report refined the diagnosis further, taking into account not only the reserves that were in the books and that would be developed with high certainty (i.e. the perimeter of CTI, 2011) but also those that firms would be potentially inclined to bring on stream in the coming years; with such an extended perimeter, the potential emissions reached 640 GtCO₂ for coal and 901 GtCO₂ for oil and gas (CTI, 2013), their addition thus surpassing most estimates of the global carbon budget – and this, without even having considered state-owned reserves.

More recently, McGlade and Ekins (2015) have used an integrated-assessment model to determine an economically optimal regional distribution of unburnable reserves. Their analysis suggests that without massive recourse to CCS, keeping global temperature below 2°C with a 50% probability entails that, respectively, 35%, 52% and 88% of global oil, gas and coal reserves must be left untapped. The detailed description of how such global targets trickle down onto different geographical areas (depending on the features of their hydrocarbon deposits) is insightful: it suggests indeed that in the 2°C scenario, the open-pit mining of bitumen in Canada ‘drops to negligible levels after 2020’ and that the resources located within the Arctic circle are identified as unburnable. These results corroborate those obtained by previous modelizations (McGlade and Ekins, 2014), which had stressed that at least 40%–55% of yet to be found deepwater resources (as of 2010) could not be developed in a 2°C world. This clear-cut diagnosis indirectly fragilizes the position of TOCs, which have significantly invested in these technology- and capital-intensive classes of assets since the early 2000s. TOCs often play indeed a key role in unlocking state-owned assets that are hard to access for state-owned companies which have poor technological know-how, little access to international capital markets and endemic corruption problems.

Heede and Oreskes’ (2016) most recent study provides another decisive contribution in the effort to delineate the exposure of TOCs to a potential carbon bubble. In a previous work, Heede had demonstrated that 70 companies and 8 government-run industries had produced 63% of the world’s fossil fuels from 1750 to 2010 – and that they could hence be considered as indirectly responsible for a large fraction of historical emissions (Heede, 2014). On this basis, Heede and Oreskes have sought to estimate the emissions that would be released by the combustion of the ‘reported proved recoverable reserves’ declared by 42 investor-owned companies, 20 state-owned companies and 8 nation-states with government-run coal industries: these amount to, respectively, 162, 766 and 676 GtCO₂. On this basis, the authors observe that ‘there is no question that the majority of reserves of both oil and natural gas are held by state-owned companies’ and insist that dangerous global warming ‘cannot be prevented by focusing on private sector activity alone’ (Heede and Oreskes, 2016: 16). Their estimations suggest that ‘the use of the existing proved reserves held by the largest investor-owned corporations [did] not lead to climate warming above the 2°C limit’ (Heede and Oreskes, 2016); however, Heede and Oreskes (2016) simultaneously emphasize that ‘exploration for and development of new reserves – beyond those that [were, in 2016,] presently proved – [would] exceed the carbon budget and push the global climate well past the 2°C limit’ (p. 18).

Even though the previously mentioned studies offer complementary macro-perspectives that each enable to ascertain the position that TOCs (qua asset holders) hold in the global carbon budget nexus, their methodological approach is insufficient. As such, it offers indeed insufficient grip to stress-test the effective carbon exposure of TOCs’ project portfolios and industrial strategies (two exceptions are CTI, 2014a, 2014b) – whereas, it is precisely at the firm level that companies have developed narratives in order to establish the compatibility between their business plans (present and future) and the 2°C target. Additional analysis is thus needed to complicate our understanding of the position of TOCs. In the remainder of the article, I focus on the case of Total, which I take to be somehow illustrative of the rest of the European oil and gas industry. I seek to show that avoiding the false opposites that consist of demonizing, or in exonerating Total, implies to ‘pierce the corporate veil’ and to provide an empirical description of the institutional dynamics that structure its development: this in turn enables to assess more precisely where the firm stands with regard to climate change.

Case study

A glimpse on Total’s projected trajectory

As of late 2017, Total counted 98,277 employees throughout 130 countries, produced 2.57 million barrels of oil equivalent per day (mboe/d) (Total, 2017a) and had the fourth highest market capitalization in the oil and gas industry at around US$168 billion (after Shell, Exxon and Chevron) (Forbes, 2018). Ekwurzel et al. (2017) have estimated that between the 1930s and 2010, the historical activities of the company had contributed to emitting ±11.9 GtCO₂eq – an amount corresponding to ±1.30% of worldwide emissions between 1850 and 2010. Heede and Oreskes (2016) have evaluated that in 2013, Total had ±4.3 GtCO₂eq of potential emissions ‘waiting’ in its reserves – an amount corresponding to ±0.42% of the total potential emissions from all investor- and state-owned companies. The fact that Total’s potential contribution is relatively modest does not imply that it should escape close scrutiny. As of September 2018, the company reported indeed a projected capital expenditure of US$15–17 billion per year in 2019 and 2020, of which more than a half was meant to be allocated to the exploration and production branch: Total could then declare that one of its objectives was to ‘leverage [its] deepwater expertise’ in Africa, Brazil and in the Gulf of Mexico; of the 12 major start-ups that were then announced for 2019–2020 (which should bring on stream ±0.6 mboe/d by late 2020), 7 were (ultra-)deepwater projects (Total, 2018). The recent acquisition for US$8.8 billion of Anadarko’s African offshore assets confirms this strategic orientation (Reuters, 2019). Put against the previously mentioned findings of McGlade and Ekins (2014, 2015) and Heede and Oreskes (2016), it seems reasonable to hypothesize that the development of such assets is at odds with the 2°C target. Taking the ‘New Policies Scenarios’ (NPS) and ‘Sustainable Development Scenarios’ (SDS) of the IEA as the building blocks of its climate strategy, the firm anticipates that an investment of ‘US$1–2 billion per year in renewables and power’ could put it on track to reach a ‘possible sales mix 2040’ made of natural gas (45%–55%), oil (30%–40%, including biofuels) and low carbon electricity (15%–20%) that would be cogent the 2°C target (Total, 2018).

However, a recent systematic analysis has highlighted the imprecision with which Total refers to the SDS and the NPS in publicly available documents, thus signalling a significant ambiguity in its climate strategy (Mougeolle, 2019) – and this, even before considering the fact that the credibility of IEA scenarios has now been increasingly questioned (see Muttit, 2018). Total’s current sales mix projection thus seems poorly compatible with rapid decarbonization roadmaps, which rely on ‘societies being able to swiftly replace existing capital with new investments at massive scales’ (Millar et al., 2017: 745). Rockström et al. (2017) have thus notably suggested that implementing such a roadmap probably implied that ‘by 2040, oil [would] be about to exit the global energy mix’.

