Shareholder Revolts 1
Shareholder revolts are an important tool toju jitsudestructive driver capitalism (a kind of leverage?)
see also divest; note // stewardship
merri ok
also DEFECTORS
see also DIVEST
and public pension
capt 719
bak
html
see de-fraud shareholder
shareholder status gives access to private info
add paradoxes: friedman says CSR nonsense/harmful? Greenspan said magic of mkt will make corps behave well, thus need no regulation.
...to shareholders, Exxon reports that shareholders have requested the creation of an outside directors committee to independently review and publish “a full report about the impact on climate change on our company’s present policies and practices…[including] anticipated liabilities our company may incur from its possible contribution to the problem…” Exxon’s board recommends against the proposal, citing, among other things, that the science around climate change remains uncertain.
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May 25, 2016
Exxon holds its annual shareholders meeting in Dallas. The board confronts 14 proposed resolutions from shareholders, 10 of which are climate-related. All climate change resolutions are voted down. However, a resolution requiring Exxon to report on the impacts to its business from climate policy receives a substantial 38% vote of support, and a separate resolution passes allowing shareholders to vote in a portion of Exxon’s board of directors. This presents the possibility of getting a climate expert on Exxon’s board.
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yahoo 5 24 exxonknews
susan Avery, the first climate scientist on ExxonMobil's board, is stepping down. Credit: Tess Abbot/WHOItn (CC BY-SA 4.0)
When Susan Avery was first nominated to ExxonMobil’s board in 2017 after pressure from shareholder advocates to bring on a climate scientist, many hoped that her expertise could help steer the oil major in a new direction. Avery — a physicist and atmospheric scientist — had spoken during her extensive career of the need to “get off fossil fuels as much as possible."
More than seven years later, Avery is set to exit her role as chair of Exxon’s Environment, Safety, and Public Policy Committee with those hopes seemingly dashed. Evidence continues to mount that the oil giant is still spreading climate disinformation to delay action on fossil fuels, and it recently sued shareholders who proposed that it pursue emissions cuts.
Avery’s decision not to stand for re-election to the board was “for reasons unrelated to the company,” according to a February filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Avery, 74, is just shy of Exxon’s mandatory retirement age, though that was not cited in the filing — directors can run for re-election until they’re 75.
The end of her tenure has reignited debate about the role of a scientist on the board of a major oil company with a legacy of spreading science denial and ignoring internal expertise.
“People wanted to give her an opportunity to change things from within, and I think there was an expectation that she would take that responsibility seriously,” said Kathy Mulvey, accountability campaign director for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy organization that supported Avery’s nomination at the time. But Avery’s ability or willingness to change the company “certainly has not borne out in reality,” Mulvey said.
Avery’s selection came after a shareholder proposal requested that Exxon nominate someone with a “high level of climate change expertise” for its board. The company’s unusual lawsuit against other shareholders could chill further attempts to sway its business model that way. Avery’s last day will be May 29, overlapping with the company’s annual shareholder meeting, where a growing number of outraged shareholder groups and state pension funds now plan to vote against prominent members of the board, including CEO Darren Woods.
With climate lawsuits against the company moving closer to trial, a growing number of states exploring legislation to make companies like Exxon pay for climate damages, and tensions with investors so high, “serving on ExxonMobil's board is a high-stakes poker game,” Mulvey said. As Avery closes out her tenure with more than $3.8 million in compensation and stock value from the company, Mulvey said, “it's not surprising” if Avery “decided to cash in her chips and go home.”
Neither Avery nor Exxon responded to requests for an interview.
Business as Usual During Avery’s Tenure
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Exxon is expanding its investments in fossil fuels.
Avery, the former president of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder, was brought onto the board during Woods’ first month as CEO. “Avery’s leadership experience in multiple academic and scientific organizations, coupled with her breadth of scientific and research expertise, reinforce the corporation’s long-standing technical and scientific foundation,” the company said as it announced her appointment.
At the time, Exxon was battling subpoenas from attorneys general in New York and Massachusetts, both investigating the company for concealing its knowledge about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. The oil giant was just beginning to experience the fallout of early revelations about its historic climate deception; the tip of that iceberg was unearthed by Inside Climate News, the Los Angeles Times, and Columbia Journalism School in 2015.
Behind the scenes, Exxon was taking a far less amenable tone in response to criticism of its climate approach.
“Kill the story,” Exxon media relations manager Alan Jeffers told Reuters’ Houston bureau chief in a 2016 email, responding to a request for comment on a Center for Media and Democracy press release accusing the American Legislative Exchange Council of abusing its nonprofit status by lobbying against climate action on behalf of Exxon.
In the years to follow, Exxon would become the target of lawsuits from state and local governments alleging the company defrauded consumers, lawmakers, and the public in order to delay climate action and protect its oil and gas profits. Evidence shows the oil giant continued to spread anti-science disinformation and internally strategize to manipulate the public’s understanding of its role in the climate crisis well into Avery’s time on the board.
A congressional report released last month following a years-long investigation found that Exxon and other oil majors’ campaigns of deception “evolved from denying climate science to spreading disinformation and perpetuating doublespeak.” Avery is mentioned in more than a dozen of the documents that members of Congress obtained from Exxon — but they’re almost entirely redacted.
The investigation found that while Exxon publicly touted its support for the Paris Agreement “since its adoption in 2015,” executives privately admitted that the company did not actually intend to meet the agreement’s goals. The oil giant’s plans are far afield from allowing it to hit those targets, according to a March analysis by think tank Carbon Tracker, which placed Exxon among the five lowest-ranking companies on its scorecard. Exxon’s climate pledges don't align with its actions, according to one peer-reviewed study, and are “misleading at best, dishonest at worst,” according to Carly Phillips, a research scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
During Avery’s tenure, the company also used advertising firms and funded partnerships with academic institutions to lend credibility to its climate pledges and promotion of “low-carbon solutions” like algae biofuels, which the company abandoned after spending millions advertising that as a climate fix. And Exxon worked to shift blame for its role in the climate crisis to consumers, according to a study of the company’s public communications by climate disinformation experts Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran.
“The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions,” Exxon’s Woods said in a recent Fortune interview.
A November report from the International Energy Agency found that oil and gas companies account for less than 1% of clean energy investment globally. “‘When the energy world changes, so will we’ is not an adequate response to the immense challenges at hand,” the report concludes.
But Exxon has vastly expanded its investments in fossil fuels, more than doubling its oil production in the Permian Basin after sealing a $60 billion deal to acquire Pioneer Natural Resources last year. Exxon and two other oil companies told Guyana that they plan to spend more than $12.9 billion on an offshore oil project there, the country said last summer. The company’s 2023 Global Outlook predicts an increase in methane gas use of more than 20% by midcentury.
In a 2021 hearing as part of a House Oversight Committee investigation, Woods refused to pledge that the company would stop funding disinformation and lobbying against climate action.
‘Like a Cancer Doctor on the Board of a Tobacco Company’
The same committee asked Avery to testify at a later hearing, but she never did. Instead, Avery appeared to use her expertise and position to lend credibility to Exxon’s claims of climate leadership.
“I’m proud to work on key issues related to climate risk at ExxonMobil,” she said in Exxon’s 2023 “Advancing Climate Solutions” report. “With my experience as an atmospheric scientist and a leader at a global research organization, I am committed to helping to advise the Board on public issues of significance. … The members of the [Environment, Safety and Public Policy] Committee are united in our commitment to position ExxonMobil as an industry leader in pursuing sustainable solutions that improve quality of life and meet society’s evolving needs.”
Sarah Myhre, another climate scientist and program director for climate advocacy and democracy reform at the Glaser Progress Foundation, contends that Avery compromised her scientific integrity to “performatively greenwash one of the most horrifically damaging, nefarious, and fraudulent corporations that has ever existed.”
“It's like a cancer doctor on the board of a tobacco company [promoting] tobacco as a health product, something that is helping people live healthier, more vibrant lives. They're taking all of their scientific bona fides and accreditation, and they're using it for this outcome, which ultimately protects the tobacco company [as it] continues to kill people or damage their lives irrevocably,” Myhre said.
Michael Mann, a climate scientist who was subject to years of attacks from climate denialists funded by Exxon, described Avery’s service to the company as a “betrayal.”
Avery’s decision “comes across as entirely transactional: climate scientist lends their imprimatur to the world’s largest publicly-traded fossil fuel company, under fire for their history of promoting disinformation and delay tactics, for seven years, and gets 4 million dollars in return,” Mann said in an email. “What is there that doesn’t look bad here?”
Silencing Dissent at Exxon
What’s not known is whether Avery ever advised Exxon to change course. The company has a history of concealing the warnings of its own scientists and retaliating against whistleblowers — even recently.
“The ability of a board member to move a company forward partially depends on the multiple stakeholder voices that the company is hearing and whether they’re willing to listen to them,” said Timothy Smith, senior policy advisor at Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, an organization that coordinates the work of shareholder groups.
Exxon’s lawsuit against two shareholder groups, filed in January, came in response to the shareholders’ proposal asking the company to limit its Scope 3 emissions, which arise from the use of its products and make up about 85% of its total greenhouse gas emissions. (Exxon’s “net zero” ambitions and emissions reduction plans don’t account for Scope 3 emissions at all.)
Shareholder resolutions such as these are intended for a vote by a company’s stockholders. When firms want to keep proposals off the ballot, the established process is to appeal to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Exxon, which sued instead, claimed the groups were driven by an “extreme agenda” that is “calculated to diminish the company’s existing business.”
That claim was “really duplicitous because they know full well that this same agenda has been raised with them by other investors over the decade,” said Smith, arguing that the company has “become more confrontational and defensive rather than be a leader in this space.”
The shareholders, Arjuna Capital and Follow This, withdrew their proposal. But Exxon continued with its lawsuit, defending the decision in its 2024 proxy statement and arguing that the “proposal process is being abused by those who treat shareholder democracy as a venue for activism.” A judge ruled Wednesday that the case can proceed against one of the shareholders, U.S.-based Arjuna Capital, but not the Netherlands-based Follow This.
Mulvey, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said Exxon would rather battle its own investors than consider transparency about or a change to its fossil fuel business.
“Not only do they continue to fight back against mandatory climate disclosure and public policies that would hold them accountable, but it is also trying to undermine the notion that those who own the company should have a say over its direction,” she said.
Tensions could come to a head at Exxon’s annual shareholder meeting as Avery steps aside. Shareholder advocacy groups like Majority Action have urged other investors to vote against the company’s entire board of directors, which CalPERS, America’s largest pension fund, has announced it will do. The Illinois State Treasurer and California State Treasurer have made similar recommendations to their state pension funds, and the New York state pension fund plans to vote against all but two of the board members.
“The [International Energy Agency] has laid out a plan to transform our energy system in line with the 1.5°C pathway. We're at a critical juncture of how this is going to occur — and Exxon appears to be hellbent on foreclosing on that urgent and necessary discussion,” said Majority Action’s senior research analyst, Bryant Sewell. “These directors have to be held accountable.”
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evil not wrong:
Shareholder Activism
Much of the Nathan Cummings Foundation’s shareholder activism focuses on pushing energy companies and electric utilities to disclose information about their activities, especially disclosures related to lobbying and industry advocacy efforts that would normally be confidential.[13] [14] Examples include:
After a 2014 Duke Energy coal ash spill in North Carolina, the NCF led a group of investors that included state treasurers and union pension funds to pressure Duke into publicly disclosing its related lobbying, advocacy and political spending. [15]
In 2016, an NCF-led coalition forced a shareholder vote at electric utility FirstEnergy on a non-binding resolution asking the company to publicly report all its government and grassroots lobbying and expenses, including the amounts it contributed to organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council. [16]
In 2017, a group of investors led by the NCF passed a nonbinding resolution at Occidental Petroleum’s annual meeting asking the company to predict what future risks it could face under a specific global warming outcome scenario. [17]
The NCF also engages in other forms of shareholder activism, such as resolutions designed to force companies to meet racial and gender quotas in their slates of proposed board candidates. [18] [19]
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no lnx
On Tuesday, at Royal Dutch Shell’s AGM in The Hague, one man − supported by a growing army of shareholders − will tackle Europe’s highest grossing company from within when he seeks approval for a resolution, opposed by directors, for a speedier and more ambitious transition to green energy. If the planet survives to tell the tale, Dutch national Mark van Baal might one day be remembered as the man who had the greatest impact on reversing climate change. The former energy journalist’s draft novel about a CEO of an oil firm changing the course of history by steering the company towards renewables struck a duff note, but sparked the idea for Follow This, a movement he founded in 2015 based on shareholder activism within some of the world’s most polluting companies, including Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell and BP.
Striking at the top
‘The oil industry can make or break the Paris Agreement,’ says Van Baal (52), who believes striking at the heart of pollution powerhouses is the most effective way to reverse climate change. Follow This’s counter-intuitive approach invites changemakers to buy a share in Big Oil (from €9) via their website and then send an email to the CEO, introducing themselves as their newest shareholder and pledging their support to help them make the switch to green energy. Inspired by TCI − who in 2007, with a mere 1% stake in ABN Amro, got the backing of shareholders to split the bank into three parts − Van Baal saw an opportunity to significantly reduce global emissions by building shareholder support for green resolutions in our most polluting corporations, while garnering media interest.
His strategy to take on multinationals from the grassroots raised a few eyebrows and was widely dismissed as ‘a sympathetic initiative’. But when his wife showed him a viral video of a lone dancer in a park evolving into a huge dance party, he recognised such doubt and derision as part of the journey to success, and the name ‘Follow This’ was born. ‘One of the lessons [I learnt],’ he says, ‘is that to get something like this off the ground, you just have to do it and run the risk of being ridiculed in the beginning.’ Follow This founder Mark van Baal addresses the board of directors at the Shell AGM in The Hague in 2018. Photo: Follow This
Transforming from within
Big in ambition, but small in stature, he cut a lonely figure when he rose nervously from a seat at the back of Shell’s packed AGM in 2015 and introduced himself to CEO Ben van Beurden, telling him: ‘I believe you can change the world.’ A David squaring up to Goliath, he urged the panel of directors not to devalue shareholders’ investments by making Shell ‘the next Kodak’, and ‘to put their brains and their billions behind renewable energy’ instead. ‘We are not asking you to stop paying dividends. I would be lynched in this place,’ Van Baal tells the room with a smile, stressing the strong business case for the transition (fossil fuels are becoming scarcer and more expensive to extract, while renewables are falling in price).
