After BP and Shell, comes the turn of TotalEnergies: the French hydrocarbon giant is preparing to experience an electric general assembly (GA) on Friday morning, targeted before its opening by scuffles between demonstrators for the climate and the police, and also with shareholders who disagree with its climate policy.
The annual GA of the French energy company opened around 10:00 a.m. local time in Paris.
At dawn, dozens of climate protesters tried to enter the stretch of street where the GA was to take place in an upscale district of the French capital.
A dozen of them, who had sat in front of the entrance, were dislodged by the police and scuffles took place, noted an AFP journalist. The police used tear gas canisters.
“Assassins! Criminals! launched some demonstrators to the shareholders trying to enter the room.
NGO Coalition
A coalition of NGOs called for the meeting to be blocked and dozens of activists are now sitting in the street, chanting “what we want is to overthrow Total” and “one, two and three degrees, it’s Total that ‘we must thank’.
“The GA must be held”, we repeated Friday morning on the side of TotalEnergies.
The meeting comes at the end of a season of stormy general meetings, where activists have stepped up actions against large groups, including Shell and BP or Barclays bank, accused of financing the expansion of hydrocarbon projects.
All against a backdrop of staggering profits: together, the majors BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron and TotalEnergies posted more than 40 billion dollars in profits this quarter, after a grandiose year 2022.
A sign of the expected tensions, TotalEnergies prohibits shareholders and journalists from using their mobile phones, and wants to force them to leave certain personal effects at the entrance.
The group wants to avoid the chaotic scenario of last year when NGO activists prevented shareholders from entering the AG.
The authorities expect the presence of 200 to 400 activists, who “absolutely want to prevent the holding of the GA”, according to a police source.
“Total’s GA will not take place”, immediately warned in a forum at the end of April the signatories 350.org, Alternatiba, Friends of the Earth, ANV-COP21, Attac, Greenpeace, Scientists in Rebellion and XR. “This general meeting plans to perpetuate the strategy of the oil company: always more fossil projects and an unfair distribution of superprofits which fuels climatic and social injustice”, they denounce.
Among the hot topics, the nearly 1.5 million individual shareholders, present or online, are being called to vote on an advisory resolution from the activist shareholder organization Follow This, which primarily tackles indirect CO2.
In other words, those related to the use of oil by its customers in cars or for heating, the equivalent of 85% of its carbon footprint.
The organization, which brings together 17 investors holding nearly 1.5% of TotalEnergies, asks it to align its reduction objectives with the 2015 Paris Agreement, in order to limit global warming to +1.5°C by compared to the pre-industrial era.
The group recommends voting against, judging the resolution “contrary to the interests” of TotalEnergies, “of its shareholders and its customers”.
The major will promote its efforts for the climate and calls on its shareholders to “vote in favor” of its own climate resolution.
This official strategy focuses mainly on its direct emissions, resulting from its operations and those related to the energy it consumes.
“The package” on renewables
Even if the group does not plan to drastically reduce its direct emissions in the decade, it intends to devote a third of its investments to low-carbon energies and reach 100 GW of renewable electricity capacity by 2030.
“It is the income from hydrocarbons that allows us to invest massively and develop renewables”, argued CEO Patrick Pouyanné on Wednesday in an interview with the magazine Challenges.
“No, TotalEnergies cannot reduce the demand for oil on its own,” he said in an interview with the daily on Wednesday. The cross.
On Friday, the French Minister for Energy Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher called on TotalEnergies to go “faster” on the development of renewable energies, in an interview with Franceinfo radio, calling on the energy company to “put the package” on renewables .
The group is present in numerous liquefied natural gas and oil projects, in the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Papua and Uganda, with the controversial EACOP heated pipeline project, which has become a media symbol of the fight against -oil.
“We (did) not know how to anticipate”, conceded to Challenges Mr. Pouyanné about this controversy, which adds to many others for the group, criticized for its record profit of 20.5 billion dollars (19.12 billion euros) in 2022, its taxes in France or CEO salary
A 10% increase in his remuneration for 2023 is also on the agenda of the GA.