This firm-level analysis suggests a dissonance between Total’s industrial strategy for the decades to come (more diversified, but still focused on fossil fuel extraction) and the many-sided diagnosis that is increasingly shared in the scientific community about the necessity to organize a managed phase out from coal, oil and natural gas.

Debunking the corporation

In the subsections to come, I seek to demonstrate that it is not possible to understand geographies of oil and gas extraction (i.e. the spatialized practicalities through which carbon is transferred from the lithosphere to the atmosphere) without retracing the flows of money that activate the process of accumulation, thereby giving their orientations to the multifarious dynamics that shape the firm’s trajectory. This requires to complicate the common sense depiction of the firm (‘Total’) as a unified corporate agent which is spontaneously conveyed by scientists (see Heede, 2014; Heede and Oreskes, 2016), by civil society and NGOs, and of course by the corporation itself – and to explore a complementary perspective, one that emphasizes the deep-seated antagonisms out of which the corporate realm gets continually re-structured. As such, the firm refers to a social institution channelling the economic activity developed as a consequence of the cluster of contracts that connect corporate assets (i.e. means of productions) to the various holders of resources that are required to operate them (Robé, 2011). Far from having aligned interests, these resource holders – be they ‘labor investors’ (workers), ‘capital investors’ (shareholders; Ferreras, 2017) or else (environmental activists who act on behalf of non-humans, civil servants whose activities instantiate the state apparatus, etc.) compete with each other in order to gain a power position on the firm – and hence secure greater control on its conduct (Chassagnon and Hollandts, 2014; Deakin, 2012). Back in the 1930s, Berle and Means (1991) had observed that a massive disjunction between ownership and control had accompanied the emergence of a ‘managerial capitalism’ characterized by the predominance of large firms securing oligopolistic positions (for the oil and gas industry, see Mitchell, 2013). Chandler (1977) later referred to this reinforced discretionary power of managers by contrasting their ‘visible hand’ with the supposed ‘invisible hand’ of the markets. Today, business firms can still be distinguished from markets in that they represent an ‘explicit institutionalization of formal hierarchies and authority relations’ (Néron, 2015). In recent decades, their internal chains of command have reached critical sizes, crossed over national borders, to the point that intra-firm relations now account for a substantial share of world trade (Baldwin, 2012; Lanz and Miroudot, 2011) – thus reshaping the world-power system (Robé et al., 2016). In the case of Total, intra-firm cooperation has materialized in the form of a pyramidal organization composed of distinct business units, each with its own hierarchical structure and operating beneath a centralized holding (Serfati, 2008): in the oil and gas industry, being able to coordinate a large number of actors (both inside and outside the firm) has indeed become a prerequisite for majors willing to develop complex resources (Beyazay, 2015; Bridge, 2008; Bridge and Le Billon, 2017). In this perspective, TOCs can thus be interpreted as the core ‘hubs’ of the accumulation process: this, however, does not entail that they are homogeneous, uniform entities. Rather, a rigorous description of the social interactions that underlie this intra-firm cooperation has to emphasize how their inherent conflictuality is checked so as to ensure the continuity of the business-as-usual. The operator of this containment is corporate power.

Corporate power in the French context

In this section, I offer a more nuanced view of corporate agency by contesting its homogeneity; to do this, I need to analyse more precisely the power relations that frame and channel the process of accumulation in the corporate realm. In this endeavour, I highlight the intra-firm social dynamics that structure the organization, and I suggest that the patterns and compromises arising from their mutual containment strongly configure Total’s trajectory. So far, I have considered the firm a self-standing entity. The main interest of this section therefore consists of un-packing it, with a view to demonstrating how, by enabling the deployment of the business-as-usual, the heterogeneous tensions that cross Total are simultaneously vectors of global environmental change. To do this, I demonstrate that the exercise of corporate power remains significantly codified by French elite culture; then, I describe the profit-sharing dynamics that contribute to shaping Total’s growth trajectory from within and suggest that these mediate specific relationships with the natural environment.

Socio-cultural determinants

In this subsection, I argue that describing how corporate power is exerted at Total needs to acknowledge the influence of the firm’s French heritage. This suggests that Total’s progressive integration into international markets, predicated on its ability to attract foreign capital and to amend its governance to fit the Anglo-American paradigm of shareholder value, fell short of a complete dissolution of its cultural identity. My claim therefore resonates with Clark and Wójcik’s (2007) analysis of the German model of capitalism. If Total’s recent strategic reorganizations show clear signs of a convergence with the Anglo-American model (see next subsection), some decisive elements betray the pervasive continuity of a specifically French form of capitalism. Among these, the singular status of the corporate elite is a case in point: the way top managers exert their power in the firm (in order to ensure the continuation of business-as-usual activities) remains largely tributary to the national context. As of 2015, 92.7% of Total’s executive officers (12 people) and 72.1% of its senior managers (about 290 people) were indeed French, though the figure was much lower for managers and the workforce as a whole, at 30.1% (about 27,600 people) and 31.2%, respectively (Total, 2016).

French business elites are a relatively unified group with access to dense, cohesive networks that create substantial social endogamy. Until the 2000s, a degree from one of the highly ranked grandes écoles would automatically pave the way to a successful career (Dudouet and Joly, 2010; Maclean et al., 2014). As Kocher-Marboeuf (2003) and Yates (2009, 2010) have demonstrated, the French oil industry has been a cas d’école of such an interlocking between corporate elite circles and the French higher state apparatus: four of the seven CEOs of Total over the last 60 years have thus graduated from ‘Polytechnique, Corps des mines’ – and if the nomination of the penultimate one (De Margerie) caused a sensation (he had a business school background), the arrival of his successor (Pouyanné) was a return to normal. In a recent study on French business elites, Maclean and Harvey (2014) have argued that reconnecting ‘class analysis with organizational analysis’ was key to understanding how the ‘field of power’ (a concept they borrow to Bourdieu) was getting constituted in the top management of the French firms listed in the CAC 40 stock index. Building on an econometric approach, Maclean and Harvey isolate the major significance of a ‘social class effect’ in the selection process through which ‘hyper-agents’ come to occupy the highest positions in the French corporate field of power. This result indicates a significant social endogamy in the nomination of senior managers. The latter therefore constitute a dominant group in the firm, a group that secures its status through the perpetuation of ‘hierarchy-enhancing legitimizing myths’ (Pratto et al., 2006) that are deeply entrenched in the corporate imaginary. Although Maclean and Harvey conducted their study recently, its conclusions seem to reflect long-standing sociological traits of French corporate elites first described by Boltanski (1987). Analysing the quick-paced penetration of the French stock market by foreign capital in the 1990s, Goyer (2006) had earlier hypothesized that the remarkable ability of large French firms to attract capital from non-EU investors was notably due to their organizational design, which left room for assertive CEOs and top managers to reorganize the workplace in a unilateral fashion: non-European mutual and hedge funds particularly appreciated this characteristic because the top-down decision-making processes of French multinational firms was a good match with their time horizon (Baudru et al., 2001). The influx of foreign capital did not fundamentally challenge the concrete arrangements of the exercise of power in the largest French firms (François et al., 2016): non-EU investors rather identified the management-led corporate decision-making process as a ‘comparative advantage’ of French listed corporations and implicitly contributed to its perpetuation by demanding high financial returns. The implementation of cash-flow discipline naturally accentuated the concentration of decision-making power in the hands of the CEO and financial managers by ruling out other performance indicators.