And when told the transition is harder than he thinks, he quips: ‘We have more confidence in you than you have in yourself, apparently.’
Investment
As for confidence in Follow This, support was snowballing, bolstered by deep-pocketed investors with a green agenda and the backing of key players such as environment minister Stientje van Veldhoven, and Jan Rotmans, the founder of Urgenda, who in 2015 won a landmark case ruling that the Dutch government had a legal responsibility to act immediately to reverse climate change. Today, over 6000 individuals have donated a total of around €20m in shares to the cause. ‘It’s amazing how many people want to contribute to this,’ says Van Baal, who believes solar panels, vegetarianism and not flying are all very well, but are not enough to stop global warming. ‘People feel pretty powerless against climate change. They thought: this can make a difference.’ The world’s biggest oil and gas companies. Source: Statista Biggest polluters
It takes guts, but engaging with Big Oil may be our best hope of keeping temperature rises to below 2 degrees as the burning of fossil fuels accounts for 87% of the world’s CO2 emissions. Research undertaken by the Climate Accountability Institute ranked Shell the 7th highest polluting company in 2019. A ruling is due later this month for a case brought against them by Milieudefensie for violating Dutch liability law by producing double the Netherlands’ legal limit of carbon emissions. In the Netherlands, greenhouse gas emissions per capita are still 34% above the EU average due to our reliance on fossil fuel.
In 2019, just 8.8% of the energy used in the Netherlands was sustainably sourced, one of the lowest in the EU. Iceland, by contrast, was powered by 78% renewables. ‘The fossil fuel interests are very big in the Netherlands,’ says Van Baal. ‘The story was always that we have so much natural gas in the north of the Netherlands that the government is dependent on it so we can’t change it so fast. Now, because of the earthquakes in Groningen, now suddenly it’s possible to do without the income.’ Carbon dioxide emissions in the Netherlands are gradually declining but our dependence on fossil fuels, say environmentalists, limits our progress. Source: CBS Shortcomings Dutch lawmakers have also tightened their grip on shareholder activists like Follow This, who now require a 5% stake to table motions in the Netherlands. Of course, Big Oil does not always appreciate being told home truths about an industry which has − until recently − served investors so well.
The atmosphere at some AGMs has been hostile at times, with Van Beurden accusing Van Baal of trying to take leadership at Shell’s 2018 AGM. Follow This, he reminds him with headmasterly authority, must ‘Follow us’. And sometimes the pressure group itself can inadvertently hinder progress. Campaigns without ambitious, concrete targets can end up functioning as fig leaves for CEOs, says Van Baal, citing Climate Action 100+’s softly-softly approach as an example. Concrete results Despite the challenges, Follow This’s impressive results suggest that the method is working. The inclusion of Scope 3 emissions in Shell’s 2017 climate targets, for example, was an unanticipated success which Van Baal says still gives him goosebumps. Creating traction in the US has been harder, but just last week, a record 58% of shareholder voters in Alaskan oil giant ConocoPhillips supported a motion brought by Follow This to reduce all of the company’s direct and indirect emissions – a huge endorsement for the resolution, whose equivalent at Shell has taken five years to creep from 2.7% to 14.4% of voters.
Citing the risk of litigation that polluters now run, as well as the prospect that fossil fuel projects become ‘stranded assets’ in a fast-changing energy landscape, the motion marked a turning point in North American big oil, which, since Biden, has seen the Securities and Exchange Commission grant greater freedom to shareholders to make climate proposals. Shareholder support for Follow This’s climate resolutions has grown steadily since the NGO’s inception. Source: Follow This Optimism
Whether the scales will also tip at Shell on Tuesday, remains to be seen. Shell has written to all shareholders advising them to support the directors’ climate resolution over Follow This’s more ambitious alternative. Though Shell asserts that its carbon production peaked in 2018, the company’s 2030 targets, say Follow This, still fall short of the Paris Agreement, and the rising demand for energy is being met by further oil exploration in the Arctic with no more than 1% of revenue invested in renewables.
Whatever happens, Big Oil − believes Van Baal − will in time burn itself out. ‘If we leave them alone, they will eventually go bankrupt, but it will take too long. It will put too much CO2 in the air,’ he says. And, despite some harsh criticism from his wife, he still thinks his novel is a good read and that the plot is realistic. ‘I’m quite optimistic, but I have to be,’ he says. ‘This is the only thing that’s going to work.’
Read more at DutchNews.nl:
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https://www.crediblecarbon.com/news-and-info/news/fossildespite-emergency-belligerent-exxon-refuses-to-act-on-climate-at-agm-oil-change-international/
Despite Emergency, Belligerent Exxon Refuses to Act on Climate at AGM – Oil Change International
MAY 28, 2020
BY ANDY ROWELL BLOG POST C: 350.org
Yesterday, Big Oil behemoth Exxon held its Annual General Meeting, where the company and its shareholders once again fundamentally flunked the climate test.
For years, activists and progressive shareholders have been trying to get the company to act on climate and divest from oil and gas and transition swiftly into renewables.
They have pointed to the fact that Exxon has known for decades about climate change but still carried on drilling, whilst funding a huge network of right-wing groups to deny the science over climate.
But Exxon is an oil company to its black core. Other oil majors, such as Shell and BP , may be trying at least make the symbolic gesture of going carbon neutral by 2050, even though critics say the plans are flawed and not ambitious enough. :{But no so Exxon, it cannot be bothered to even do that.
The company is still blinded by a “*drill, baby, drill”* mentality that is hurtling us toward climate catastrophe. }:It is also losing its shareholders billions in investments as the company’s share price has plummeted due to COVID-19.
Exxon still has the most radical expansion plan of any oil major, despite a longstanding campaign of investor groups to bring the company in line with climate goals.
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The Challenge establishes a clear “climate-safe” boundary for any financing to the fossil fuel industry. It outlines simply how companies such as Exxon should only be eligible for investment if they commit to stop expansion of fossil fuels and release a detailed plan for a phase out.
One of the organizations signing on was Oil Change International (OCI). Hannah McKinnon , the Energy Transitions and Futures Program Director from OCI, said: “Maintaining a safe climate requires an ambitious just transition away from fossil fuel production starting now.” McKinnon added that “New production is not Paris-compatible and investors should plan a fast exit from any company that says otherwise.”
The disinvestment campaign has been joined by BlackRock, the world’s largest fund manager, often seen as a climate villain itself, which is one of the company’s largest shareholders. The investment company, which owns about 5 per cent of Exxon, lodged multiple votes against the oil giant over the oil company’s failure to make progress on its climate change targets.
BlackRockalso voted in favor of a shareholder motion that proposes splitting the role of chief executive and chairman, something campaigners have been calling for decades trying to make the oil company more accountable for its disastrous climate policy.
However, according to *Reuters* underCEO Darren Woods, the company “blocked six climate resolutions from this year’s ballot.” Moreover, only a third of shareholders backed the proposal to split the CEO and Chairman.
This means that Exxon, which has been bruised, battered, and bloodied by a catastrophic collapse in the oil price, and is hemorrhaging money, wants us all to drive over a climate cliff too. It is reckless corporate behavior, which the executives must know will cost lives.
Indeed with a timing that is deeply ironic, the morning of the AGM, the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre, one of the leading climate research institutes in the world, concluded that the “human fingerprint on the climate is now unmistakable” after 30 years of tracking the impact of humans on our changing climate.
Peter Stott, a Professor and expert on climate attribution science at the Hadley Centre, told the *Guardian* : “The climate now is completely different from what we had 30 years ago. It is completely outside the bounds of possibility in natural variation.”
He added “Reality has proven that what we were saying 20 to 30 years ago was right. As scientists, that is vindication… The worry is that we are now taking risks globally that we don’t fully understand… there will be no winners of climate change if we continue.”
And more than most it is Exxon’s dirty fingerprints all over our climate catastrophe. By the time the Hadley Centre was set up in 1990, Exxon knew that its emissions were causing climate change. It could have acted. But it did not. Instead it did the opposite and funded decades of denial. By doing so its finger have slowly tightened around our collective necks. It is time to break their dangerous grip before it is too late.
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http://books.insideclimatenews.org/exxons25years
~ shareholder timeline
A narrative chronology and detailed spreadsheet examine Exxon's refusal to support dozens of shareholder resolutions on climate change since 1990.
By Elizabeth Douglass, InsideClimate News
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https://desmog.co.uk/2020/05/14/climate-jpmorgan-rejects-shareholder-disclose-carbon-footprint
no lnx many
under Rising Pressure on Climate, JPMorgan Rejects Shareholder Calls to Disclose Full Carbon Footprint
By Alex Varley-Winter • Thursday, May 14, 2020
America’s largest bank is shunning calls from shareholders to disclose its full emissions, despite warnings from its own economists that “catastrophic” climate change could end up threatening human life “as we know it.”
JPMorgan Chase, which a coalition of U.S. environmental groups recently claimed is the world’s largest financer of fossil fuels, has instructed its shareholders to vote down a proposal for the bank to report the emissions of its lending activities at its upcoming annual general meeting (AGM) on May 19.
Now treasurers from eight U.S. states are joining a call for JPMorgan to elect an independent board chair who will guide the company’s financing to align with the Paris Agreement.
The bank has also faced pressure from shareholders this year for encouraging Lee Raymond, former CEO of ExxonMobil, to stay on as a member of JPMorgan’s board. Exxon has donated tens of millions of dollars to organizations casting doubt on anthropogenic climate change, including under Raymond, who later this year will step down from leading JPMorgan’s board but remain a director. The group of state treasurers also oppose Raymond staying on the board.
Scott M. Stringer
@NYCComptroller
We must address the financial and climate risks to @jpmorgan associated with fossil fuels.
That's why we're voting ‘no’ on Lee Raymond—his excessive tenure, climate change denial and fossil fuel connections prove he can't be an independent director.https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/comptroller-stringer-and-pension-fund-trustees-launch-vote-no-campaign-against-lee-raymond-at-jpmorgan/ …
Comptroller Stringer and Pension Fund Trustees Launch “VOTE NO” Campaign Against Lee Raymond at...
(New York, NY)—Today, New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer, on behalf of the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, Teachers Retirement System of the City of New York and New York City...
comptroller.nyc.gov
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“As part of a broader plan for the bank to seriously grapple with the risks climate change poses to investors, Raymond should plan to retire from the board entirely,” said Maryland State Treasurer Nancy Kopp in a statement. Kopp and state treasurers of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin united with efforts of the Pennsylvania treasurer, comptrollers of New York City and New York State, and the California public employee retirement program in pressuring JPMorgan on its climate governance.
Shareholders Pushing JPMorgan on Climate
While JPMorgan touts the “leadership role” it says it has taken to address the “challenges and opportunities of a carbon-constrained environment,” climate activist shareholders are calling for it to publish “if and how” it plans to put its investments in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement and whether it is considering setting emissions reduction targets for its lending. Activist shareholders increasingly have been using the AGMs of fossil fuel companies and their funders to push for climate action from the inside.
JPMorgan currently only publishes the emissions produced by the bank’s own operations, with its first “climate change report” released last year stating that it was “focused on defining and obtaining the right data” on its clients’ “climate-related risk” but that it was at the “early stages of this journey.”
Another proposal to be considered at the AGM next week, put forward by Trillium Asset Management, a Boston-based company focused on socially responsible investing, urges the bank to outline how it plans to respond to “rising reputational risks” relating to its investments in the controversial Canadian tar sands and oil and gas companies operating in the Arctic.
JPMorgan announced in February that it would stop financing companies involved in thermal coal and new Arctic oil and gas development, while increasing its financing of renewables.
Bill McKibben
@billmckibben
Over the past 3 years @Chase has lent $196 billion to the fossil fuel industry; if you look at the worst projects, they've lent 63% more than anyone else. They are the Doomsday Bankhttps://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/jpmorgan-chase-bank-biggest-investor-fossil-fuels-956927/ …
MANHATTAN, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES - 2019/11/20: Protesters picketing outside a Chase Bank branch. Expanding on the momentum of the quickly growing national movement to hold Chase Bank accountable for its central role in funding the global fossil fuel industry, dozens of New York residents with the organization Rise and Resist, with co-sponsor Rainforest Action Network stormed the new JPMorgan Chase headquarters in...
How JPMorgan Chase Became the Doomsday Bank
Protesters hope a campaign of civil disobedience will force JPMorgan Chase — the biggest lender to fossil fuel companies — to change course
rollingstone.com
But Trillium’s proposal argues that the bank is the “largest global lender and underwriter” to the top 30 companies already operating in the Arctic, as well as the top 34 companies involved in the Canadian tar sands.
The bank’s Board of Directors are advising shareholders to vote against both motions, in a move that activists argue puts them at odds with their American peers.
A recent report by the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) said JPMorgan had become “the first bank to blow past the quarter-trillion dollar mark in post-Paris fossil financing, with $269 billion in 2016-2019.”
RAN’s findings have galvanized shareholder calls for banks to phase out fossil fuels, with activists pointing to RAN’s research to push for change at JPMorgan’s AGM.
Bank Resists ‘Moderate’ Carbon Footprint Proposal
Danielle Fugere, President of shareholder advocacy group As You Sow, which filed the proposal on carbon emissions disclosure, told DeSmog: “What we are asking them to do is measure, disclose, and set a target to become Paris aligned.”
“We are asking this not only because climate change poses risk to the bank, but because it poses systemic risk to shareholders.”
“Many U.S. banks are waiting for a perfect system to emerge for them to begin measuring climate risk — if they wait for that, it’ll be too late — we are really trying to press them to move faster than they may think they need to,” she added.
