Source 1: About the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline(EACOP). TotalEnergies and partners aim to construct a 1445-km crude oil pipeline and infrastructure to transport Uganda’s crude oil from Hoima in Uganda to Tanga in Tanzania. If constructed, this would be the longest heated crude oil pipeline in the world, producing an estimated 34 million tonnes of carbon emissions annually. The project has already displaced thousands and threatens the water resources, livelihoods of millions of people in the Lake Victoria basin, as well as wildlife. TotalEnergies has been linked to other fossil fuel projects such as oil exploration in Africa’s oldest national park - Virunga national park in the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as the Mozambique Liquefied Natural Gas project. TotalEnergies announced that they would stop all their operations within the Virunga national park borders in 2013 and recently resumed their operations in Mozambique LNG after almost one year of suspension.

Source 2: The second video in the series, however, was a little closer to home for me. Set in the Congo Basin, this video zoomed in on the threat that Total’s greenwashing poses to our greatest resource in countering climate change as Africans: the world’s largest tropical peatland, which stores an equivalent of 20 years of the US’s fossil fuel emissions. French oil company TotalEnergies recently bought rights permitting future oil drilling in pristine peatland forest of the Republic of Congo. It claims it can compensate for the damage caused by its oil drilling by planting a 40,000 hectare tree farm elsewhere in the country, which it says can soak up millions of tonnes of its climate pollution — and it plans to use trees that reportedly aren’t native to the natural savannah ecosystem in their offsetting project.