In an important work on the cultural values underpinning French corporate codes, D’Iribarne has demonstrated that French ‘cadres’ exhibit a ‘defensive concern’ for rank and distinction, as well as a taste for privileges directly inherited from the ancien régime. The persistence of aristocratic values beneath a meritocratic gloss explains why it becomes possible to classify French employees into different castes inside the same firm. A ‘logic of honor’ binds every group to specific duties and privileges, which are partly ingrained in salary scales and career paths (D’Iribarne, 1992, 1994). This description resonates with Goyer’s (2006) suggestion that, compared with what can be observed in Germany, ‘the promotion system of French firms [reflects] a change of status unilaterally decided by the top management rather than the acquisition of technical expertise’. Of course, the ‘change of status’ invoked in his account is not purely arbitrary, for it recognizes good performance: however, it nonetheless suggests that co-optation remains more than elsewhere the norm. According to Clift (2012), the long-standing French hostility to liberalism as an intellectual tradition can explain this non-liberal penchant inherent in French corporate governance, which one could even interpret as a Rousseauian heritage; rank-and-file employees and intermediary managers are thus often inclined to welcome the decisions of executive officers as the instantiations of a substantial ‘corporate will’ that leaves little room for dissent. In this vein, it is interesting to report how portraits of Total’s CEO in the French press regularly praise his ‘iron will’ and ‘unilateral style of management’ (Le Monde, 2016) – and only rarely raise the side-effects of such a complete supremacy on corporate governance or on investor relations (Les Echos, 2018).

The French corporate elite’s latent socio-cultural traits influence the exercise of corporate power and, therefore, the organization of the accumulation process. In this perspective, power relations are best interpreted as being fundamentally ‘embedded in distinctive social contexts’ (Clift, 2012), which are in turn deeply culturally informed – thereby articulating a distinctively French variety of capitalism. Yet, emphasizing this explanatory pattern does not rule out others: as Goyer (2006) observed, different patterns may even become closely intertwined (i.e. the socio-cultural and the economic one). In the next subsection, I supplement the present description with a further analysis of how Total’s transition to shareholder capitalism has accelerated a decoupling of the interests of employees along the hierarchical chain.

Economic determinants

In this subsection, I consider four distinct schematic social groups inside the firm, on the basis of the company’s threefold classification (Total, 2016), which encompasses ‘executive officers’, ‘senior managers’ and ‘other employees’ (who actually are the ‘other employees’ who benefit from performance shares): the ‘other employees’ who do not benefit from this incentivization scheme thus constitute the last category. I suggest that the differentiated dynamics of these intra-firm groups are best analysed by considering their respective positions towards what I refer to as the ‘fossil rent’, namely the broad array of social goods that are traditionally associated with the production of hydrocarbons: if financial wealth is the most obvious good, social status and prestige also matter. Influenced by Walzer’s (1984) critique of monist approaches to distributive justice, this definition of a multi-faceted ‘fossil rent’ thus seeks to rule out the temptation to provide one-sided mechanistic accounts of human motivations. For example, higher executives of oil and gas majors tend to cooperate actively with their national embassies more than in any other industry, and thus tend to develop ‘privileged’ relationships with foreign ministers and heads of states (Auzanneau, 2015; Cantoni, 2017). This bestows a certain grandeur on their position – a grandeur that is incidentally reinforced by a myriad of other factors. Kocyba’s (2017) description of how the architecture of the European Central Bank tower in Frankfurt mirrors the power relations between EU members could thus be transposed to Total: in the skyscraper of the company’s headquarters, which piles up on the surface the fossil wealth excavated from the depth (Bridge, 2015), the panoramic, top-down view on Paris that higher executives enjoy from their offices doubtlessly bolsters their sense that their mission – supplying its ‘lifeblood’ to the polis (Huber, 2009) – gives them status. For the remainder of this subsection, I do not analyse further the symbolic goods that are attached to the exercise of power, and I focus exclusively on the financial wealth that the fossil rent generates.

Financialization, wage inequalities and innovation

Since it would exceed the scope of this analysis to embark on an exhaustive study of the intricate links between financialization, wage inequalities and innovation, I first isolate some of the key arguments that have structured discussions around the Anglo-American context, before turning to the French case.

Since the mid-1980s, many observers have stressed how the diffusion of the shareholder value paradigm in the United States had served to justify the rise of executive pay, and the corresponding widening of income and wealth inequalities. Lazonick (2012) and Lin and Tomaskovic-Devey (2013) have extensively analysed the impact of this transformation on large American firms: the increasing share of executives’ earnings realized through financial channels, supported by the emergence of new practices on the stock markets (‘downsize and distribute’ rather than ‘retain and reinvest’), progressively led to a reshuffling of the class alliances that had stabilized after the New Deal. Duménil and Lévy (2015a, 2015b) have described this shift as a transition towards ‘managerialism’ – that is, a late phase of capitalism in which the interests of managers and capitalists have become virtually indistinguishable, with the labour’s share of income entering a steady decrease. It is worth mentioning here that these accounts are based on datasets aggregated at the national level; they do not assess distributive issues within the corporate perimeter. Mueller et al. (2016) partially filled this gap by developing a structural analysis of intra-firm income inequalities beyond the mere focus on executive pay, which had generated the bulk of academic debates. Analysing a sample of British firms and subdividing their hierarchies into nine generic socio-professional layers, the authors were able to demonstrate a positive correlation between the size of the firm and pay inequality across the hierarchy. Their finding supports the preceding analysis and confirms the hypothesis of an upsurge in intra-firm income inequality in recent decades, at least in Anglo-American firms. I should also mention, albeit briefly, the effects of financialization on innovation. Graeber (2015) has rather scathingly pointed out that financialization had, at least since the 1960s, been exacerbating a deep-seated feature of mass-market capitalism, namely its structural inability to deliver substantial technological progress – an observation that Veblen (2012 [1921]) had made earlier. The growing obsession of multinational firms with the value of their stocks has had adverse effects on capital expenditure (e.g. by justifying expensive buyback plans: see Serfati, 2008), thus impeding the integration of ecological constraints in the business-as-usual (Fieldman, 2014). Total is not an exception in this respect: it is reasonable to contend that its full integration to the circuits of the financial economy structurally hinders long-term research and development projects, thereby affecting its organizational capacity to engage a ‘phase out’ strategy.

