By Benjamin Mallet and America Hernandez
PARIS French riot police used pepper spray against several hundred climate activists who sought to block shareholder access to oil major TotalEnergies' annual general meeting on Friday.
Investors are expected to vote on a climate resolution activist shareholders have proposed demanding accelerated cuts to the planet-warming gases the company's oil and gas business produces.
Police escorted shareholders through the protesters and all those attending the meeting were required to place phones in sealed satchels for its duration.
"I regret that this meeting does not take place in the conditions that it should," Chief Executive Patrick Pouyanne told the meeting as it began on time. "In any case, I hope dialogue will follow."
As climate activists have intensified demands oil companies set tougher targets on greenhouse gas emissions, protesters tried to storm the stage of Shell's shareholder meeting earlier this week and disrupted BP's AGM last month.
Energy Minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher told France Info radio that oil and gas companies needed to "re-invent themselves" and would have no future unless they could map a path out of fossil fuels.
Investors are set to vote on a climate resolution urging accelerated cuts under the French oil major's greenhouse gas emission reduction programme. Climate activist group Follow This and 17 institutional investors with a total 1.1 trillion euros under management proposed the resolution.
TotalEnergies' board opposes the resolution, which calls for the company to commit to steeper absolute emissions cuts by 2030 as opposed to intensity targets that can fall as a company adds renewable assets.
It also demands TotalEnergies includes in its 2030 targets Scope 3 emissions that are released when the fuels the company sells are burned by customers, such as in planes or cars.
The French company will instead urge investors to approve its own internal climate plan, focused on more modest emissions cuts from gases at its directly-owned facilities. It does not envisage a major overall reduction in client-produced emissions by 2030.
Scientists say the world needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions by about 43% from 2019 levels by 2030 to meet the 2015 Paris Agreement's goal of keeping warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
Outside the venue, the protesters had sat across access roads, locking arms and legs to form a human barricade.
"The science is clear but Total is ignoring it," read one banner held up by the demonstrators, who included Greenpeace activists.
Human rights observers were on site as police used pepper spray and dragged protesters away to clear a path through. The smell of teargas hung in the air from an earlier skirmish several hours before the meeting begun.
(Reporting by Benjamin Mallet and America Hernandez, editing by Silvia Aloisi, Richard Lough and Barbara Lewis)