Yet, in a position that Fugere feels is out of step even with its fellow American investment banks, JP Morgan has resisted what she calls a “moderate” proposal to commit to and report on a plan to reduce so-called “financed emissions” produced by the companies to which it lends.
As You Sow
@AsYouSow
“The global financial system has a small window of opportunity to reduce financing of high-carbon activities or risk catastrophic levels of #globalwarming. Banks no longer have a free pass to fund high-carbon activities.” @Danielle_Fugerehttps://www.asyousow.org/press-releases/2020/3/12/jpmorgan-chase-climate-change-resolution …
SEC Denies JPMorgan’s Bid to Silence Shareholders; Other Major Banks Begin Taking Responsibility...
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently held that JPMorgan Chase, the world’s largest funder of fossil fuels, must include a climate-related shareholder proposal on its proxy this...
asyousow.org
Defending its current approach on climate change in response to the proposal, JPMorgan argues it provides “transparent disclosure of our approach to and performance on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) topics through multiple channels” and “supports public sector leadership to drive carbon emissions reductions on a global scale.”
In response to the proposal on oil and gas developments in the Arctic and Canadian tar sands, JPMorgan pointed to its recent commitment to end project financing for new Arctic developments and said both Arctic and tar sands developments were “sensitive sectors” and therefore subject to “enhanced review” by its Global Environmental and Social Risk Management team.
Alison Kirsch, a researcher for RAN, told DeSmog their research showed TC Energy, the infrastructure company formerly known as TransCanada that is building the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, was the bank’s “single biggest fossil fuel client” between 2016 and 2019. Following TC Energy’s announcement in March that it would be proceeding with the project, designed to carry oil from Canada’s tar sands region to U.S. refineries, JPMorgan led a $1.25 billion bond issuance for TC Energy, along with the multinational bank Citi.
Kirsch called JPMorgan’s Arctic announcement “small potatoes in light of what it needs to do to stop being a climate villain.”
As You Sow’s Fugere argues the bank’s gradual shift on fossil fuel financing is leaving it behind the curve. Over the last year As You Sow has researched the investments of five leading U.S. financiers and filed similar shareholder proposals with Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America.
Those banks have appeared to shift to accommodate shareholders’ requests, Fugere says, leading the group to withdraw their motions, “because those banks agreed to begin the process of finding an appropriate method for measuring their carbon footprints.”
JPMorgan Chase is, by contrast, resisting such pressure ahead of its AGM and instead directing its shareholders to vote against the proposal.
Eli Kasargod-Staub, cofounder of shareholder activist nonprofit Majority Action, says JPMorgan’s next shareholder meeting will be a “litmus test” for big asset managers such as Vanguard and BlackRock, which together hold nearly 15 percent of shares, to see if they are really committed to their pledges on climate change.
JPMorgan declined to provide comment for this article when approached by DeSmog.
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https://www.ecowatch.com/bayer-monsanto-lawsuit-2645411206.html
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https://www.ecowatch.com/bayer-monsanto-lawsuit-2645411206.html
Carey Gillam
A California shareholder of Bayer AG on Friday filed a lawsuit against the companies' top executives claiming they breached their duty of "prudence" and "loyalty" to the company and investors by buying Monsanto Co. in 2018, an acquisition the suit claims has "inflicted billions of dollars of damages" on the company.
Plaintiff Rebecca R. Haussmann, trustee of the Konstantin S. Haussmann Trust, is the sole named plaintiff in the suit, which was filed in New York County Supreme Court. The named defendants include Bayer CEO Werner Baumann, who orchestrated the $63 billion Monsanto purchase, and Bayer Chairman Werner Wenning, who announced last month he was stepping down from the company earlier than planned. The suit claims that Wenning's decision came after Bayer improperly obtained a copy of the then-draft shareholder lawsuit "through corporate espionage. ...The lawsuit also claims that Bayer's recent announcement of an audit of its acquisition actions is "bogus" and "part of the ongoing cover-up and intended to create a legal barrier to this case to protect Defendants from their accountability…"
The action is a shareholder derivative complaint, meaning it is brought on behalf of the company against company insiders. It seeks compensatory damages for shareholders and disgorgement of "all compensation paid to the Bayer Managers and Supervisors who participated in bringing about this Acquisition…" The suit also seeks return of funds paid to banks and law firms involved in the acquisition.
The defendants include not only Baumann and Wenning, but also some present and former Bayer directors and top managers, as well as BOFA Securities, Inc., Bank of America, Credit Suisse Group AG and the law firms of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP and Linklaters LLP.
A Bayer spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit comes a little more than a month before Bayer's April 28 annual shareholders' meeting in Bonn, Germany. At last year's annual meeting, 55 percent of shareholders registered their unhappiness with Baumann and other managers over the Monsanto deal and the subsequent loss of roughly $40 billion in market value.
Bayer's purchase of Monsanto has been clouded by tens of thousands of lawsuits alleging Monsanto's glyphosate-based herbicides cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma and that the company deceived customers about the risks. Bayer proceeded with the acquisition even after the International Agency for Research on Cancer in 2015 classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen with a positive association to non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and despite knowledge of the spreading legal claims.
Bayer then completed the Monsanto purchase just two months before the first Roundup cancer trial ended with a $289 million verdict against the company. Since that time two more trials have ended in similar findings against the company with verdicts totaling more than $2 billion, though the trial judges in each case have lowered the verdicts. All are now on appeal.
Bayer has said there are more than 45,000 plaintiffs currently making similar claims. The company has been working to settle the lawsuits for a figure widely reported to be around $10 billion but has thus far not been successful in putting an end to the litigation.
The lawsuit claims that during 2017 and 2018, as the filing of new Roundup cancer lawsuits was escalating, the ability of Bayer management to conduct due diligence into Monsanto and the litigation risks was "severely restricted." As a result, "Bayer could not conduct the kind of intrusive and thorough due diligence into Monsanto's business and legal affairs called for under the circumstances."
The suit claims that Monsanto did not disclose a material risk from Roundup and failed to quantify any potential financial impact. Monsanto's executives "had every incentive to minimize the Roundup risk in order to get Bayer to close the deal," the lawsuit states.
The shareholder lawsuit claims that "these types of mass-tort cases… can destroy a company."
The lawsuit points to the fact that Monsanto's glyphosate herbicides are now being restricted and/or banned in many parts of the world, including in Germany.
"The Monsanto Acquisition is a disaster. Roundup is doomed as a commercial product," the lawsuit states.
Reposted with permission from U.S. Right to Know.
bayer epa food glyphosate herbicides pesticides roundup science
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drilled 320
JPMorgan Hopes to Block Shareholder Climate Risk Resolutions
Activist shareholder resolutions ask JPMorgan to report its exposure to climate risk. But the firm has moved to block them from a vote.
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In its latest move to put profits over people, President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to make it easier for corporations to hide from accountability.
Let’s make sure corporations can’t hide.
Every year, investors use shareholder proposals to sound the alarm on emerging issues that not only impact the corporations they own, but also affect how companies interact with our communities and the planet.
Now, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is trying to make it more difficult for shareholders to bring these critical proposals up for a vote.
Years before Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft killed hundreds of people, the company’s shareholders filed proposals raising concerns about the company’s influence over regulators.
Under the new rules, those shareholders’ efforts to hold Boeing’s management accountable would have been blocked.
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1219
Trump's SEC is proposing a dangerous rule change that would silence shareholders and undermine corporate accountability efforts. This move will help inoculate powerful Wall Street companies and wealthy CEOs to pressure from their own shareholders.
The rule would make it harder to file shareholder petitions by increasing the ownership stake needed in order to do so by ten fold. It would also increase the percentage of support a petition would need to garner from shareholders in order to stay alive.
Shareholder resolutions have been used for decades to ensure better corporate governance and to advance important causes like gay rights, gender and racial equity, and environmentalism -- concerns for which the recent, much-lauded statement issued by major CEOs through the Business Roundtable implies support. For instance, employees recently used their company-issue stock to pressure Amazon to reduce its contribution to climate change because of its impact on the world and on Amazon's own business.
Now the SEC is looking to undermine shareholder proposals and make it harder advocates from constraining corporate abuses. We need to stand up and fight back to protect the ability of shareholders to shape the governance of corporations they invest in.
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1019
Shareholders speak up
Numerous reports have described climate-related shareholder resolutions at oil and gas companies. But many such resolutions initiated in the last five years have failed a vote, and the number of actions declined from 2016 to 2018.
Still, these efforts led to increased discussion of climate-related concerns between shareholders and management. The recent uptick in corporate climate strategy and investments undoubtedly reflects investor interest, societal pressure, the public policy environment and the growing competitiveness of other technologies. The question is how much change can emerge without much stronger signals from one or more of these sources.
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https://www.ecowatch.com/warren-climate-risk-disclosure-act-2640576122.html
The Green New Deal has been the focal point of the climate debate among the Democratic presidential candidates. Less publicized is the Climate Risk Disclosure Act, a proposal from Senator and presidential contender Elizabeth Warren, that seeks to frame climate change as a threat to the public markets.
The idea: force companies to publicly disclose how their valuation would fare should climate change continue versus how they would do should temperature rise be capped at 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels, the benchmark outlined in the Paris agreement.
"The Climate Risk Disclosure Act empowers investors to make smart decisions about where to invest their money by requiring that public companies be straight about how climate change and related policies will affect their bottom lines," said Sen. Warren in an exclusive statement sent to Cheddar. "Shareholders weighing this new information will compel big companies to speed up the transition to a clean energy economy, reducing the odds of an environmental and financial disaster without spending a dime of taxpayer money."
First proposed in 2018, and reintroduced with changes earlier this summer, Warren's bill would use the Securities and Exchange Commission to force publicly-traded companies to confront their own position within the climate crisis — and share that information with investors. The law, the Senator's office explains, would also have companies reveal their direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions, share the total fossil fuel assets they own or manage, and outline their climate change risk management strategies.
It's certainly not the only climate proposal from the Massachusetts senator, but the Climate Risk Disclosure Act does appear fundamentally Warren-esque in its hope to use regulatory agencies — in this case, the SEC — to push the free market toward a less environmentally-destructive future.
Notably, the legislation was co-sponsored by several other presidential hopefuls, including Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Cory Booker, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. It has also won the endorsement of sustainability advocacy organizations, including the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (Ceres) and the U.S. Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment (US SIF).
Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) introduced the bill in the House, where it just passed the House Financial Services Committee.
"Public corporations must take responsibility for the large financial risks posed by the impacts of climate change, while embracing the economic opportunity of being global leaders in developing a clean energy economy," said Casten in a statement to Cheddar. "Our bill utilizes market mechanisms to incentivize climate action by ensuring that corporations disclose the risks posed by climate action to the benefit of their shareholders and the public."
This is not the first time an idea like this has come up. As early as 2007, state officials, investor advocates, and climate groups — including Ceres, Friends of the Earth, and Environmental Defense — had begun pushing the SEC to issue guidance as to how companies should disclose risks related to climate change.
"Companies' financial condition increasingly depends upon their ability to avoid climate risk and to capitalize on new business opportunities by responding to the changing physical and regulatory environment," they wrote in a letter to the agency. For instance, the organizations argued the physical impact of climate change could impact a company's ability to operate or expose it to new legal proceedings.
Three years later, the agency commissioners — in [a party-line vote] — finally issued guidance suggesting how companies might go about disclosing the risks related to the impact of climate change. The guidance noted that climate change could impact how a business described itself, its legal proceedings, managements' discussion and analysis of operations, and risk factors facing the company.
"It did not change any of its rules. It just said our current rules mandate addressing the risks of climate change," explains Alan Palmiter, a business law professor at Wake Forest University.
Palmiter has written that, at first, the SEC's guidance drew a good amount of attention. He found that a "flurry" of law firms sent letters to their clients notifying them of the new guidance, with many noting that the SEC could take further action on the subject.
However, Palmiter found that some law firms were unsure how to follow the guidance. Some also questioned the capacity of companies to determine how climate change might affect them, and some doubted the existence of climate change altogether, he found.
But despite some initial fanfare, the guidance didn't seem to have much impact on how many — or how much — companies disclosed about their climate risks. Palmiter notes that "during the first years after the SEC guidance, fewer than three-fifths of companies in the S&P 500 mentioned climate change in their 10-K annual reports" and that most of these were simply "a short one-paragraph risk factor."
In 2014, Ceres argued the SEC had not prioritized "the financial risks and opportunities of climate change as an important disclosure issue."The non-profit noted that the agency comment letters related to the adequacy of climate change-related disclosures had dwindled from 38 in 2010 to none in 2013. Many companies had said nothing about climate change in their annual SEC filings, the organization found, and disclosures were highly variable, often revealing little detailed information.
Two years later, the SEC requested comment on a wide range of issues, including climate change, but there doesn't appear to have been any subsequent action under the Trump administration. Last year, the SEC also received a request for a petition for broader rulemaking governing "environmental, social, and governmental" disclosures.
When asked about its guidance for companies in regard to climate change, the SEC directed Cheddar to the 2010 guidance. The agency did not respond to follow-up questions as to whether further guidance had been issued since then and why enforcement appears to have slowed.
The Government Accountability Office's February 2018 review of the guidance found that the SEC was limited because it "primarily relies on information that companies provide," couldn't subpoena more information, and the information it did have wasn't standardized across companies. It also reported that industry associations said "they consider the current climate-related disclosure requirements adequate and no additional climate-related disclosures are needed," but that "some investor groups and asset management firms have highlighted the need for companies to disclose more climate-related information." Echoing the GAO, Jim Hempstead, a managing director at Moody's told Politico this June, "Climate disclosures that are coming out right now are all over the map," and implying that disclosures "comparable across companies" would be more helpful.
Warren re-introduced the legislation this summer, saying it would "give investors, and the American public, the power to hold corporations accountable for their role in the climate crisis."
The failure of the 2010 guidance has been at the foundation to push this bill ahead, with the leaders of both Ceres and US SIF, citing the SEC's "lax" enforcement in their support for Warren's 2019 Climate Risk Disclosure Act.
