TotalEnergies: shareholders approve the group’s climate strategy

by time news

2023-05-26 14:31:18

Attempts to block the annual general meeting (GM) of TotalEnergies, which opened this Friday, May 26 in Paris, will not have prevented shareholders from voting by a very large majority (88.76%) the strategy group climate. TotalEnergies has for many months – years, even – been under pressure from environmental organizations and the French government to accelerate its energy transition and get out of fossil fuels.

The CEO, Patrick Pouyanné, welcomed “broad support” and a “quality debate” around the group’s climate strategy. This provides for more investment in renewables and the strengthening of CO2 emission reduction targets for its operations. The non-binding advisory climate resolution, tabled by the coalition of activist shareholders Follow This, which asked it to do more on its carbon footprint to align with the objectives of the Paris agreements, was rejected. She won 30.44% of the votes cast.

“As long as investors allow oil companies to cause a climate meltdown by voting against aligning with the Paris agreement, oil majors will cling to their fossil fuel business model for as long as possible,” Tarek Bouhouch previously said. , member of Follow This, during the Q&A session. Among the 17 activist investors in this collective, who hold almost 1.5% of TotalEnergies, are La banque PostaleAM, Edmond de Rotschild AM, La Financière de l’Échiquier.

The “grumpy people who accuse us of greenwashing”

During his speech, the CEO of TotalEnergies justified himself at length in terms of his group, one of the five major world majors with BP, Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron. “Our company was the major that invested the most to build the energy model of tomorrow which will be based on electricity”, via renewable energies, he declared, adding that he cannot reduce his petroleum activity. “The demand for oil at the global level is growing and if it is not TotalEnergies that meets this demand, others will do it in our place”, he said again, responding to “the grumpy people who accuse us of greenwashing”.

The CEO had opened the annual meeting as planned at 10 a.m., held with numerous security precautions: security guards, barriers, police cars… And inside Plexiglas plates to separate the stage from the public. At dawn, dozens of demonstrators tried to enter the section of street in front of the Salle Pleyel, in the beautiful districts of Paris, before being dislodged. The demonstrators then remained nearby, about a hundred on each side of the street segment, chanting slogans, before dispersing around noon.

“We will not let them go,” assured Marie Cohuet, spokesperson for the Alternatiba association. According to her, TotalEnergies “embodies the worst of what is done in terms of exploitation of people and the planet”. The blockage was organized with other associations including Friends of the Earth, ANV-COP21, Attac, Greenpeace, Scientists in Rebellion and Extinction Rebellion. Six people were arrested, police said.

Activists “in their role of alerting”

Asked about these events, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne felt that “climate activists” were “in their role to alert and say that we must speed up”. The Minister for Energy Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher called on the group to “go faster” on renewable energies, adding that oil and gas companies “must reinvent themselves, get out of fossil fuels”.

This meeting comes at the end of a stormy GA season, during which actions have multiplied against large groups against a backdrop of staggering profits. Combined, BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron and TotalEnergies are posting more than $40 billion in profits this quarter, after a great 2022.

Even if TotalEnergies does not plan to significantly reduce its direct and indirect greenhouse gas 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 of here 2030. The French 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 mediatized symbol of the fight against oil.

This controversy adds to many others for the major, criticized for its record profit of 20.5 billion dollars (19.12 billion euros) in 2022, the amount of its taxes paid in France or the salary of his boss. A 10% increase in the CEO’s compensation for 2023 was also adopted by the GA.

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