Even if primary data on the level of intra-firm income inequalities within French transnational firms are largely unavailable, this hypothesis of a tight connection between pay inequality and latent dynamics of financialization can be defended. In 2011, Faber (the then VP and now CEO at Danone) estimated, on the basis of non-disclosed corporate figures, that a 30% reduction in the global compensation allocated to the top 1% of Danone’s best-paid employees would, if redistributed to the lowest 20%, double their pay. This order of magnitude clearly hints at a pervasive structural gap in the wage policies of French champions, which it is possible to ascertain indirectly. Building on datasets aggregated at the national level, Piketty (2014) noticed that the fraction of the French national income going to the top 0.1% jumped from 1.5% in the 1980s to nearly 2.5% in 2010. Earlier work by Landais (2007) showed a similar picture when he established that the average incomes of the top 1%, 0.1% and 0.01% grew by 14%, 29% and 51%, respectively, between 1998 and 2005. By highlighting the crucial role of the financial sector in widening the income gap nationally, Godechot’s (2011) analysis provided a more comprehensive view of this diagnosis: in 2007, 24.1% of the upper 0.1% wage fractile worked in the financial sector, but just 6% 30 years earlier; in the industrial sector, the figures were 14% and 38%, respectively. Yet, Alvarez’s (2015) analysis of a sample of 6980 non-financial French firms reveals that an increased dependence on profits accrued through financial channels tends to decreases labour’s share significantly, thereby contributing to a widening of inequalities. Cross-checked with Labban’s (2010) account of the rapid financialization of international oil markets since the 1980s (i.e. of the growing decoupling between the circulation of ‘paper oil’ in financial markets and the effective trade in physical markets) and the active involvement of oil and gas firms in this process, Alvarez’s diagnosis that a ‘strong incentive for corporations to move investments from real assets to financial assets’ exacerbates pay inequality (and low innovation) can probably be extended to Total, a hypothesis I shall test further in the next subsection.

Intra-firm class dynamics as a vector of environmental change

In this paragraph, I examine Total’s internal power structures with a view to showing that their continuous reconfiguration (articulated, in recent decades, by the imperative to align with the interests of shareholders) is intimately interconnected with the articulation of specific ‘ecological regimes’. I suggest that only a close study of the dynamics inherent in the process of accumulation can link the social practices enacted everyday by corporate managers at Total’s headquarters in Paris, on the one hand, with the degradation of socio-ecological habitats in sites of extraction, and with the diffracted release of CO2 in a globally homogenized atmosphere, on the other. In other words, understanding the concrete arrangements of accumulation enables one to interpret these empirical phenomena not only as ‘ontologically distinct fragments of reality’ but also as ‘parts of an internally related totality’ (Arboleda, 2015).

When introducing the concept of ‘fossil rent’ earlier in the discussion, I implicitly hinted at its uneven economic distribution along the hierarchical chain of command. Now I shall focus more deliberately on its financial component and analyse how Total’s executive officers and senior managers (who constitute about 0.3% of the corporate workforce) manage to harvest a substantial share of it. Analysing the distribution of stock options and performance shares over the last 15 years helps one to appreciate this phenomenon better. The breakdown of Total’s stock option grants (Figure 1) reveals how executive officers and senior managers gradually captured a greater share of the total options distributed, from approximately 30%–35% in the early 2000s to about 70% between 2007 and 2010, while their proportion among beneficiaries only rose slightly (from 11.7% in 2000 to 17.1% in 2010).

Figure 1.

Breakdown of Total stock option grants by category of beneficiary (2000–2010) (aggregate % of options distributed to each category).

In 2000, the 24 executive officers, on average, received 4.6 times as many stock options as the 298 senior managers, who themselves received four times as many options as the 2740 ‘other employees’ (who were in turn granted an average of 554 options). In 2010, these figures rose significantly, reaching 9.3 and 7.4, respectively, with a rising average of 778 options granted to ‘other employees’. While the suspension of stock option plans after 2010 partially reined in this progression of intra-firm income inequalities, the phenomenon persisted through other channels. One can observe a similar divergence between ‘interclass’ multiplying factors when considering Total’s distribution of performance share grants between 2005 and 2017 (Figure 2). When the firm buys these shares back from the market, it usually grants them to their beneficiaries after a vesting period of 2 or 3 years, provided that some performance targets (which the consolidated return on equity (ROE) mostly defines) are met. On this precise point, it is worth emphasizing that with US$5 billion budgeted for the period 2018–2020, Total’s projected share buyback plan beats investments in renewables on the same period (Total, 2018).²

Figure 2.

Breakdown of Total performance share grants by category of beneficiary (2005–2017) (aggregate % of shares distributed to each category).

While analysing the data, first it is important to bear in mind that, between 2005 and 2010, a fraction of the top management combined variable revenues from both stock options and performance shares, though the latter were distributed to a larger number of employees. Moreover, the end of the stock option plans coincided with a substantial increase in the total proportion of performance shares allocated to executive officers and senior managers (13% in 2009; 30% in 2017). Throughout the period under consideration, a divergence in multiplying factors similar to the one observed for stock options could be noted: in 2005, the 29 executive officers received, on average, 3.5 times as many shares as the 330 senior managers, who themselves received 2.1 times as many as the 6956 ‘other employees’ (who in turn were granted an average of 260 shares), whereas in 2017, these factors amounted to 4.7 and 11.9, respectively, with a rising average of 398 shares granted to ‘other employees’.³ It is crucial, however, to remember that about 90% of Total’s workforce remains excluded from this compensation scheme – a figure that exceeded 95% for stock options.