Whether the bill will be passed or not, like so much of a growing slate of bills meant to combat the climate crisis, may rest on the ability of Democrats to win back the Senate and the White House in the upcoming election.
And while it's not likely to be signed into law yet, Bryan McGannon, director of government relations at US SIF, notes: "It builds a track record."
This story originally appeared in Cheddar. It is republished here as part of EcoWatch's partnership with Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.
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819 art'l yesterday ceo ~ profit max, vs ceo$ max, //?
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/financial-journalist-explains-why-shareholder-democracy-and-milton-friedman-economics-have-failed-miserably/
no lnx
Financial journalist explains why ‘shareholder democracy’ and Milton Friedman economics have failed miserably
Written by Alex Henderson August 20, 2019
“Shareholder democracy” is an economic theory that was aggressively promoted by the late Milton Friedman, the conservative University of Chicago economist who served as an adviser to President Ronald Reagan as well as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.According to “shareholder democracy,” a corporation’s #1 responsibility is to its shareholders — not the good of society at large — and “shareholder democracy” as preached by Friedman influenced everything from Reaganomics to neoliberalism to the Libertarian Party. But Andrew Ross Sorkin (author of the 2009 book “Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves”) explains in a New York Times article that in 2019, more and more Americans are rethinking “shareholder democracy” and coming to view it as detrimental to the greater good.
“For nearly a half-century,” Sorkin explains, “Corporate America has prioritized, almost maniacally, profits for its shareholders. That single-minded devotion overran nearly every other constituent, pushing aside the interests of customers, employees and communities
Friedman, Sorkin notes, scoffed at the concept of corporate responsibility, asserting in 1970, “What does it mean to say that ‘business’ has responsibilities? Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.”
But in 2019, according to Sorkin, one is seeing a resurgence of what used to be called “managerialism” — essentially, a belief that corporations need to be concerned about employees, communities and society’s greater good and not simply shareholders. There were hints of managerialism, Sorkin says, in aBusiness Roundtable statement released on Monday — when leaders of major companies ranging from Apple and Amazon to JPMorgan Chase issued a joint statement noting that employees and communities should matter to companies along with shareholders.
Sorkin attributes this statement in part to “public outrage” and a growing populism.
“Americans mistrust companies to such an extent that the very idea of capitalism is now being debated on the political stage,” Sorkin asserts. “Populism has been embraced on both ends of the political spectrum, whether in the trade protectionism of President Trump or the social-net supremacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders.”
Indeed, Sanders’ popularity shows a shift in the United States’ political landscape. The self-described “democratic socialist” has achieved much greater prominence in U.S. politics than he had in the 1990s or 2000s, and recent polls on the 2020 Democratic presidential primary have found him battling for the #2 position with the decidedly liberal/progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Reflecting on the effects of “shareholder democracy,” Sorkin explains that in the past, “Shareholders and, in turn, a new class of investors known as corporate raiders convinced executives to slash any and all fat from their budgets or risk being taken over or voted out. Layoffs increased, research and development budgets were cut, and pension programs were traded for 401(k)s. There was a rush of mergers driven by ‘cost savings’ that grabbed headlines while profits soared and dividends increased.”
The debate on “corporate democracy” versus “managerialism,” Sorkin stresses, will rage on — and not everyone in the business world agrees with the Business Roundtable statement issued on Monday.
“For whatever progress may have been made Monday, it is hardly clear the debate is over,” Sorkin explains. “In fact, the fight for corporate identity is just beginning.”
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Law360 breaking news.
Exxon Hit With New Stock-Drop Suit Over Climate Disclosures
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"Internal documents show that Exxon's executives knew the company's disclosures regarding the impact of climate change related risks on its
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https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/05/07/exxon-shareholder-lawsuit-climate-change/
An ExxonMobil shareholder has filed a lawsuit against the oil giant and some of its executives alleging they misled investors by understating how much risk climate change poses to the company’s assets.
Sarah Von Colditz filed the suit Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Defendants include current and former Exxon executives and board members, including current chief executive Darren Woods and his predecessor, Rex Tillerson. The complaint accuses the company and executives of violating federal securities law, breaching fiduciary duties and wasting corporate assets.
Exxon is already facing two lawsuits over the company’s alleged misrepresentation of asset values to investors. The state of New York filed a lawsuit in October following a three-year investigation that showed Exxon had used two different sets of numbers to calculate climate risk—one disclosed publicly while the other was used internally. The public numbers indicated that Exxon was using higher costs of potential greenhouse gas regulations, or proxy costs, for internal planning than it was using in its business decisions.
Von Colditz cited this alleged misrepresentation in her complaint. “Exxon’s failure to employ carbon proxy cost policies that actually corresponded to its public statements violated generally accepted accounting principles,” the complaint said.
The complaint also says that Exxon’s behavior and resulting litigation has damaged the company’s credibility and reputation. It calls for stronger oversight of the company’s proxy cost and climate risk considerations.
Another shareholder climate suit against Exxon is moving forward, also in the Northern District of Texas. Exxon recently requested the court deny class certification to that suit, filed as a class action by the Greater Pennsylvania Carpenters Pension Fund.
Exxon has also been opposing efforts by investors to push the company to deal more transparently with climate issues. The Securities and Exchange Commission allowed Exxon to block a proposal requesting it set targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The New York State Common Retirement Fund and the Church of England submitted that proposal for consideration to be included in the materials that shareholders will vote on at the upcoming annual meeting. On Friday, the two institutions filed a notice indicating they would vote againstre-election of current Exxon board members and would vote in favor of establishing an independent board chairman.
“The Fund and the Church Commissioners believe that ExxonMobil’s inadequate responses to climate change and to engagement with Climate Action 100+ participants reflect in significant part a board that is not functioning effectively in the absence of an Independent Chairman,” the proposal says. Climate Action 100+ is an investor initiative that works to push the largest corporate emitters to curb emissions and strengthen climate-related financial disclosures.
The notice also said Exxon’s intransigence stands in contrast to other oil majors, such as Shell, that have agreed to set emissions reduction targets.
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https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/07/17/sec-climate-risks-disclosure/
Karen Savage
A bill that would require public companies to disclose the risks posed to their business by climate change passed a crucial committee vote in the House on Wednesday.
The House Financial Services Committee passed the Climate Risk Disclosure Act of 2019, which was introduced by Illinois Rep. Sean Casten in 2018. The bill would require the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to develop and implement guidelines for companies on disclosing climate risks. The SEC would be required to make the information available to the public on its website.
“Climate change is a risk to the stability of the global financial system,” Casten said. “This bill presents a market-based solution to understand the impact of a changing climate on companies and provide investors, lenders, and insurers with better information.”
The bill now moves on to a vote by the full House, and if it passes, on to the Senate. With the Senate still controlled by Republicans, it is unlikely to have enough support.
Companies are currently required to disclose the risks that other issues—including lawsuits, significant corporate events and other business trends—pose to their business in annual SEC reports known as 10-Ks. But they are not required to specifically disclose risks posed by climate change.
A study by ClimateWire in 2016 found companies’ voluntary risk disclosures are often vague, with little useful information for investors. Because there are no standard guidelines for measuring and reporting climate risk, comparing risk from company to company is difficult, if not impossible.
The Climate Risk Disclosure Act would require companies in the finance, insurance, transportation, electric power, mining and non-renewable energy sectors to disclose direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions and to disclose the total amount of fossil fuel-related assets owned or managed by those companies. Companies would be required to use specific parameters for climate scenario analyses and to disclose the methods used in calculating the social cost of carbon. That makes it easier for investors to compare companies based on their climate risk.
Fossil fuel companies have long been accused of not providing complete, consistent or transparent information on the risk climate change poses to their business.
Exxon is currently facing a lawsuit by the New York attorney general’s office for allegedly deceiving investors for years by deliberately downplaying the climate risks to its business and long-term financial health.
In recent years, BP, Exxon, Shell, Chevron and many other major fossil fuel companies have faced intense shareholder pressure to disclose their climate risks. While some have begun to deal more transparently with the issue, many continue to reject shareholder requests.
A law requiring disclosure will help shareholders make better-informed investment decisions, said Danielle Fugere, president of As You Sow, a nonprofit that advocates for corporate responsibility through shareholder advocacy.
“Climate change is very important to investors and shareholders because climate will impact every facet of the economy, from agriculture to supply chains to realty, we’re already seeing those impacts,” Fugere said.
“It’s impossible to predict the next PG&E bankruptcy will be—that was a bankruptcy related to climate change that nobody saw coming last year.”
PG&E, California’s largest utility, has been found liable for several of the state’s largest wildfires, with climate change intensifying the conditions that lead to them. The company’s shareholders have lost more than $10 billion since the company filed for bankruptcy earlier this year.
More than 50 investor and advocacy groups sent a letter last week to Casten and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who is a member of the Senate Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance and Investment, in support of the bill.
“Ensuring climate risk disclosure is standardized will allow companies and investors—especially those managing state employee pension funds and other long-term portfolios—to plan for a low-carbon future, and that science and data guide the process,” the groups wrote in the letter.
Casten said residents in his home state are already feeling the effects of climate change and said it’s crucial that investors understand the risks.
“In just the past few decades rising temperatures have worsened extreme weather events; wildfire seasons are longer; in Illinois the painting season has been shortened from seven months to six months. Mosquitoes are expanding their territory, spreading tropical disease. Two feet of sea-level rise is already baked in,” Casten said.
“What does that mean if you are a property manager investing in assets on Miami beach? What does that mean if you are a seed developer who has seeds that are not going to be able to germinate at the rising temperatures in my home state of Illinois?
“If you are an investor, you would like to know the answers to those questions.”
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desmog
guest post by Zorka Milin, Senior Legal Advisor for Global Witness.
The world was recently stunned to see the highest ever recorded concentration of carbon dioxide in our planet’s atmosphere: 415 parts per million, and rising. This figure, the highest in the millions of years that humans have existed, is unthinkably ominous to most of us. Yet it was no surprise for the company responsible for emitting a good share of that CO2: Exxon’s own scientists predicted this grim milestone with eerie accuracy way back in 1982.
If Exxon knew back then, what is the company doing to tackle the growing greenhouse gas emissions that are already causing a climate and extinction crisis? ExxonMobil investors, and the public, deserve to know. The company’s response has been to bury its head in the sand and continue with business as usual. But that is not cutting it, and this week’s annual general meeting (AGM) is a major test, with the company facing a push by some of its investors such as New York state pension fund to oust the entire board.
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Bernie Sanders to attend Walmart annual shareholders meeting to promote proposal that would give hourly workers a seat on company’s board
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For decades, fossil fuel companies have spent millions to spread climate disinformation and delay action on climate change, but now we're one step closer to holding them accountable. After months of public pressure, oil and gas giant Shell has given in to activist and investor demands. It has released a report on the climate policy lobbying of external groups that it funds and cut ties with one anti-climate group.
Unfortunately, other major fossil fuel companies, such as BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil, are still hiding their anti-climate lobbying behind trade associations. These trade associations, such as the American Petroleum Institute (API) and others, lobby against climate action on behalf of their members, allowing companies to feign support for climate action in public while doing just the opposite behind closed doors.
This is a big deal. Lobbying by Big Oil often tips the scales on climate policy at the federal, state, and local levels—frequently under the cover of third-party groups they fund in secret. While some major fossil fuel companies no longer dispute climate science, most continue to hold leadership positions in industry groups like these that fight against science-based climate policy.
Shell's trade association report isn't perfect. The company did withdraw from the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), unable to square AFPM's lack of support for carbon pricing and its push for a rollback of Environmental Protection Agency fuel economy standards with Shell’s own climate policies. However, it still maintains membership in two other trade groups that have played well-documented roles in spreading climate disinformation.
Shell's trade association report brings much-needed attention to the fossil fuel industry's political lobbying. It also puts pressure on other companies to follow suit. It's time for BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil to step up and improve on Shell's first step towards transparency and accountability.
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omfg crypto? remember that other pvt hedge fund scam?
https://www.desmogblog.com/steve-milloy
update no lnx vid
Key Deeds
October 22, 2018
Milloy joined forces with Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Fred Palmer to create an activist shareholder group called Burn More Coal, established for the purpose of preventing the closure of coal-fired power plants. BMC’s motto includes the phrase, “Coal is Life.” [73]
The group filed a shareholder proposal with Duke Energy demanding an economic justification for the planned decommissioning of some of Duke's coal plants:
“What will be the actual benefit to anyone or anything of it? Global CO2 emissions are higher now than ever and increasing.” [73]
The move came as Duke plans to retire 14 coal plants by 2020 to comply with federal and state environmental regulations and under pressure from low natural gas prices and increasing demand for renewable energy. [73]
In an interview with The Daily Caller, Palmer said:
“There is a cabal in the utility industry that wants to decarbonize independent of federal policy. It’s as if Al Gore were running the utility industry.” [73]
August 7, 2018
Milloy spoke at the Heartland Institute's “America First Energy Conference” (AFEC 2018) in New Orleans, Louisiana. [70]
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CMD?
In a victory for environmental and shareholder activists, the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) has denied ExxonMobil’s request to prevent a shareholder vote on a resolution requiring the oil giant to disclose its political spending, including “dark money” contributions to advocacy groups and trade associations.
The SEC ruling comes on a shareholder proposal brought by the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) that would require Exxon to compile a semiannual report on its “political contributions and expenditures (direct and indirect) with corporate funds,” as well as related company policies, and post it on the company’s website.
The SEC also rejected Exxon’s attempt to prevent a vote on a resolution brought by an activist shareholder to create a board-level committee to review and oversee the company’s strategy on climate change.
The SEC rulings were first reported by Climate Liability News.
Dark Money
Dark money is money used to influence elections that is passed through trade associations and advocacy groups in a way that obscures its true source. These groups can take money from corporations, unions, and individuals, and, for example, air TV ads to influence elections, without disclosing where the money came from.
