Yesterday, TotalEnergies published the detailed poll results for its Annual General Meeting (AGM) held on 25 May. These results mark the failure of shareholder engagement and confirm the complicity and major responsibility of shareholders in the oil and gas majors’ climate inaction. In contradiction with their own commitments regarding the need to support and accelerate the companies\u2019 transition toward a low-carbon future, major investors such as BlackRock and Allianz did not even find the courage – or the desire – to oppose TotalEnergies’ flawed climate plan through a simple consultative vote. In the coming weeks, Reclaim Finance will continue to analyze each investor’s individual votes to point out the hypocrisies and cowardice that undermine the credibility and effectiveness of shareholder engagement.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div> The flawed climate plan presented by TotalEnergies received 89% support from shareholders at the company\u2019s 2022 AGM last week <\/b>(compared to 92% last year). This slight decrease in shareholder support (-3 percentage points) reflects a status quo: shareholders continue to rubber stamp flawed climate plans that are fundamentally incompatible with the climate emergency. The result of the vote at TotalEnergies confirms a trend seen at other oil and gas companies\u2019 AGMs during the last couple of weeks (1)<\/p>\n Accounting for abstention, the support rate for TotalEnergies’ climate plan even increases slightly between 2021 and 2022. <\/b>It was 82.8% last year (7.3% against and 9.9% abstention) and it reaches 83.8% this year (11.1% against and 5.7% abstention). These figures indicate that the increase in the rejection rate of TotalEnergies’ climate plan is entirely due to some investors shifting from absention to opposition (2): none of TotalEnergies’ major shareholders seem to have withdrawn their support for the company’s climate strategy.<\/p>\n The results of TotalEnergies\u2019s AGM confirm the failure of shareholder engagement toward oil and gas companies. While CEO of the French Major discarded shareholder opposition by saying that those who voted against its climate plan were \u00ab\u00a0marketing their shares at the expense of [TotalEnergies]\u00a0\u00bb, one can legitimately wonder if it is not rather the opposite: Say on Climate votes are becoming hollow marketing tools for companies to greenwash their climate inaction, with the help of complicit shareholders. The last option for safeguarding the credibility and effectiveness of Say on Climate would be to make them mandatory under law and to set precise expectations regarding the content of underlying climate plans (as it is currently being done by the UK Transition Plan Taskforce<\/a><\/u> in the UK).<\/p>\n<\/div> Individual investors are slowly beginning to publish their votes at TotalEnergies\u2019 AGM. <\/b>These votes highlight the hypocrisy and complicity of investors who appear to be more concerned by giving the appearance of climate action and \u201cengagement\u201d rather than actually pushing companies to do more on climate –\u00a0 even through a simple, non-binding vote.<\/p>\n It is already established that Allianz Global Investors, a subsidiary of the insurer Allianz and one of the first investors to make its votes public, voted in favor of TotalEnergies’ flawed climate plan (3). The investor also supported incomplete and unambitious climate plans at Repsol, BP and Shell. The US giant Blackrock has also published its ballots, which show that it supported TotalEnergies’ climate plan – as well as those of Shell and Equinor (4).<\/p>\nA stinging failure for the climate and for shareholder engagement<\/h1><\/span>
Revealing a first cohort of complicit investors<\/h1><\/span>