French police have fired tear gas to disperse climate demonstrators gathered in Paris to raise their voices against an annual general meeting of oil company TotalEnergies on Thursday.
Called by a coalition of political parties and charities, dozens of protesters gathered around the Salle Pleyel venue from dawn on Friday, and were heard chanting slogans ‘All we want is to knock down Total’ and ‘One, two, and three degrees, we have Total to thank.’
Marie Cohuet, spokeswoman for climate campaigners Alternatiba said: ‘We won’t let them go.
‘TotalEnergies embodies the worst of what is done in terms of the exploitation of people and the planet.
Energy giants posted record profits last year as the war in Ukraine sent oil and gas prices soaring.
Friday’s unrest comes on the heels of Tuesday’s protest outside Shell’s annual general meeting in London, where protesters were shouting ‘Go to hell, Shell!’
On Tuesday, activists from pressure groups including Greenpeace, Fossil Free London, Neon, and Tipping Point interrupted the opening speech of chief executive Wael Sawan, while others attempted to occupy the stage.
TotalEnergies chief executive Patrick Pouyanne refused to accept the criticism against his group.
Pouyanne said his company must meet growing demand from developing nations. ‘No, TotalEnergies cannot lower oil demand on its own’.
Climate protests have become a regular feature of annual meetings in recent years, with campaigns focused particularly on banks such as HSBC and Barclays that lend to fossil fuel projects as well as oil companies including Shell’s rival BP.
Last year, three people were arrested after Shell was forced to pause its AGM and environmental protesters chanted: ‘We will stop you.’
Last week, parts of northern Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region received half their average annual rainfall in just 36 hours.
Rivers burst their banks and thousands of acres of farmland lied submerged, forcing an estimated 20,000 people to leave homeless and 13 were confirmed dead.
It was just the latest weather disaster to hit Europe where as atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide increase, so too does extreme weather.
Consecutive years of drought have afflicted farmers in Spain and southern France, while last year there were unprecedented heatwaves across the continent.
Paola Pino d’Astore, an expert at the Italian Society of Environmental Geology (SIGEA): ‘Climate change is here and we are living the consequences. It isn’t some remote prospect, it is the new normal.’
The French riot police have also been violent against workers and young who have been demonstrating against the policy of French President Macron and his government’s decision to raise the pension age in the country from 62 to 64.
Meanwhile, French magistrates on Thursday filed preliminary charges against five French maritime rescue personnel in a probe of the deadly sinking of a flimsy migrant craft in the English Channel in 2021 that killed 27 people.
The five, all military personnel, were handed a preliminary charge of not assisting people in danger, judicial authorities said.
Preliminary charges allow magistrates further time to investigate.
Magistrates have previously filed preliminary charges against 10 other people suspected of manslaughter and assisting the illegal entry of migrants. Three magistrates are handling the investigation.
The five military personnel now also handed charges serve at a French maritime surveillance and rescue centre for the English Channel, judicial authorities said. They are not being held in detention.
The centre’s missions include coordinating search and rescue operations.
The November 2021 sinking was the deadliest migration accident on the dangerous stretch of sea that separates France and Britain.
It shone a spotlight on smuggling networks that prey on migrants. It also sent tensions soaring between France and Britain over how to tackle the problem.
The German economy has fallen into a recession as persistent inflation and biting higher interest rates curb demand in Europe’s largest economy.
Official data by the federal statistics agency Destatis released on Thursday showed Germany’s economy contracted by 0.3 per cent in the first three months of the current year compared with a 0.5 per cent contraction the previous quarter.
It is Germany’s second consecutive quarter of negative growth, the threshold for a ‘technical recession,’ said Destatis in a statement.
Back in April, a preliminary estimate showed Germany’s gross domestic product (GPD) was virtually at zero growth in the first three months of the year, meaning the country would have barely avoided recession.
However, data published earlier in May showed industrial production fell more than expected in March, stemming from a poor performance by the key automotive sector.
ING Germany’s chief economist Carsten Brzeski in a note to clients claimed that China should take much of the blame for the downturn in European economies he said: ‘It took a couple of statistical revisions, but at the end of the day, the German economy actually did this winter what we had feared already since last summer.
‘The warm winter weather, a rebound in industrial activity, helped by the Chinese economy reopening and an easing of supply chain frictions were not enough to get the economy out of the recessionary danger zone.’
The downturn occurred as the country battled a rise in energy prices in the wake of the Russian-Ukraine war, which weighed on households and businesses.
German Social Democrat Chancellor Olaf Scholz who heads a coalition government in the country, however, tried to play down the fears of a prolonged recession.
‘The German economy’s prospects are very good.’
The April inflation reached 7.2 per cent in the country.
It was due in large part to the increased cost of energy, above the euro zone’s average but below Britain’s headline rate of 8.7 per cent.
Destatis said: ‘The persistence of high price increases continued to be a burden on the German economy at the start of the year.’
The German central bank, the Bundesbank, predicts the economy to grow modestly in the April-to-June quarter, with a rebound in industry offsetting stagnating consumer spending.
Germany’s last recession came as the Covid-19 pandemic swept through Europe at the beginning of 2020, forcing governments to effectively shut down large parts of the economy.
The United Nations (UN) has criticised EU countries and Britain saying that they discriminate against any refugees who do not come from Ukraine.
The International Organisation for Migration, IOM, a UN body, says more than 20,000 refugees have drowned in the Central Mediterranean since 2014 whilst trying to reach the EU.
The EU is paying billions of Euros to Turkey and Libya to manage refugee flows. Campaigners say detention centres in Libya are particularly bad.
Natalia Alonso the Senior Policy and Advocacy Adviser for the UN’s children’s charity UNICEF said: ‘The conditions there are horrible.
‘They are defined as hell. We have witnesses of people who were able to escape that and their stories that are just horrible, really, and slavery, raped for slavery, I can just go on.’