Taken as such, these results mitigate Wright’s (1985) famous observation that in contemporary capitalism, top executives and managers of multinational firms occupy ‘contradictory locations within exploitation relations’ (p. 87): in Total’s case, their interests indeed seem significantly aligned with those of shareholders (Duménil and Lévy, 2015b). Wright (2015) himself recently emphasized that a significant part of senior managers’ earnings

should [now] be thought of as an allocation by the executives themselves of profits of the firm to the personal accounts of managers, rather than a wage in the ordinary sense. They exercise their capitalist-derived power within the class relations of the firm to appropriate part of the corporation’s profits for their personal accounts. (pp. 136–137)

From all this, it becomes apparent that, far from being a homogeneous institution, Total is composed of distinct social groups (or ‘intra-firm classes’), whose interests are decoupled – if not plainly antagonistic. In the following paragraph, I elaborate this hypothesis further by exploring the ‘ecological negative’ of this alignment of the interests of Total’s executive managers with their shareholders’ short time horizons.

Recent scholarship in geography has underlined how finance capital, through its fundamental orientation towards the projection of future value creation (Harvey, 2007; Labban, 2010), ultimately relies on real production to generate profits. As such, it is deeply entangled in the socio-material world. In this respect, Total’s case is not an exception: one can transpose Labban’s (2014) account of how the oil and gas majors’ endorsement of cash-flow discipline has fostered a degradation of working conditions to analyse how its implementation at Total results in a deterioration of the natural environment.

To highlight this phenomenon, I first need to emphasize how crucial the exercise of ‘reserve replacement’ has become for public-listed oil and gas firms. Since the value of their stocks mirrors ‘the value of current reservoirs [as] future cash potential’ (Wood, 2016), majors constantly have to prove their reserves by ‘formatting them into the financial frames of net present value and discounted cash-flows’: ‘finance [thus] shapes discoveries and formats them into the framework of finance’ (Wood, 2016). The attempt to keep their stocks afloat in the context of the increasing scarcity of conventional fuels has, in the last decade, understandably led oil and gas senior executives to turn to unconventional and extreme fuels to compensate the declining reserves. Focusing on the development of Alberta tar sands, Zalik (2015) has showed how these assets ‘operate[d] as a spatiotemporal fix for capital at various scales, allowing accumulated capital to be sunk into extractive landscapes and financial futures’: replacing reserves is indeed an attempt to appease investors, who expect a ROE, while ensuring the short-term stability of the top executives’ financial packages. Operating unconventional and extreme reserves (such as those listed as ‘unburnable’ by McGlade and Ekins) thus resonates with the monetary interests of high-profile managers.

The next step therefore is to retrace how these interests structure the organization of the hierarchical chain of command, which in turn strongly shapes the myriad of everyday practices that frame the production of oil in sites of extraction. Wood (2016) has provided a detailed account of how the ‘bottom line imperative’ shapes the working activities of corporate geoscientists. In her ethnographic study conducted in Alberta, she describes how these perform a ‘financialized geology’ when they ‘surf deep time-spaces and interpret the signals from rock using scalar instruments to map zones of opportunity that are read through the lens of finance’. Far from representing an already existing value, reserve reports thus ‘spatialize and assign value on the basis of a well’s rate of cash flow’; it is thus possible to conclude that, through mathematical formulas that ‘provide a means to liquidate the future in the present while creating a financial path dependence on future production, [. . .] regimes of reserve qualification perform a form of resource management’ (Wood, 2016). From this perspective, the identification of Alberta tar sands as a locus for capital accumulation appears eminently context-dependent; this is because it relies on the prior diffusion, in the corporate realm and beyond, of a homogenized language in which this identification can ‘make sense’, thereby transforming deposits into business opportunities.⁴ As Zalik’s contribution suggests, over the last few decades, there has been an increasing tendency to articulate technical–economic possibilities through the imaginary of finance (see also Labban, 2010): top executives have become the ambassadors of this new imaginary and have had their zeal fuelled by structures of incentivization that they have themselves contributed to shape (Caldecott and Rook, 2015). Far from occurring on a purely ideational level, this re-articulation of the scope of possibilities has had tangible effects – notably by inducing the development of industrial megaprojects, which organize massive material and energy flows across highly fragmented production networks – thereby redrawing collective relationships to the natural environment on both a local and a global scale.⁵

From all this, it seems clear that in pursuing their interests, Total’s top executives transform the environment mediately by steering the firm towards carbon-intensive futures that meet short-term ROE targets. Yet, it is now probable that in the foreseeable future, ‘stranded assets’ (Caldecott et al., 2013) could affect the interests of shareholders and, as a consequence, of financially incentivized managers. However, the majority of Total’s other employees would probably be better off if the company decided to sell ‘stranded assets’ in order to reinvest in an alternative corporate project – for most of them derive the bulk of their income from a wage (paid in exchange for their work) rather than from financial compensation, and may therefore develop much weaker preferences for the present than do their top executives.

The interests of the different social groups making up the firm are thus decoupled, and their potential antagonism seems largely predicated on the critical temporality of the ‘fossil rent’. Van de Graaf and Verbruggen (2015) have observed that, with the prospect of a structural decline in the demand for oil, ‘petroleum in the ground [could indeed] no longer be considered as the equivalent of a safe financial deposit’. If the anticipation of this temporal dilemma has already been identified in the strategies of national producers (Fattouh et al., 2016), one can reasonably assume that oil and gas executives are engaged in a similar effort to prolong the availability of the fossil rent, for the latter ensures them a safe haven for the remainder of their career (see also The Guardian, 2017a, 2017b). Consequently, one can probably extend Tvinnereim and Ivarsflaten’s (2016) finding that Norwegian people ‘employed in fossil fuel extraction are as favorably inclined to energy-related mitigation as everybody else as long as alternative areas in which to gainfully employ their skills can be found’ to Total’s top executives: considering their poor prospect of finding compensation outside the oil and gas industry to match what they currently receive at Total, it is reasonable to infer that they will stick to rent-seeking strategies.

Conclusion

In this study, I have attempted to ascertain the position of TOCs in the global carbon cycle, in a time of mounting concern about the potentially disastrous consequences of anthropogenic global warming. After having delineated the contours of the carbon budget conundrum, I have attempted to outline a fair picture of Total’s trajectory and contended that in a context of intensified financialization, intra-firm pay inequality constituted one of the major (yet often overlooked) structural limitations to an ambitious ‘phase out’ industrial strategy. In a context where it seems increasingly clear that organizing an ‘equitably managed decline in fossil fuel extraction’ would inevitably entail a ‘significant transitional disruption’ of the business-as-usual (Healy and Barry, 2017; Kartha et al., 2018; Le Billon and Kristoffersen, 2019), it is reasonable to doubt the institutional capacity of TOCs to catalyse such a social, political and cultural metamorphosis.