In trying to deny the resolution’s place on the shareholder ballot, to be voted at its May 29 annual meeting, Exxon claimed that it did disclose its policies having to do with political contributions. UUA correctly noted, however, that Exxon only discloses direct contributions to candidates, candidate committees, PACs and party committees. Money run through other nonprofit groups is not disclosed.
According to the Climate Investigation Center, fossil fuel and corporate trade groups spent $1.4 billion on PR firms and ad buys between 2007 and 2018. How much of that money is Exxon’s is unknown.
Taking Climate Change Seriously
The climate shareholder proposal, brought by Arjuna Capital, calls for Exxon to create a new board committee to “assess the company’s responses to climate related risks and opportunities, including the potential impacts of climate change on business, strategy, financial planning, and the environment.”
Exxon claimed that it already considers climate change through a committee with a broad mandate to evaluate the company’s health and safety and environmental performance.
According to Climate Liability News, Arjuna Capital argued that Exxon “has no specific mention of climate change in its charter and while it may address climate change to an extent, the wide array of issues under its jurisdiction do not provide the specialized focus necessary to address the ‘more strategic climate change issues concerning investors, including the emissions associated with burning the company’s product.'”
Most people would think that Exxon has a committee at the board of director level to tackle climate change by itself, but it does not.
Arjuna Capital noted that with only one climate expert on its board, the company is ill-prepared to deal with the biggest threat to its business and shareholders in this century....
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*By representing millions of everyday investors, these money managers have the power to sway fossil fuel companies to take real action on climate change. Tell BlackRock and Vanguard to vote for climate and democracy at ExxonMobil's and Chevron's shareholder meetings next month.
If you have a 401(k) or other retirement account, there's a good chance these money managers are speaking for you.*
https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/03/08/main-street-investors-coalition-national-association-manufacturers-shareholders-climate
no lnx doc?
By Karen Savage, Climate Liability News. Crossposted from Climate Liability News.
The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), a 123-year-old trade group that has worked diligently to defend Big Oil in the burgeoning climate liability battles, has also taken on another opponent to the status quo: investors.
In addition to filing briefs in defense of the fossil fuel industry, launching campaigns to discredit the communities filing suits and intervening on the side of the federal government in a landmark constitutional climate lawsuit, Juliana v. United States, NAM has rallied behind efforts to keep corporate shareholders from influencing how oil companies conduct business.
In recent years, shareholders concerned about climate-related risks to the companies’ bottom lines, which includes liability suits, have introduced proposals urging oil and gas companies to reduce their carbon footprint and be more forthcoming about the climate risks to their bottom line.
Once largely unmoved by a hard-to-imagine future threat, investors now need only look out their windows or turn to news reports to see firsthand the catastrophic effects of climate change: The charred remains of entire communities in the aftermath of California wildfires; parts of Texas submerged by more than 4 feet of water in the wake of Hurricane Harvey; countless unnamed weather events from the record-shattering rain that swept through Louisiana in 2016 to the now-routine flooding in Florida and areas along the Atlantic seaboard.
While most shareholder proposals have failed, there have been some victories: In 2017, investors forced Exxon to produce its first climate-risks report and other proposals prompted Occidental Petroleum, BP and Shell to increase reporting on climate risks. BP announced in February that it will support a resolution calling for even more disclosure that will be proposed at its May 2019 shareholder meeting.
With the potential for more successful proposals, NAM has ramped up its opposition. Last year it launched the Main Street Investors Coalition (MSIC), a broad initiative to put the brakes on shareholder proposals involving climate change and other social justice issues. The group considers those efforts “politically motivated shareholder activism.”
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NAM is also targeting proxy advisory firms, which are hired by institutional investors to analyze reports and recommend how shareholders should vote on certain issues. NAM supports new legislation in Congress calling for tighter regulation of proxy firms by the SEC and even funded its own study claiming proxy firms’ advice is often politically motivated or influenced by conflicts of interest, painting investors as uninformed and unconcerned with corporate profits.
Suggesting that institutional investors have a political agenda or don’t care about the bottom line is not true, said Timothy Smith of the Boston Trust and Investment Management Company, a state-chartered bank and trust company, who wrote a letter to the SEC rebutting NAM’s claims.
“That’s absolutely insulting to a pension fund, which has to care about shareholder value. It’s a very, very high priority,” Smith said.
Smith said investors have met with many of NAM’s member companies, most of which value shareholder participation. He said he has found none that share NAM’s pessimistic view of shareholder motivation.
To spearhead its effort, NAM tapped George David Banks to lead MSIC. Banks, the current executive vice president of the American Council for Capital Formation, a conservative think tank, served for a year as an advisor to President Trump on energy and climate policy. During a previous stint on the staff of Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), he wrote that he considered oil lobbyists “partners.”
In addition, MSIC wants shareholders to rely on the government and not the individual companies to tackle climate change. But with the Trump administration’s propensity for appointing industry insiders to political positions — including the recent confirmation of former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler to lead the Environmental Protection Agency — the government has been dismantling existing environmental regulations and backpedaling away from climate action.
As part of its attack on shareholders’ efforts for more transparency and accountability, NAM also partnered with the Chamber of Commerce in November to launch a six-figure ad campaign warning that proxy firms lack oversight and endanger investors’ savings.
The initiative — dubbed proxyreforms.com — maintains that proxy advisory firms are putting their 401K retirement plans at risk by giving bad advice and ignoring small investors.
“There’s a growing risk to millions of workers and retirees like you,” warns a dire voice on a video posted NAM’s YouTube channel. “Your retirement savings could be in jeopardy.”
By painting proxy advisory firms as the enemy of individual investors, MSIC is misleading the public, said Sue Reid, vice president of climate & energy for Ceres, a non-profit organization dedicated to sustainable investing.
Reid said the suggestion that “big ugly billionaire–driven money-grubbing asset managers” are driving shareholder resolutions that work for them and not the “little guy” completely misses that many shareholder resolutions are backed by pension funds, which administer the savings of thousands of individual retirees.
“They might have a lot of money that they manage, but absolutely those are the resources of the ‘little guy,’” Reid said. “So for workers across the spectrum — an awful lot of blue collar workers across the United States — these are their hard-earned resources to support their retirement.”
Corporate Disconnect
Projects like MSIC and the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project call into question an apparent disconnect between NAM’s direction on climate change and that of many of its member companies.
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In a letter to companies with executives on the NAM board,investors led by the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), Walden Asset Management and the New York State Common Retirement Fund last year called for an end to attacks on shareholders by NAM and the MSIC. It also questioned the accuracy of the NAM-funded study.
“We are deeply concerned about the negative message that the NAM Report conveys about investor engagement and shareholder resolutions in general and climate change in particular,” the investors said in the letter. They said they were particularly concerned about the NAM-funded study, which suggests that shareholder resolutions — particularly resolutions related to climate change — do not increase investor profits.
“The report, which argues that shareholder resolutions on climate change are politically motivated and may negatively affect company performance and shareholder value, is clearly at odds with the policies and experiences of many NAM members. Further, NAM’s depiction of climate-related resolutions may permit an inference that the companies that serve on its board are skeptical about climate science or the action needed to address this urgent issue,” wrote the investors.
Smith, representing Walden Asset Management, a division of the Boston Trust and Investment Company, appealed at the time to NAM’s member companies to protect their reputations and integrity by distancing themselves from both NAM and MSIC.
“The irony is that many companies on the NAM board are active business leaders on climate change, yet their dues to NAM are funding an aggressive attack against the very investors they meet with regularly to address climate change.”
Corporate Change Comes From Within
Shareholder resolutions stem from not only concerns about future profitability, but also the social impacts of their investments. In recent years, shareholders have proposed hundreds of resolutions aimed at forcing companies to address the risks of climate change and make other policy changes.
These resolutions provide a way for shareholders to bring critical issues to the attention of a company’s management and board. Generally, any investor holding $2,000 worth of stock or 1 percent of a company can introduce a resolution.
It was pressure from shareholders that forced Exxon in 2014 to provide a report on its climate-risk calculations. That report, Energy and Carbon — Managing the Risks, was subsequently subpoenaed by the New York attorney general’s office in its investigation into a potential climate fraud lawsuit. The AG office has since filed suit against Exxon.
The passage of a shareholder resolution in 2017 forced Exxon to acknowledge for the first time that its core oil and gas assets face some risk of becoming stranded — or unusable — due to government policies and international agreements that seek to limit climate change.
Hoping to push Exxon to more fully outline which assets could become stranded, shareholders are now proposing a resolution that the company provide investors with an accounting of how it plans to meet its short-, medium- and long-term greenhouse gas targets as outlined in the Paris Climate Agreement. Exxon in January asked the SEC for permission to avoid a vote on that resolution. The SEC has not yet ruled on it.
NAM believes proxy advisory firms have been a reason for the recent success of some of those resolutions and is calling for increased SEC oversight to limit their influence.
“For far too long, proxy advisory firms have exerted undue influence over manufacturing companies, trying to force business decisions without any regard to investors’ best interests,” NAM president and chief executive Jay Timmons told Reuters.
NAM also submitted a letter to the SEC, urging the agency to “highlight the importance of effective guardrails around third parties (like proxy advisory firms and activist investors) that often detract from business growth and shareholder value creation” and to streamline the proxy process in order to allow companies to “continue to focus on growing their businesses and driving shareholder returns.”
NAM and the Main Street Investors’ Coalition did not respond to requests for comment.
Not only can shareholder resolutions lead to increased corporate earnings, but carbon asset risk resolutions could prevent companies from incurring additional liability for climate change damages, said Danielle Fugere, president of As You Sow, a non-profit advocating for corporate responsibility through shareholder advocacy.
“It will help companies move forward understanding that they need to start making changes, that they need to start reducing their carbon risk, that demand may in fact fall precipitously in the future and the world is moving to a low carbon energy system,” Fugere said. “If they are not on board, then they are at risk of being competitively disadvantaged.”
Nell Minow, a long-time shareholder rights advocate, said the Main Street Investors Coalition does not represent actual Main Street investors.
“In reality, it is a corporate-funded group with no real ties to retail investors,” Minow wrote in a post on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation. “And its advocacy is as fake as its name.”
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https://www.desmog.co.uk/2018/05/21/bp-accused-corporate-evasion-over-response-climate-change-questions-agm
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https://www.alternet.org/environment/jpmorgan-chase-ceo-jamie-dimon-needs-climate-change-education
Wall Street's biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase, just posted record earnings. Its quarterly profit surged 35 percent to an all-time high. CEO Jamie Dimon's take-home pay soared to a stunning $141 million. But while Chase's shareholders and top executives make hay, the climate is reeling from increasing emissions from burning fossil fuels—a trend that Mr. Dimon seems happy to finance.
In one of his precious few public comments on climate change, Dimon condemned President Donald Trump for pulling out of the Paris Agreement last June. One year later, however, he seems fully on board with Trump's agenda to "unleash" fossil fuels and resurrect coal. Since Trump's election, Chase has poured more money than any other U.S. or European bank into the most planet-harming fossil fuels. From 2016 to 2017, Chase quadrupled its financing for tar sands and increased its coal mining funding by 2,100 percent.
Chase has publicly committed to supporting clean energy and has a policy to reduce its lending for coal mining (contradicted by its huge spike in financing for the sector last year). Yet whenshareholders submitted a resolution for this year's annual general meeting calling on the company to disclose the risks associated with financing tar sands—one of the most carbon-intensive forms of oil—Chase rejected it by saying it would be like asking for a report on whether the bank offices had "carpeted floors."
This rejection is consistent with Dimon's apparent lack of concern over climate change.His recent 47-page letter to shareholders is filled with commentary on current hot-button political issues—spurring Andrew Ross Sorkin to speculate in the New York Times whether Dimon was contemplating a run for president in 2020. But on climate change—one of the most momentous public policy issues of our era—Dimon is almost completely silent, with just one mention in passing buried deep on page 44 of the shareholders' letter.
He made no mention that 2017 was the world's most expensive year on record for devastation from extreme weather events. No mention that last year, Chase's European competitors BNP Paribas and ING adopted policies that sharply restrict their lending to the worst fossil fuels. No mention that if we are to meet the Paris goals—which Dimon supposedly supports—we need to quickly stop expansion and start a rapid phaseout of these dangerous energy sources.
But at least climate change got to play a cameo this year: Dimon's previous ten letters to shareholders did not mention the phrase a single time. (The only allusion to climate change we can find in these letters—supposedly the second-most anticipated by investors after Warren Buffett's—is a reference in 2009 to Chase making money from trading carbon credits.)
Jamie Dimon is a strong CEO. He's famous for having a firm hand on Chase's tiller. So given that its great helmsman appears to be mostly ignorant of—or perhaps just doesn't care about—global warming, it's not surprising that Chase is the worst Wall Street funder of extreme fossil fuels. (Another relevant and deeply alarming aspect of Chase's executive leadership is that its longest-serving board member is none other than Lee R. Raymond, former CEO of ExxonMobil and one of the world's most notorious corporate climate denialists.)
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https://www.ecowatch.com/big-oil-divestment-2553608299.html
By Andy Rowell
New Golden Age for Big Oil or a Golden Goodbye?
Goldman Sachs, the investment bank at the heart of the global economy still doesn't get it.
The bank, once famously described as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity," has a blinkered and fundamentally flawed vision when it comes to the future of the oil industry.
Monday, Bloomberg reported that the hugely influential investment bank had issued a report on the "Seven Sisters," the world's largest oil companies and the bank argues that having "survived a life-changing crisis," the companies are "now poised to reap the rewards."
Having shed costs as prices plummeted, Big Oil is now "in a sweet spot with rising oil prices and low operating costs, leaving them with the biggest cash-flow growth in two decades and boosting earnings," according to Goldman's report.
Goldman's Michele Della Vigna told Bloomberg: "We see this as the start of a new golden age for Big Oil's reborn Seven Sisters," with a "favorable environment for returns in the commodity."
This analysis is dangerously defective in that it seems to envisage a world where Big Oil can carry on drilling unimpeded for decades. But the bank has forgotten about climate change, stranded assets, shareholder actions and the growing number of lawsuits against Big Oil for their role in climate change, widely seen as the #Exxonknew scandal. Indeed, recently Arnold Schwarzenegger said he was planning on suing the companies for "murder."
