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Following the climate lawsuit brought against the French State in ' I l'affaire du siècle' i [1], the environmental NGO "Notre affaire à tous" (NAAT)[2] filed a second high-profile climate court case against one of the "carbon majors", Total, a French corporate group based in 130 countries and at the origin of almost 1% of global GHG each year[3]. The constitutional principle of the liberty of enterprises will surely not allow the courts to interfere that far in Total's operations. 3 According to the Carbon Majors Reports, Total is one of the 20 companies contributing the most to global warming worldwide (see Carbon Disclosure Project, Richard Heede "Carbon Majors Report" [2017]) since Total's direct and indirect GHG account each year for approximately 1% of global emissions (458 Millions of tonnes of CO2equivalent). 'The GHG Protocol Corporate Standard classifies a company's GHG emissions into three "scopes". [Extracted from the article]

Four associations filed l'affaire du siècle, a climate legal action against the French State before the Administrative Court of Paris in May 2019. This lawsuit questions the State's actions and inactions in matters of climate change mitigation and adaptation. Even though the complaint is mainly based on legal constructions and theories that are well-known to French Courts, this paper focuses on three ground-breaking legal innovations brought by the plaintiffs: a pre-existing general State obligation to combat climate change, a pre-existing right to live in a sustainable climate system, and, eventually, the remediation of the pure ecological damage (préjudice écologique) linked to climate change through a formal demand for monetary compensation of one symbolic euro and an injunctive relief to take all measures to limit global warming under the 1.5 °C threshold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]