Before concluding, it is important to recall how fragmentary the perimeter of this analysis remains: other case studies would be needed to engage in a comparative approach – yet, publicly available data on TOCs remain unfortunately scarce. However, further research could be undertaken in order to refine further our understanding of how private actors of the economic and financial system accelerate the advent of the Anthropocene. As Galaz et al. (2018a, 2018b) have recently emphasized in two co-authored publications, examining the role of finance is crucial – for it intervenes at every step in processes of resources extraction. This requires not only to analyse how asset owners engage with climate risk in a context where passive index funds have gained unprecedented influence (Haberly and Wójcik, 2017) but also to pay greater attention to investment banks, which tend to underwrite debt and equity for their clients without considering the environmental risks associated with their projects (Wójcik and Urban, 2019). A raising public awareness on this issue might accelerate the ‘end of innocence’ for the financial sector and amplify further the pressure put on the fossil fuel industry.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Gordon L. Clark and Cécile Renouard for having proofread initial versions of this paper, and Michael Urban for his advice in the last steps.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: during this research did not receive any substantial grant from the firm analysed in the paper. Part of the fieldwork implied that the author travelled to one of its subsidiaries for a short research session (3 weeks): during that time, his living expenses (accommodation, meals, and return flight) were defrayed by the firm through an agreement with a French research institute, to which he was associated. Apart from this funding, he did not receive any financial support (direct or indirect) from the firm. He has no other declarations of interest to mention.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Financial support by the Economic and Social Research Council when the author was a DPhil student and was also a decisive support in the realisation of this research project.

ORCID iD

Pierre-Louis Choquet

Notes

References

Allen

Frame

Huntingford

, et al. (2009) Warming caused by cumulative carbon emissions towards the trillionth tonne. Nature 458(7242): 1163–1166.

Alvarez

(2015) Financialization, non-financial corporations and income inequality: The case of France. Socio-Economic Review 13(3): 449–475.

Arboleda

(2015) Financialization, totality and planetary urbanization in the Chilean Andes. Geoforum 67: 4–13.

Auzanneau

(2015) Or noir. Paris: La Découverte.

Baldwin

(2012) Global supply chains: Why they emerged, why they matter, and where they are going. CEPR Discussion Paper no. DP9103, August. Available at: https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/9103.html

Baudru

Lavigne

Morin

(2001) Les investisseurs institutionnels internationaux: une analyse du comportement des investisseurs américains. Revue d’économie financière 61(1): 121–133.

Berle

Means

(1991) The Modern Corporation and Private Property. New York: Transaction Publishers.

Beyazay

(2015) The Nature of the Firm in the Oil Industry: International Oil Companies in Global Business. New York: Routledge.

Boltanski

(1987) The Making of a Class: Cadres in French Society. New York: Cambridge University Press.

10.

BP (2018) Statistical Review of World Energy 2017. London: BP. Available at: https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/downloads.html

11.

Bridge

(2008, May) Global production networks and the extractive sector. Journal of Economic Geography 8(3): 389–419.

12.

Bridge

(2015) The hole world: Scales and spaces of extraction. Scenario Journal 5(Extraction). Available at: https://scenariojournal.com/article/the-hole-world/

13.

Bridge

Le Billon

(2017) Oil. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Polity Press.

14.

Caldecott

Rook

(2015) Cognitive biases and stranded assets: Detecting psychological vulnerabilities within international oil companies. Stranded Assets Programme Working Paper, July. Oxford: Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. Available at: https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/research/sustainable-finance/publications/Cognitive-biases-and-Stranded-Assets.pdf

15.

Caldecott

Tilbury

Ansar

(2013) Stranded assets and the fossil fuel divestment campaign: What does divestment mean for the valuation of fossil fuel assets? Stranded Assets Programme Working Paper, October. Oxford: Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. Available at: https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/publications/reports/SAP-divestment-report-final.pdf

16.

Cantoni

(2017) Oil Exploration, Diplomacy, and Security in the Early Cold War: The Enemy Underground. New York: Routledge.

17.

Carbon Tracker Initiative (CTI) (2011) Unburnable Carbon – Are the World’s Financial Markets Carrying a Carbon Bubble? London: CTI.

18.

Carbon Tracker Initiative (CTI) (2013) Unburnable Carbon – Wasted Capital and Stranded Assets. London: CTI.

19.

Carbon Tracker Initiative (CTI) (2014a) Carbon Supply Cost Curves: Evaluating Financial Risk to Oil Capital Expenditures. London: CTI.

20.

Carbon Tracker Initiative (CTI) (2014b) Oil & Gas Majors: Fact Sheets. London: CTI.

21.

Chandler

(1977) The Visible Hand – The Managerial Revolution in American Business. New edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

22.

Chassagnon

Hollandts

(2014) Who are the owners of the firm: Shareholders, employees or no one? Journal of Institutional Economics 10(1): 47–69.

23.

Clark

Wójcik

(2007) The Geography of Finance: Corporate Governance in the Global Marketplace. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

24.

Clift

(2012) Comparative capitalisms, ideational political economy and French post-dirigiste responses to the global financial crisis. New Political Economy 17(5): 565–590.

25.

Deakin

(2012) The corporation as commons: Rethinking property rights, governance and sustainability in the business enterprise. Queen’s Law Journal 37: 339–381.

26.

D’Iribarne

(1992) Les entreprises françaises et la logique de l’honneur. Le Débat 69(2): 145–155.

27.

D’Iribarne

(1994) The honour principle in the ‘Bureaucratic phenomenon’. Organization Studies 15(1): 81–97.

28.

Dudouet

F-X

Joly

(2010) Les dirigeants français du CAC40: entre élitisme scolaire et passage par l’État. Sociologies Pratiques 21(2): 35–47.

29.

Duménil

Lévy

(2015a) A reply to William Lazonick’s comment. International Journal of Political Economy 44(2): 100–104.

30.

Duménil

Lévy

(2015b) Neoliberal managerial capitalism. International Journal of Political Economy 44(2): 71–89.

31.

Ekwurzel

Boneham

Dalton

, et al. (2017) The rise in global atmospheric CO₂, surface temperature, and sea level from emissions traced to major carbon producers. Climatic Change 144(4): 579–590.

32.

Faber

(2011) Chemins de traverse: Vivre l’économie autrement. Paris: Albin Michel.