Furthermore, the website Business Green reported last week about another report, produced jointly by the environmental think tank E3G and the Oxford Sustainable Finance Programme. The top line says it all: "New research released today suggests the only commercially viable future for oil majors in a carbon constrained world is a gradual winding down of their operations or a quick sell off of assets."
The report had simulated a scenario under which the Seven Sisters had to shift their business models in line with what was agreed in Paris—a 2 C warming—which could put a whopping $2.3 trillion of oil and gas industry projects at risk as they are "incompatible" with a 2 C world.
As Business Green reported "It found that oil firms' best chance of commercial survival is to rapidly diversify from fossil fuels into alternative technologies such as renewable energy, and gradually retire upstream fossil fuel assets."
This is far from a new dawn as you can get. "Out of five possible strategies, only 'managed decline' and 'first one out' are commercially viable options for International Oil Corporations," said Business Green.
Indeed, Monday one of the Seven Sisters,Royal Dutch Shell, produced its annual "Sky scenario" report which outlined how we might collectively achieve the Paris agreement emission targets.
"Introducing Sky—an ambitious scenario to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 C. This requires a complex combination of mutually reinforcing drivers being rapidly accelerated by society, markets and governments," said Shell.
Shell outlines, amongst others, "a change in consumer mindset means that people preferentially choose low-carbon, high-efficiency options to meet their energy service needs," a "step-change in the efficiency of energy use," plus carbon pricing, a massive increase in renewables, and unprecedented expansion of Carbon, Capture and Storage and vast reforestation.
No doubt others will pick apart Shell's plans for being unrealistic and flawed, especially around its own continuing investment in fossil fuels and issues such as carbon pricing and Carbon, Capture and Storage, but the main point is that the company's own analysts believe that the days of Big Oil are numbered.
And pressure is building day by day for the companies to divest: Monday, the Financial Times reported that shareholders are "preparing a renewed push" for Shell to "adopt more ambitious goals for tackling climate change." The company is expected to face a shareholder resolution at its AGM calling for a "radical shift" away from fossil fuels.
Mark Van Baal of Follow This, who is leading the shareholder action, told the Financial Times: "More and more institutional investors want companies they invest in to commit to Paris. Because they foresee that they cannot make a decent return on their capital in a world economy disrupted by devastated climate change."
Maybe someone should tell the Goldman Sachs vampire squid that too, before they advise too many investors about this wonderful new golden era for Big Oil. Because that era is now history.
Reposted with permission from our media associate Oil Change International.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07032018/shareholder-resolutions-climate-change-2-degrees-methane-lobbying-trump-administration
When a group of investors asked Noble Energy, Inc., to report on the risks climate change poses to its business, the company's response put on display how the Trump administration's pro-fossil-fuel stance is swaying the perennial debate.
Similar resolutions brought by concerned shareholders have won increasing investor support since the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and grudging acceptance by some in the industry.
Not Noble. The Houston-based oil and gas company urged its shareholders to vote down the resolution, and then it described its vision of an unfettered regulatory future under the Trump administration.
"The current administration and the Republican Congress have adopted policies aimed at increasing the production of domestic oil and natural gas resources and repealed or amended certain executive orders and regulatory policies that have restricted or adversely impacted development," the company wrote. "In sum, the proposal calls for a report that would be principally based on speculative assumptions about a legislative and regulatory environment that is inherently unpredictable."
Nearly three dozen shareholder resolutions related to climate change risk have been filed this year with publicly traded oil and gas companies and electric utilities, to be voted on by their shareholders at annual meetings spread throughout the spring. Executives often urge shareholders to vote down such resolutions, and there are concerns this year that the administration's positions could lead to even more complacency, by both companies and their investors.
Perhaps the most susceptible to ripples of the administration's assault on climate and environment policies this year are the nearly two dozen resolutions focused on methane emissions and on the impact of measures limiting global temperature rise caused by burning fossil fuels.
Limiting Methane Emissions – or Not
At least six oil, gas and electric utility companies, including Chevron, are facing shareholder resolutions calling on executives to explain the steps they're taking to minimize emissions of methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases.
While investor groups raise concerns, however, the Trump administration has embarked on a mission—cheered on by organizations like the American Petroleum Institute—to roll back most of the Obama-era requirements for reducing emissions of methane from oil and gas drilling on federal land.
Companies that might be tempted to see the current administration's behavior as an excuse to delay acting on climate risks should be cautious—administrations change, and the oil and gas industry in particular is built on investments that require weighting risks decades into the future, said Danielle Fugere, president of As You Sow, a non-profit shareholder advocacy organization.
"Investors today are becoming more and more sophisticated when they think about a company's sustainable future and what that means to their investments," said Fugere, whose group released a report on Thursday with Sustainable Investments Institute and Proxy Impact tracking this year's climate-related shareholder resolutions.
"Investments will be made with companies that have a plan for the future; a plan that accounts for a decarbonizing economy where companies are making adjustments to remain competitive," she said.
Assessing Risk in a 2-Degree World
A block of shareholders led by the Presbyterian Church filed the resolution asking Noblefor an assessment of the impact its portfolios would face from policies and technologies that keep warming under 2 degrees Celsius.
It's one of at least 18 shareholder resolutions this year calling on oil, gas and electric utility companies to conduct a 2-degree scenario analysis.
"A 2-degree scenario analysis of Noble Energy's future plans will generate a more complete picture of current and future risks and opportunities than business-as-usual planning," the church's resolution states. "This report will help Noble identify both vulnerabilities and opportunities for its business and reassure investors that Noble is poised to manage and take advantage of future regulatory, technological and market changes."
It would be shortsighted of Noble to make decisions based on the Trump Administration's devotion to fossil fuels, said Rob Fohr, director of Faith-Based Investing and Corporate Engagementfor the Presbyterian Church.
"In the short term, I can see where the company has a lot to be excited about," Fohr said. "But for the long term, it's not prudent to make plans based on the activities of one administration."
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06022018/marathon-oil-shareholder-resolution-human-rights-dakota-access-environment-social-risk-disclosure
The clash between the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and backers of the Dakota Access pipeline unfolded in news clips of violence, intolerance and humiliation. Demonstrators against the pipeline were met with snarling guard dogs, armed security officers and fire hoses that drenched them during freezing weather.
For a block of shareholders in Marathon Petroleum Corp., an Ohio-based company that bought a minority interest in the Dakota Access pipeline just as tensions hit a flashpoint in 2016, it was an unsettling scene that played out on social media and network news.
What happened in full view of the world on the remote plains of North Dakota has prompted a shareholder resolution calling on Marathon to explain how it identifies and addresses environmental and social risks—including potential violations of the rights of indigenous peoples—when making business decisions related to acquisitions.
"The construction and operation of energy infrastructure in North America requires respect for rigorous standards of environmental review and the human rights of Indigenous Peoples," the resolution says.
The shareholders argue that Marathon, which contributed $500 million in partnership with Enbridge to buy a $2 billion stake in the Bakken pipeline system that included Dakota Access, must consider environmental and human rights issues when assessing risks associated with purchases. They cite the United Nations' Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a measure of the expectations for considering the rights of indigenous people to "free, prior and informed consent prior to the approval of any projects affecting their traditional territory."
"When such risks are not adequately considered, decisions can be made that lead to reputational, regulatory and financial loss," says the resolution, which will be considered during the company's annual meeting in Findlay, Ohio, on April 25.
The shareholders say the value of their investments could be jeopardized by the negative image created by future confrontations that could result in damage to the company's reputation.
So, they are asking Marathon to prepare a report that describes the review process used to identify and address environmental and social risks in reviewing potential acquisitions. They want the company to consider a number of points, including how environmental and social risks are identified and assessed; which international standards are used to define the company's human rights; and how this information is calculated into business decisions.
Jamal Kheiry, communications manager for Marathon, said the company had no comment. The company's position will be spelled out later in its proxy statement that addresses business to be conducted at the meeting.
Human Rights Risks Are Investment Risks
The resolution by Marathon shareholders is one of more than two dozen resolutions on environmental matters filed with oil and gas companies. Those resolutions, which address concerns such as reducing methane emissions and curbing global warming, could be considered during annual meetings usually scheduled throughout the spring.
Marathon shareholders filed a similar resolution last year that met resistance from the company but still earned approval by 35 percent of the company's stockholders who voted.
The New York State Comptroller's Office, which manages public employee pension funds that are major shareholders, was the lead sponsor of both resolutions.
Although the office declined to discuss the resolution in detail, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said a year ago that investors had a right to know how Marathon considered the rights of indigenous peoples.
"Given the nationwide protests and controversy that surrounded the Dakota Access Pipeline, we assume Marathon would have undertaken robust due diligence before getting involved with that project," DiNapoli said in a 2017 statement. "Risks to the environment and to human rights create risks for our pension fund's investments and should be addressed as part of a sustainable business plan."
Why Marathon Says It Opposed the Resolution
The company, in its proxy statement last year, said it "respects the human, cultural and legal rights of individuals and communities" but still urged shareholders to reject the resolution.
Preparing the kind of reports sought through the resolution would require a highly customized study of projects under consideration, the company's 2017 proxy statement said."Providing a report of the nature the proponent seeks would require (Marathon) to present an incomplete and potentially misleading picture of prospective strategic transactions," it said.
Marathon's Board of Directors argued that the company's community engagement program provided a forum and allowed adequate opportunity for any group to make its positions known.
The resolution resonated with shareholders, though, said Jonas Kron, a senior vice president for Trillium Asset Management, a Boston-based company that focuses on socially responsible investing and that filed the resolution.
Similar resolutions addressing environmental and social justice issues with oil and gas companies typically generate around 20 percent approval, he said. "This vote shows the intensity of the issue with shareholders," he said. "I would hope they would be more responsive to such a significant plurality, and take steps to reexamine the way they consider indigenous people issues and maybe don't get involved with these types of projects."
A year ago, Marathon sought permission from the Securities Exchange Commission to suppress the resolution. The commission, which regulates publicly traded companies like Marathon, rejected the company's request.
This year, Marathon has not tried to block the resolution and is in discussions with DiNapoli's office. "Should Marathon decide to endorse its provisions as company policy, the comptroller will ask that the proposal be withdrawn from consideration at the annual meeting," Patrick Doherty, the comptroller's director of corporate governance, wrote to Marathon.
'People Are at Stake'
Shareholders in Marathon's partner, Enbridge Inc., a Canadian pipeline company that owns more than 10,000 miles of pipelines in Canada and the United States, filed a similar resolution last year that was also sparked by the faceoff at Standing Rock.
"To put it very bluntly, the protest, the movement, if you will, could most likely have been prevented," Chad Harrison, a Standing Rock councilman, said during the Enbridge shareholders meeting last year.
The solution would have been for the company to engage the people affected by the pipeline, he said. "People are at stake," Harrison said, according to a transcript. "People on the ground, people where pipelines are built."
Although Enbridge opposed the resolution and it was defeated, the company nevertheless vowed to update its policy on indigenous peoples and expand its disclosures about how it addresses human rights.
"One thing that shouldn't be in doubt is the fact that we recognize and respect the legal and constitutional rights of indigenous peoples, and the vital relationship they have with traditional lands and resources," Enbridge President and CEO Al Monaco said in a statement following the shareholders meeting.
The Dakota Access pipeline is part of Marathon's 8,300 mile pipeline system. It begins in the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota and runs nearly 1,200 miles to Illinois, where it connects to other pipelines that carry oil to refineries as far south as Texas. Along the way, it crosses hundreds of streams, rivers and other waterways, including the Missouri River a half-mile upstream from the Standing Rock reservation.
The people of Standing Rock rely on the river for drinking water, irrigation and fishing.
A prolonged protest involving people from more than 100 tribal nations, along with veterans and supporters from across the country, began in 2016 during construction of the pipeline. Along with their fear of polluted water, the tribe decried the desecration of sacred sites and the loss of tribal sovereignty; issues that highlighted the tribe long-standing struggle for social justice.
Oil began flowing through the $3.78 billion pipeline last year. It was designed to carry 470,000 barrels of oil a day.
Jodi Gillette of Standing Rock, a former adviser to President Barack Obama on Native American affairs, reminded Marathon shareholders last year of the tribe's rich heritage. While she said she believes the company can change, she said this of Marathon executives: "They are the ones who will have to look their grandchildren in the eye and say they are the ones who continue the abuse of the indigenous people of America even when they had the chance to change."
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surprising defection: greenwash?
https://www.ecowatch.com/bhp-climate-change-2518910663.html
World's Largest Mining Company Breaks With Global Trade Groups That Deny Climate Change
One of the world's largest coal companies is making plans to quit the World Coal Association over a disagreement on climate policies.
British-Australian mining giant BHP Billiton noted in a review of the company's industry associations issued Tuesday that it may end its membership in the international lobbying group and will reconsider its membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce due in part to the U.S. planned withdrawal from the Paris agreement.
BHP's review comes on the heels of mounting shareholder pressure to reconsider its memberships with groups that espouse views contrary to the company's stated values. The report affirmed that BHP believes "the warming of the climate is unequivocal, the human influence is clear and physical impacts are unavoidable" and reasserted the company's support for the Paris agreement.
As reported by the New York Times:
The move highlights the delicate considerations huge mining companies must contend with as they seek to balance profit with social and environmental awareness.
It represents the latest example of a business that is largely built around traditional fossil fuels responding to investor and government concern over climate change. Last week, the oil and gas giant BP said it would spend $200 million to acquire a large stake in a solar power developer, while Norway's Statoil and France's Total have also made investments in renewables.
Though carefully worded, B.H.P.'s report also takes issue with the Trump administration's unilateral exit from the Paris agreement.
"While we won't always agree with our industry associations, we will continue to call out material differences where they exist and we will take action where necessary, as we have done today," Geoff Healy, the company's chief external affairs officer, said in a statement.
