2023-07-22 11:00:11
Warning, advertising message. “With gasoline at cost, it’s easy to leave. The hardest part is getting home! » This is how E.Leclerc addresses motorists during the summer. To attract customers to its supermarkets, the food distribution group offers a visit to its service stations. He promises to sell his fuel there, and therefore his petroleum products, without making a profit. Discount valid every Friday, Saturday and Sunday, from the end of June until mid-August. On social networks, its competitors Intermarché and Système U also announce commercial operations, more limited in time.
Article 7 of the law of August 22, 2021, known as Climate and Resilience, forbidden yet “advertising relating to the marketing or promotion of fossil fuels”. The measure, highly publicized at the start, is supposed to target the energies responsible for global warming – unless the fuels also contain “renewable product”.
Problem: its entry into force, first scheduled for August 2022, is suspended from an implementing decree… which has still not arrived. The text provides that“a Conseil d’Etat decree sets the list of energies affected by the ban as well as the expected requirements for renewable energy to be the subject of publicity actions”.
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A consultation was open to the public until March 2022. According to a source familiar with the matter, the government has brought a draft decree to the Council of State. Contacted, the latter did not react to our questions, nor did the Ministry of Ecological Transition.
“Announcement effect”
For the time being, all fuel advertisements are engulfed in this legal vacuum. “Even if these communication operations fall within the scope of this ban, which depends on a future decree, they remain legal for the time being”says lawyer Marc Devedeix, who specializes in energy law.
In the Climate and Resilience Law, an offense is punishable by “100,000 euros for a legal entity, these amounts being able to be brought up to the totality of the amount of the expenses devoted to the illegal operation”. The law provides that the future decree also determines the “ requirements of good public access to information relating to the price of the energies concerned”.
On the side of the environmental NGO Greenpeace, the jurist Clara Gonzales believes that “the solution today would be to act against the State before the Council of State to try to obtain the publication of the decree”. Beyond the“announcement effect” aroused in 2021, the reflection could also broaden, according to her, to “all products that run on fossil fuels”, rather than reducing it to the sale of energies as such. Vast subject, knowing that the energy consumption of France is still mainly based on oil and gas.
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