33.

Fattouh

Poudineh

Sen

(2016) The dynamics of the revenue maximization–market share trade-off: Saudi Arabia’s oil policy in the 2014–2015 price fall. Oxford Review of Economic Policy 32(2): 223–240.

34.

Ferreras

(2017) Firms as Political Entities: Saving Democracy through Economic Bicameralism. New York: Cambridge University Press.

35.

Fieldman

(2014) Financialisation and ecological modernisation. Environmental Politics 23(2): 224–242.

36.

Forbes (2018) The world’s 2000 largest public companies. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/global2000/list/

37.

François

Lemercier

Hamilton

(2016) Financialization French-style (1979–2009). Revue Française de Sociologie 57(2): 269–320.

38.

Gagnon

Hall

Brinker

(2009) A preliminary investigation of EROI for global oil and gas production. Energies 2(3): 490–503.

39.

Galaz

Crona

Dauriach

, et al. (2018a) Finance and the Earth system – Exploring the links between financial actors and non-linear changes in the climate system. Global Environmental Change 53: 296–302.

40.

Galaz

Crona

Dauriach

, et al. (2018b) Tax havens and global environmental degradation. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2(9): 1352–1357.

41.

Godechot

(2011) Finance and the rise in inequalities in France. Working Paper no. 13, April. Paris School of Economics. Available at: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00584881/document

42.

Goodwin

Katavouta

Roussenov

, et al. (2018) Pathways to 1.5 °C and 2 °C warming based on observational and geological constraints. Nature Geoscience 11(2): 102–107.

43.

Goyer

(2006) Varieties of institutional investors and national models of capitalism: The transformation of corporate governance in France and Germany. Politics & Society 34(3): 399–430.

44.

Graeber

(2015) The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. London: Melville House.

45.

Haberly

Wójcik

(2017) Earth incorporated: Centralization and variegation in the global company network. Economic Geography 93(3): 241–266.

46.

Hall

Lambert

Balogh

(2014) EROI of different fuels and the implications for society. Energy Policy 64: 141–152.

47.

Harvey

(2007) Limits to Capital. New and fully updated edition. London and New York: Verso.

48.

Hausfather

(2018a) Analysis: How much ‘carbon budget’ is left to limit global warming to 1.5 °C? Carbon Brief, 9 April. Available at: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-much-carbon-budget-is-left-to-limit-global-warming-to-1-5c

49.

Hausfather

(2018b) Analysis: Why the IPCC 1.5C report expanded the carbon budget. Carbon Brief, 8 October. Available at: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-ipcc-1-5c-report-expanded-the-carbon-budget

50.

Healy

Barry

(2017) Politicizing energy justice and energy system transitions: Fossil fuel divestment and a ‘just transition’. Energy Policy 108: 451–459.

51.

Heede

(2014) Tracing anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane emissions to fossil fuel and cement producers, 1854–2010. Climatic Change 122(1–2): 229–241.

52.

Heede

Oreskes

(2016) Potential emissions of CO₂ and methane from proved reserves of fossil fuels: An alternative analysis. Global Environmental Change 36: 12–20.

53.

Holy Father Francis (2015) Laudato Si’. Vatican: Roman Catholic Church.

54.

Huber

(2009) The use of gasoline: Value, oil, and the ‘American way of life’. Antipode 41(3): 465–486.

55.

IEA (2012) World Energy Outlook 2012. Paris: International Energy Agency.

56.

IEA (2016) World Energy Outlook 2016. Paris: International Energy Agency.

57.

IPCC (2006) 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories: Vol. 2: Energy (Stationary, Mobile, and Fugitives), Vol. 3: Industrial Processes and Product Use. Geneva: IPCC.

58.

IPCC (2014) Fifth Assessment Report – Synthesis Report. Geneva: IPCC.

59.

IPCC (2018) Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5 °C Above Pre-Industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways. Geneva: IPCC.

60.

Kartha

Caney

Dubash

, et al. (2018) Whose carbon is burnable? Equity considerations in the allocation of a ‘right to extract’. Climatic Change 150(1): 117–129.

61.

Kocher-Marboeuf

(2003) Chapitre IX: Promouvoir une politique pétrolière indépendante. In: Kocher-Marboeuf

(ed.) Le Patricien et le Général. Jean-Marcel Jeanneney et Charles de Gaulle 1958–1969, vol. I. Vincennes: IGPDE, pp. 243–295. Available at: http://books.openedition.org/igpde/1123

62.

Kocyba

(2017) Für Europa arbeiten? Arbeitsbeziehungen in der Europäischen Zentralbank. Revue Economique et Sociale 75(4): 47–53.

63.

Labban

(2010) Oil in parallax: Scarcity, markets, and the financialization of accumulation. Geoforum 41(4): 541–552.

64.

Labban

(2014) Against value: Accumulation in the oil industry and the biopolitics of labour under finance. Antipode 46(2): 477–496.

65.

Landais

(2007) Les hauts revenus en France (1998–2006): une explosion des inégalités? juin. Available at: http://www.insee.fr/fr/insee-statistique-publique/connaitre/colloques/inegalites/pdf/landais_texte.pdf

66.

Lanz

Miroudot

(2011) Intra-firm trade. OECD Trade Policy Paper no. 114, 24 June. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Available at: http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/content/workingpaper/5kg9p39lrwnn-en

67.

Lazonick

(2012) Financialization of the U.S. Corporation: What has been lost, and how it can be regained. MPRA Paper, University Library of Munich, Germany. Available at: https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/42307.html

68.

Le Billon

Kristoffersen

(2019) Just cuts for fossil fuels? Supply-side carbon constraints and energy transition. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. Epub ahead of print 10 January. DOI: 10.1177/0308518X18816702.

69.

Le Monde (2016) Patrick Pouyanné, Mister big oil. Le Monde, 24 October. Available at: http://www.lemonde.fr/entreprises/article/2016/10/24/patrick-pouyanne-mister-big-oil_5018999_1656994.html

70.

Les Echos (2018) Patrick Pouyanné, le patron XXL qui bouscule Total. Les Echos, 14 December. Available at: https://www.lesechos.fr/industrie-services/energie-environnement/0600331394126-patrick-pouyanne-le-patron-xxl-qui-bouscule-total-2230089.php

71.

Lin

K-H

Tomaskovic-Devey

(2013) Financialization and US income inequality, 1970–2008. American Journal of Sociology 118(5): 1284–1329.

72.