For a deeper dive:
New York Times, Reuters, The Guardian, FT, Deutsche Welle, WSJ, Fox Business
For more climate change and clean energy news, you can follow Climate Nexus on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for daily Hot News.
RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB
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seems odd to cave?
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12122017/exxon-climate-risk-disclosure-sec-shareholder-investigation-pressure
Under pressure from investors, prosecutors and global regulators, ExxonMobil Corp. agreed on Monday to strengthen its analysis and disclosure of the risks its core oil business faces from climate change and from government efforts to rein in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.
That will require Exxon to face squarely the implications of reduced oil demand if the world makes good on the pledges of the Paris climate agreement to cut carbon emissions practically to zero fast enough to avoid the worst effects of global warming.
In a one-paragraph filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the oil giant said it would stop resisting motions filed by dissident shareholders seeking this kind of risk disclosure. Over the past few years, more shareholders have sided with the dissidents, who have included descendants of the founding Rockefeller family, faith and social progress groups and important financial institutions. Earlier this year, 62 percent of shareholders voted for Exxon to annually report climate risk.
Specifically, Exxon dropped its opposition to a shareholder proposal filed Nov. 28 by New York's state pension fund. The proposal asks Exxon to analyze how the Paris goal of keeping global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels will affect its business and to assess the financial risks associated with that 2-degree scenario.
"Exxon's decision demonstrates that investors have the power to hold corporations accountable and to compel them to address our very real climate-related concerns," said New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli, who oversees the nation's third-largest public pension plan, with $192 billion in assets.
"We will continue to monitor Exxon's response to climate change as we urge the company, and others in the energy sector, to find ways that they can adapt to the growing lower carbon economy," DiNapoli said.
Exxon told the SEC that it "will seek to issue these disclosures in the near future. These enhancements will include energy demand sensitivities, implications of two degree Celsius scenarios, and positioning for a lower-carbon future."
Shareholders Want More Details
Tim Smith, senior vice president of Boston-based Walden Asset Management, praised Exxon's decision to drop its public opposition to the shareholder request but noted that its SEC statement was short, "unusual" and thin on details about how Exxon would follow through.
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The day before President Trump made his decision to pull the U.S. out of the landmark Paris climate accord, ExxonMobil reluctantly crossed a climate threshold.
A majority of shareholders, over 62 percent, voted in favor of America’s biggest oil company releasing detailed analyses of the risks that climate change poses to its business.
Having previously argued that sufficient information is already being provided, CEO Darren Woods relented far enough to say that Exxon would “take the vote seriously [and] will respond to that feedback and look for opportunities” to communicate. Woods did not, however, agree to produce a requested report.
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/06/08/window-dressing-exxon-reluctantly-crosses-climate-threshold
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1/17 exxon
Avery has served on the United Nations Secretary General's scientific advisory board, which provides advice on science, technology and innovation for sustainable development. She also had been associated with the National Research Council Global Change Research Program Advisory Committee, and advisory committees with NASA, NOAA, and the National Science Foundation.
Over the last two years, Exxon has opposed shareholder resolutions calling for a board member with a scientific and climate change background. The company had urged shareholders to reject the proposals under the leadership of Tillerson, who is poised to be confirmed as secretary of state as soon as next week.
The company argued that its directors should have a "breadth of experience" and not be limited in their scope of expertise.
Although the resolutions received support of just 21 percent of investors in 2105 and 2016, a number of large shareholder organizations have thrown their weight behind them, including CalPERS, which manages California's public employees retirement fund, and State Street Global Advisors, a worldwide investment management company. A similar resolution is up for consideration at the company's annual meeting later this year.
Rev. Mike Crosby and the Province of St. Joseph of the Capuchin Order of friars had championed the resolutions. Crosby said Avery's selection is a sign the company may be more willing to begin accepting the mainstream understanding that climate change is not only happening but will impact the world's consumption of fossil fuels.
"It looks like they (Exxon) are changing their position," he said. "This is a step in what we see as a gradual evolution by Exxon."
Crosby said the company initially refused to even talk when the friars first raised the issue several years ago.
"We weren't getting anywhere with them," he said. "But they have been evolving. The last time we brought it up with them, they seemed more willing to talk."
The election of Avery doesn't necessarily signal a wholesale embrace of climate change science, said Tim Smith, senior vice president of Boston-based Walden Asset Management, which promotes corporate responsibility on behalf of shareholders.
"This is terribly important symbolically; terribly significant for company governance," he said. "We don't know that this is a big shift."
It increases the company's competence in addressing the climate issue, he said.
"This should enrich the climate discussion by the company and hopefully make the company more accountable for the impact of climate."
==
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11012017/exxon-shareholders-climate-change-rex-tillerson
Once again this year, dissident ExxonMobil stockholders have filed several resolutions with the company asking it to be more forthright in addressing the climate crisis.
Submitted months before Exxon's annual meeting in May, by a twist of fate it also helps set the stage for Wednesday, when Rex Tillerson, Exxon's former chief executive and Donald Trump's pick to become secretary of state, appears at a Senate confirmation hearing.
At the hearing, Tillerson's critics are likely to connect the dots between his stance on climate change as the head of the oil giant and how he would approach the problem as the nation's top diplomat, in light of the global climate treaty that Trump has opposed.
And that may mean Tillerson finds himself facing questions about the treaty's goals that shareholders have pressed him about before.
Most of the seven shareholder resolutions filed under Exxon's deadline in recent days resemble those the company vehemently opposed in recent years under Tillerson's leadership.
They ask Exxon to add a board member with environmental expertise; disclose funding of lobbyists and organizations dedicated to influencing climate policy; and to explain in detail how the company might align its business with a low-carbon economy.
Exxon is expected to oppose those resolutions, as it has consistently for more than two decades.
Dismissing one resolution last year, Tillerson told shareholders that confronting climate change had to be balanced against other objectives, like providing energy to the world's poor.It's an argument he has made repeatedly, and can be expected to be repeated in a new setting this week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
"It is a judgment of balance between future climatic events which could prove to be catastrophic but are unknown ... and the more immediate needs of humanity today," Tillerson told shareholders last year.
Over the years, the dissident shareholders have carefully built a troika of recommendations that are meant to box in the company and make it acknowledge the conflicts between business-as-usual and the Paris agreement's goals.
One resolution, offered last year and refiled in essentially the same form by New York State's pension fund managers, calls for Exxon to prepare a stress test of how the company would perform if emissions were limited to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius, a key Paris goal.
A second resolution, filed by Arjuna Capital, a company focused on sustainable investments on behalf of it clients, asks for a report summarizing how the company will adjust. "A transition toward a low carbon economy is occurring and trends to reduce global demand for carbon-based energy are accelerating," it asserts. "A failure to plan for this transition may place investor capital at substantial risk."
A third, also from Arjuna, asks the company to return capital to shareholders instead of investing in development of high-cost oil reserves that may never be exploited because of reduced demand for fossil fuels.
"In a perfect world we would see a scenario where the company admits the problem, communicates its options and then implement those options in transitioning its business models," said Natasha Lamb, Arjuna's director of equity research and shareholder engagement.
At the shareholder meeting last year in Dallas, the open floor debate was dominated by arguments over the climate resolutions. Tillerson took the lead in urging votes against the resolutions.
Exxon's opposition to the shareholder resolutions has put it in a position of dancing around the Paris treaty's goal of keeping global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and striving to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. Any warmer, scientists say, and the risks are intolerable.
However challenging the targets, there is a clear scientific consensus that achieving them means reducing net emissions of greenhouse gases to zero over the coming decades. But Exxon shies away from that conclusion.
"Even among members of the global scientific community, including leading climate change researchers and nonpartisan think tanks, there exists significant disagreement over how to define or reach a 2 degree target," said a letter from an Exxon attorney to the Securities and Exchange Commission spelling out the company's opposition to one resolution.
That attitude, some climate advocates worry, colors the worldview of the man nominated to represent the country's climate policy.
"The key difference between his role as Exxon CEO and role of Secretary of State needs to be focused on what is the best interest of the United States and its people not just on the economic interests of a global energy company," argued Shanna Cleveland, a senior manager at Ceres, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable investing.
Under Tillerson, Exxon continued to be one of the most obstructionist oil companies worldwide when considering climate change mitigation, said Richard Ferlauto, a member of the governing board of 50/50 Climate Project, a nonprofit focused on increasing the climate awareness of publicly traded corporations.
Opposition to shareholder climate resolutions exemplifies that resistance, said Ferlauto, who served four years as deputy director for the SEC's office of Investor Education and Advocacy.
"While it's conjecture to say how he'll operate as Secretary of State, his track record is clear," he said. "ExxonMobil has been the focus of a high number shareholder resolutions relative to climate change. His opposition has been clear."
"When the world sees that opposition, it will understand the U.S. policy going forward for what it is."
Despite the perennial setbacks, dissident shareholders say they are not discouraged.
Several of the resolutions last year, although defeated, drew more support than ever.
Yes votes reached 38 percent for a resolution calling on Exxon to show how the company's business would be affected by international efforts to limit global warming to 2 degrees.
Slightly more than 60 percent of shareholders voting last year approved a resolution to allow stockholders to nominate outsiders for seats on the board, While not strictly a climate resolution, it meant a climate activist could eventually become a director. The proxy access measure was the first Exxon shareholder proposal to be approved since 2006.
That is a signal that a growing number of Exxon shareholders want the company to step up when it comes to climate change, said Tim Smith, senior vice president of Boston-based Walden Asset Management, which promotes corporate responsibility on behalf of shareholders.
Smith said there also is increasing concern about the environmental and societal impacts of climate change.
"It is a very interesting combination," Smith said. "Investors are starting the conversation with different purposes, but end up at the same place: 'We have to be concerned about what Exxon is doing about climate change.' "
Rev. Mike Crosby and the Province of St. Joseph of the Capuchin Order of friars once again are asking that Exxon seat a board member with a climate change background.
It's the third time Crosby and the friars have tried this route. Each of the last two years, the resolution has received a 21 percent favorable vote. But Crosby, who was among the first Exxon shareholders to pressure the company on climate change though resolutions back to the late 1990s, is unbowed.
The company that once ignored and discredited concerns over climate change has slowly become more receptive, he notes.
And Tillerson, for his part, goes before the Senate with his erstwhile employer, whatever its record of performance, acknowledging that the risks of climate change are real and that the Paris agreement is a good first step toward addressing them.
"I think this persistence has contributed to Exxon's evolution," Crosby said. "They see it's not going to go away."
"We're not going away."
PUBLISHED UNDER:
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exxon bust
At its annual meeting in Dallas, Texas, ExxonMobil shareholders rejected a series of resolutionsWednesday calling for climate action, including resolutions backed by CalPERS, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, as well as New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli and the Church of England. Shareholders did pass a measure to let minority shareholders nominate outsiders for seats on the board, raising the possibility that a climate activist could someday become a director at Exxon.
It was the first Exxon annual meeting since a series of revelations that for decades the companycovered up its own scientific findings linking rising carbon emissions to dangerous climate change. At the shareholders meeting, the granddaughter of a former Exxon scientist questioned the CEO of Exxon about the company’s record. We speak to the woman, Anna Kalinsky.
http://ecowatch.com/2016/05/27/granddaughter-exxon-scientist/
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leverage
exxon busted iCN AG
The day would only get worse for the multinational energy firm, as the Securities and Exchange Commission ordered a vote on a shareholder resolution that would require the firm to disclose how climate change—or regulations meant to combat it—would impact the stability of the company’s finances.
Govt securities watchdog orders ExxonMobil shareholder vote on #climate data https://t.co/KfS425w05d #ExxonKnew #divest
— climatehawk1 (@climatehawk1) March 24, 2016
The SEC’s move comes just weeks after an investigation by the Government Accountability Project, which revealed that, for years, Exxon had lied to the SEC in its 10-K filings.
“Exxon has done a masterful job of hedging its bets, both by omission and commission: omitting mere mention for many years, and then grossly understating, the vast array of direct and indirect risks it faces as a result of climate change,” said Climate Science & Policy Watch, a GAP program that promotes governmental integrity in the use of climate science. “Even worse, Exxon has overtly and flagrantly overstated possible financial and economic risks associated with regulating carbon and other GHGs, both here in the U.S. and in nations around the world."
http://www.alternet.org/environment/rockefeller-family-fund-divest-exxonmobil-says-oil-giant-morally-reprehensible
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5/16*
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http://ecowatch.com/2016/05/02/buffett-rejects-climate-change-report/
Warren Buffett‘s Berkshire Hathaway shareholders voted overwhelmingly against a shareholder proposal to create a report citing the climate change risks for its insurance companies.
Buffett, the so-called “Seer of Omaha” for his company’s S&P beating returns, said he doesn’t think climate change creates serious risks for Berkshire’s insurance business and also refused to make a public statement in favor of reducing fossil fuel use.
A study by Asset Owners Disclosure Project (AODP) recently found that nearly half of the world’s top 500 investors are doing nothing to mitigate climate risks in their investments. AODP CEO Julian Polter said pension funds and insurers that ignore climate change were “gambling with the savings and financial security of hundreds of millions of people.”
Warren Buffet's advice to shareholders at annual meeting: Avoid envy and costly fees. https://t.co/4A7q40ezAu
— The Associated Press (@AP) April 30, 2016
For a deeper dive:
News: AP, Reuters, Daily Caller, Bloomberg
Commentary: Christian Science Monitor, Christina Beck analysis; CleanTechnica, James Ayre analysis
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/warren-buffett-climate-change_us_56d36cade4b03260bf773563
huffpo
Warren Buffett doesn't want you to know how his empire is preparing to deal with the disastrous effects of climate change. In fact, he said in a letter released Saturday, he isn't exactly sure this whole "climate change" thing is real, anyway.
In his annual letter to investors in his conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, the billionaire investor fought back against a proposed shareholder resolutiondemanding his insurance subsidiaries measure and disclose the risks that climate change poses to their business and how the company is responding to the threat. Buffett compared fears over climate change to the brouhaha around apocalyptic Y2K predictions.
