Our thanks to all those readers who, after reading the first issue of our new-style Energies, whether in English, French or Spanish, wrote to us in one of these languages to tell us what they thought. And to encourage us. The considerable amount of mail we received, from within the Total Group and from external readers, showed clearly that you liked both the presentation and the content of Total’s international magazine. Readers particularly liked our feature From energy to energies, with one of you summing up the general feeling by remarking: “At last, some straight questions and answers about the post-oil era and the coming challenges! This issue of Energies deserves a place in many libraries.” But there were more reserved comments too, with one reader saying: “Total is now a leading French company (…). I thought that the new-style magazine would switch to France’s legal and very practical metric system. Alas, this was not the case.” 		 
Certainly, Total is now France’s biggest industrial company, but the Group is also one of the world’s oil and chemicals majors. So, without rejecting our French origins, we use the international references adopted by our business segment. Indeed, this touches on the goal of our magazine: to foster a better understanding and to share the rules governing business segments that are not well known to the public, segments that are so diverse that we in the Total Group still have much to learn from one another. Among these rules, our top priority goes to safety. Indeed, safety lies right at the core of our profession, which we all practice with wholehearted commitment while remaining fully aware of the risks involved. Risks that we strive to manage as well as possible. In our business, safety is so important that it really deserves not just a magazine feature, or even a special issue, but a whole book. In this issue, rather than trying to cover the subject in an exhaustive way,		  
we chose a universal and emblematic factor: the helmet, a symbol of safety recognized throughout the professional world –and certainly not just the oil industry– and in leisure activities as well. Of course, we know there’s much more to safety than just wearing a helmet, and we’ll be coming back to other aspects of the theme in subsequent issues of our magazine. Furthermore, in order to forge even closer contact with readers, starting in 2004 Energies will be appearing every two months instead of three.We were delighted with your positive comments and have taken careful note of the negative ones. It is our hope that each issue of Energies will continue to trigger such a fruitful exchange between you and us. Keep those letters coming in!

The Editorial Team