Lowe

Bernie

(2018) The impact of earth system feedbacks on carbon budgets and climate response. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series A: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences 376(2119): 20170263.

73.

McGlade

Ekins

(2014) Un-burnable oil: An examination of oil resource utilisation in a decarbonised energy system. Energy Policy 64: 102–112.

74.

McGlade

Ekins

(2015) The geographical distribution of fossil fuels unused when limiting global warming to 2°C. Nature 517(7533): 187–190.

75.

Maclean

Harvey

(2014) Elite connectivity and concerted action in French organization. International Journal of Organizational Analysis 22(4): 469–449.

76.

Maclean

Harvey

Kling

(2014) Pathways to power: Class, hyper-agency and the French corporate elite. Organization Studies 35(6): 825–855.

77.

Meinshausen

Hare

, et al. (2009) Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2°C. Nature 458(7242): 1158–1162.

78.

Millar

Fuglestvedt

Friedlingstein

, et al. (2017) Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C. Nature Geoscience 10(10): 741–747.

79.

Mitchell

(2013) Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso.

80.

Mougeolle

(2019) Total, la stratégie du chaos climatique. Paris: Notre Affaire à Tous, 350.org, Les Amis de la Terre. Available at: https://www.amisdelaterre.org/IMG/pdf/rapport_total_strategie_du_chaos_climatique-mai19.pdf

81.

Mueller

Ouimet

Simintzi

(2016) Within-firm pay inequality. Available at: http://people.stern.nyu.edu/hmueller/papers/inequality.pdf

82.

Muttit

(2018) The IEA Comes Up Short on Climate (Again). Oil Change International, 12 November. Available at: http://priceofoil.org/2018/11/12/business-as-usual-iea-climate/

83.

Néron

P-Y

(2015) Rethinking the very idea of Egalitarian markets and corporations: Why relationships might matter more than distribution. Business Ethics Quarterly 25: 93–124.

84.

Peters

(2018) Beyond carbon budgets. Nature Geoscience 11(6): 378–380.

85.

Piketty

(2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

86.

Pratto

Sidanius

Levin

(2006) Social dominance theory and the dynamics of intergroup relations: Taking stock and looking forward. European Review of Social Psychology 17(1): 271–320.

87.

Quéré

Andrew

Friedlingstein

, et al. (2018) Global carbon budget 2018. Earth System Science Data 10(4): 2141–2194.

88.

Reuters (2019) ‘Total CEO says planned buy of Anadarko’s Africa assets perfectly . . .’. Reuters, 17 May. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-anadarko-petrol-m-a-total-idUSKCN1SN02D

89.

Richardson

Cowtan

Millar

(2018) Global temperature definition affects achievement of long-term climate goals. Environmental Research Letters 13(5): 054004.

90.

Robé

J-P

(2011) The legal structure of the firm. Accounting, Economics, and Law 1(1). Available at: https://works.bepress.com/jean-philippe_robe/1/

91.

Robé

J-P

Lyon-Caen

Vernac

(eds) (2016) Multinationals and the Constitutionalization of the World Power System. New York: Routledge.

92.

Rockström

Gaffney

Rogelj

, et al. (2017) A roadmap for rapid decarbonization. Science 355(6331): 1269–1271.

93.

Rogelj

Popp

Calvin

, et al. (2018) Scenarios towards limiting global mean temperature increase below 1.5°C. Nature Climate Change 8(4): 325–332.

94.

Serfati

(2008) Financial dimensions of transnational corporations, global value chain and technological innovation. Journal of Innovation Economics & Management 2: 35–61.

95.

Steffen

Richardson

Rockström

, et al. (2015) Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science 347(6223): 1259855.

96.

The Guardian (2017a) Brazil’s oil sale plans prompt fears of global fossil fuel extraction race. The Guardian, 15 November. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/15/brazils-oil-sale-plans-undermine-its-role-at-bonn

97.

The Guardian (2017b) UK trade minister lobbied Brazil on behalf of oil giants. The Guardian, 19 November. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/19/uk-trade-minister-lobbied-brazil-on-behalf-of-oil-giants

98.

Total (2009) Registration document 2008. Available at: https://www.total.com/sites/default/files/atoms/file/2008-document-reference-vf.pdf

99.

Total (2014) Registration document 2013. Available at: http://www.total.com/sites/default/files/atoms/files/registration-document-2013.pdf

100.

Total (2016) Registration document 2015. Available at: http://www.total.com/sites/default/files/atoms/files/registration_document_2015.pdf

101.

Total (2017a) Factbook 2017. Available at: https://www.total.com/sites/default/files/atoms/files/factbook-2017_web_0.pdf

102.

Total (2017b) Form 20-F. Available at: https://www.total.com/sites/default/files/atoms/files/2017-form-20-f-web.pdf

103.

Total (2018) Strategy and outlook presentation, September 2018. Available at: https://www.total.com/fr/medias/actualite/communiques/presentation-strategie-perspectives-2018

104.

Total (2019) Registration document 2018. Available at: https://www.total.com/sites/default/files/atoms/files/ddr2018-en.pdf

105.

Tvinnereim

Ivarsflaten

(2016) Fossil fuels, employment, and support for climate policies. Energy Policy 96: 364–371.

106.

UNFCC (2015) Adoption of the Paris agreement FCCC/CP/2015/L.9/Rev. 1. Available at: http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2015/cop21/eng/l09r01.pdf

107.

Van de Graaf

Verbruggen

(2015) The oil endgame: Strategies of oil exporters in a carbon-constrained world. Environmental Science & Policy 54: 456–462.

108.

Veblen

(2012 [1921]) The Engineers and the Price System. New York: Martino Fine Books.

109.

Walzer

(1984) Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books.

110.

Wójcik

Urban

(2019) Dirty Banking: Probing the gap in sustainable finance. Sustainability 11(6): 1745.

111.

Wood

(2016) Inside the halo zone: Geology, finance, and the corporate performance of profit in a deep tight oil formation. Economic Anthropology 3(1): 43–56.

112.

Wright

(1985) Classes. London: Verso.

113.

Wright

(2015) Understanding Class. London: Verso.

114.

Yates

(2009) The French Oil Industry and the Corps Des Mines in Africa. Trenton, NJ; Amsara: Africa Research & Publications.

115.

Yates

(2010) Life stories and family histories of the French oil industry. In: Beltran

(ed.) A Comparative History of National Oil Companies. Brussels: Peter Lang, pp. 54–67.

116.

Zalik

(2015) Resource sterilization: Reserve replacement, financial risk, and environmental review in Canada’s tar sands. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 47(12): 2446–2464.