“It seems highly likely to me that climate change poses a major problem for the planet,” the 85-year-old wrote in the letter, released Saturday morning. “I say ‘highly likely’ rather than ‘certain’ because I have no scientific aptitude and remember well the dire predictions of most ‘experts’ about Y2K.”
Insurance companies take on losses after major weather disasters (think droughts, Hurricane Katrina and other big storms), so it makes sense they'd be concerned about climate change. If that's true, why would Buffett say he's not so sure this is real? Because skepticism is better business.
Buffett isn’t denying climate change, but rather using language climate deniers feel comfortable with and will likely cite in future attempts to derail environmental policy. Climate change affects Buffett's business: He owns a Nevada utility that has fought and won against solar development in that state, and his railroad, Burlington Northern, in large part depends on the demand for coal and oil.
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http://www.desmog.uk/2016/02/26/major-investors-pressure-exxonmobil-consider-climate-impacts
For the first time, in my memory, we are actually seeing oil and gas majors talk about climate change as an existential threat. Today for example the minister for oil and gas for Saudi Arabia, Ali Al-Naimi, actually got up on stage in front of this entire group and said that climate change is more of an existential threat to the industry than any down cycle.”
This is what Shannon Cleveland, head of Ceres’ Carbon Asset Risk Initiative, told DeSmog from Houston where she is attending the premier annual oil industry gathering known as CERAweek.
“That is just a message — that even with things as bad as they were in 2015 — no one was talking about here at CERAweek last year,” Cleveland continued. “I think there is actually an opportunity for this industry to start shifting.”
Ceres is a group that, according to its website, works with investors “to weave sustainable strategies and practices into the fabric and decision-making of companies, investors and other key economic players.”
Another sign of the shift was Al-Naimi saying that, “Solar is definitely going to be the answer to energy’s future.” This hasn’t been the typical messaging at past CERAweek events. However, the question that is critical for addressing climate change is — how far in the future?
Because Al-Naimi also noted that Saudi Arabia is exploring fracking technology to produce oil and gas and promised that, “We will produce it one of these days.” It’s unlikely Al-Naimi will join the “keep it in the ground” movement any time soon.
ExxonMobil Still Fighting Climate Change Action
One of the requests investors are making of oil companies is the testing of portfolios against a scenario where global temperature rise is limited to no more than 2 degrees.
“I was just in a session where Total announced that they are now stress testing their portfolio against two degree scenarios consistent with the climate agreement in the Paris agreement,” Cleveland told DeSmog. “That is something I can’t imagine having happened last year.”
Of course, not everyone appreciates these efforts and ExxonMobil is denying this is necessary.
Which is why a group led by New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli and the Church of England’s investment fund just asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to reject ExxonMobil’s plan to block a shareholder proposal for information on how the company will be impacted by climate policies that would necessarily involve curbing emissions from fossil fuels.
“ExxonMobil risks becoming an outlier among its peers who have publicly supported reining in climate change,” DiNapoli said. “As investors, we need to know how ExxonMobil’s bottom line will be impacted by the global effort to reduce emissions and what the company plans to do about it.”
DiNapoli isn’t just any investor as he controls the $178 billion state pension fund.
ExxonMobil isn’t overly popular with New York elected officials these days as New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is investigating ExxonMobil to determine “whether the country's largest oil and gas company lied to investors about how global warming could hurt its balance sheets and also hid the risks posed by climate change from the public.”
This week, building on Schneiderman’s efforts, http://350.org along with other environmental groups delivered a petition with 81,000 signatures demanding other Attorneys General join with Scheiderman. The petitions were delivered to the the National Association of Attorneys General annual meeting in New York City this week.
Despite this pressure, ExxonMobil has maintained that it doesn’t believe any of its assets will ever be stranded or left in the ground — because apparently what ExxonMobil really wants to do is help poor people around the world raise their living standards as explained on the corporate website:
We believe producing these assets is essential to meeting growing energy demand worldwide, and in preventing consumers – especially those in the least developed and most vulnerable economies – from themselves becoming stranded in the global pursuit of higher living standards and greater economic opportunity.
However, once again ExxonMobil is denying reality as climate change is clearly having a growing negative impact on living standards in many poor communities around the world. The Syrian conflict — which even England’s Prince Charles has attributed to climate change and drought — is one current example.
So as opposed to ExxonMobil’s proposed goal of turning poor people into fossil fuel consumers in the pursuit of higher living standards, the reality is that failure to achieve a two degree scenario means a vast increase in the world’s climate refugee crisis and increased conflict.
“The Paris agreement has fundamentally altered the way nations and businesses think about the financial risks of climate change, yet Exxon is standing still as the world changes around it,” said Shanna Cleveland. “The window is closing for Exxon to adapt for the energy transition that is now underway.”
While it is clear ExxonMobil won’t change willingly, with large investors like New York’s pension system and the Church of England now asking for answers, perhaps ExxonMobil will be forced to join the rest of the world in addressing climate change. ...
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Oil giant ExxonMobilmoved to reject a shareholder proposal calling for the company to assert moral leadership on climate change and pledge to work toward limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius or less.
In a letter to securities regulators, the company said the resolution filed by a faith-based organization is "vague and indefinite." Exxon also said it’s unnecessary for shareholders to consider the proposal at the annual stockholders meeting on May 25 because the company has already taken steps to tamp down global warming. The resolution was filed by the New Jersey-based Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment.
While social responsibility groups have been demanding action on climate change from Exxon for decades, the Tri-State resolution is the first to call on the company to acknowledge moral responsibility. Over the past 25 years, shareholders have submitted 62 climate change-related proposals to Exxon, according to an InsideClimate News review of shareholder resolutions. Of those, 22 were either withdrawn or blocked by the company. None of the remaining 40 got enough votes to pass.
Management often urges the Securities and Exchange Commission to bar shareholder proposals from the proxy statements they publish for annual investor meetings.
Sister Patricia Daly of the Sisters of St. Dominic of Caldwell, N.J., one of the sponsors of the resolution, called Exxon’s move "arrogant and dangerous."
"This challenge demonstrates that ExxonMobil plans to continue to cling to an unsustainable paradigm that severely harms our planet, without reflecting on the moral dimensions of a ‘business as usual’ scenario," she said. "I wonder what management fears will be revealed if they allow this resolution to go to a vote.
"They don’t see the moral imperative," she said. "They are dodging the 2 degrees."
The resolution declares, “We believe that ExxonMobil should assert moral leadership with respect to climate change.” It also calls on Exxon to adopt policies consistent with limiting the average global temperature increase to 2 degrees since the beginning of the Industrial Age and to acknowledge urgency in meeting that goal. The Tri-State Coalition represents nearly 40 Roman Catholic groups with pension funds that hold shares of Exxon.
A spokesman for Exxon declined to comment.The Tri-State proposal was among the **first of seven 2016 shareholder resolutions**to be filed with Exxon addressing climate change.
Exxon asked the SEC to allow the company to dismiss the resolution because it does not spell out exactly what actions Exxon would have to take to comply.
"The Proposal’s request that the company commit to ‘support the goal’ of limiting warming to less than ‘2° C’ is vague and misleading," according to Exxon’s letter to the SEC.
"The meaning and implications of this reference to ‘2° C’ are not defined or explained in the proposal and are likely only understood and appreciated by shareholders with a significant level of knowledge and expertise regarding climate change science and policy," Exxon said in the letter.
The company argued that there is disagreement in the scientific community over how to define or reach a 2-degree target, so it would be impossible for the company to do so.
The goal of holding global warming to 2 degrees or less was embraced by 196 countries during the Paris climate talks last year. The resulting agreement aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which are the largest contributor to global warming.
Exxon also said it has taken numerous steps to reduce the risk of climate change.
"The Company's past and current actions and initiatives compare favorably with the shareholder proposal’s essential objective of having the Company publicly support the goal of addressing climate change risk," according to the Exxon letter.
It cited steps to improve energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions at its own operations and to conduct and support research on new technologies. Exxon said it also has urged governments, private companies and consumers to embrace climate policy solutions.
The sponsors of the proposal said Exxon's objections show that it is out of step with the rest of the industry and the world. Daly said the moral dimensions of climate change are clear and have been articulated in statements from world leaders and faith leaders, including Pope Francis in his environmental encyclical, Laudato Si’.
Robert Brulle, a professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University, said he understands Exxon's argument that the resolution is vague. He said the resolution’s sponsors could have specified how Exxon should contribute to the 2-degree limit, or how much in greenhouse gas emissions Exxon should curtail.
"Without the specificity, you end up with all the varying interpretations," said Brulle, who has studied the funding behind climate change denial campaigns mounted by the fossil fuel industry, including Exxon. "What Exxon is doing is using that discussion to muddle the issues."
As for Exxon's contention that it has already met its responsibility, Brulle called it "laughable."
"They say 'Oh yeah, we've met that goal,'" he said. "But what have they really done?"
Published Under:
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/02022016/exxon-stiff-arms-request-take-moral-responsibility-climate-change
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tied w/ shell
http://www.desmog.uk/2016/01/20/exxonmobil-spent-least-8m-european-lobbying-and-corporate-donations-2014
exxonMobil has spent at least £5.6m($8.08 million) on lobbying the European Commission and in donations to European universities and organisations in 2014 according to the most recent figures available.
A DeSmog UK investigation into the oil giant’s European activities reveals much of this was spent lobbying on energy and environment issues in addition to donations to organisations such as the United Nations Environment Programme and the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.
Last September, *Inside Climate News* revealed that ExxonMobil knew about the impacts of manmade climate change in the 1970s’ and ‘80s yet went on to fund numerous climate denial efforts. This prompted theNew York Attorney General to subpoena ExxonMobil to “determine whether the company lied to the public about the risks of climate change or to investors about how those risks might hurt the oil business.”
And now, the Church of England’s Commissioners (who run its £6.7bn endowment fund) has co-filed a shareholders’ resolution this week with the New York State Common Retirement Fund calling on ExxonMobil to publish an assessment of how its business portfolio would be affected by a 2C target as agreed in the Paris Agreement in December. Together, the group of investors hold more than $1bn in ExxonMobil shares.
So, while the oil giant has been getting a lot of heat in the U.S. for funding climate denial, DeSmog UKasks: what has ExxonMobil been up to in Europe?
EXXONMOBIL 2014 EU SPENDING BREAKDOWN
GRAND TOTAL: At Least£5.6m($8,083,406)
Lobbying:between £3.6m– £3.8m(between€4.75m –€4.99m /$5.2m– $5.5m)
Universities:£264,550 ($374,209)
Public Policy:£87,631($123,957)
Other (ex. health, environment):£1,682,587($2,380,000)
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hope:
divest/shareholder/defector combine? trimtab?
A global coalition of 25 institutional investors with over forty five billion pounds in assets under management is calling on nine major publicly listed companies to review their membership of lobbying groups that seek to undermine EU climate policy.
The investors have written to BHP Billiton, BP, EDF, Glencore, Johnson Matthey, Proctor and Gamble, Rio Tinto, Statoil and Total expressing concern that the companies declared climate policies are undermined by membership of lobby groups with a track record of obstructive lobbying on climate change policy. The move comes as companies have come under increasing pressure to withdraw from regressive lobbying groups, with Unilever leaving Business Europe and BP and Shell exiting ALEC over climate policy.
http://www.alternet.org/environment/ftse-100-firms-pressured-leave-anti-climate-lobbying-groups
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Exxon's early research into climate change was revealed in a 2014 email from a former company scientist that was uncovered by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). It was shared as part of a broader project,The Climate Deception Dossiers [2], published Wednesday, that traces campaigns by fossil fuel companies, including Exxon, to discredit the impact of industry on the planet's warming. The company's early awareness of climate change and willingness to factor it into business decisions starkly contrasts with the path it took a decade later, when it led efforts to cloud public understanding of climate science and delay action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide.
Exxon's research in 1981 was initiated to help corporate planning, according to the email by Leonard S. Bernstein, the former employee. The research apparently was instrumental in Exxon's decision not to develop a major natural gas field in Asia. The field, called Natuna, contains a vast natural gas reservoir but it also contains a sizable amount of carbon dioxide, according to Bernstein.
"If Natuna were developed and its CO2 vented to the atmosphere, it would be the largest point source of CO2 in the world and account for about 1% of projected global CO2 emissions," wrote Bernstein in an email to his son, Neil, a classics professor at Ohio University.
"In the 1980s, Exxon needed to understand the potential for concerns about climate change to lead to regulation that would affect Natuna [the gas field] and other potential projects," Bernstein wrote. "They were well ahead of the rest of industry in this awareness." Neil Bernstein shared his father's email with a colleague who then posted it to the website of the university's Institute for Applied & Professional Ethics.
In the email Bernstein wrote that whatever the public stance of natural resource companies, "internally they make very careful assessments of the potential for regulation, including the scientific basis for those regulations." He added that: "Exxon NEVER denied the potential for humans to impact the climate system. It did question––legitimately, in my opinion––the validity of some of the science."
Usually energy companies vent the carbon dioxide released in drilling fields like Natuna into the air, Bernstein wrote. The email indicates that early research by Exxon into CO2's contribution to climate change apparently was one reason the company put off exploring Natuna. The difficulty and expense of disposing of the carbon dioxide has kept the Natuna project dormant since then, said Gautam Sudhakar, director of global gas at IHS, an industry consultancy.
Ten years after Exxon began its assessment of the Natuna field's potential impact on the atmosphere, the company became a driving force in industry organizations committed to derailing American participation in the 1997 Kyoto protocol, a landmark international treaty that called for developed countries such as the United States to combat global warming by cutting greenhouse gas emissions. At the time those organizations argued that climate science was too uncertain to underpin sweeping efforts to cut emissions. Exxon also became a generous funder of conservative think tanks and scientists, such as Harvard-Smithsonian scientist Willie Soon [3], that sowed public doubt about global warming.
A scientist at Exxon for 20 years until his departure in 1989, Bernstein went to Mobil where he wrote a 1996 primer on climate science for the Global Climate Coalition, an advocacy group for the fossil fuel industry. In it he urged members to focus on scientific uncertainty rather than use arguments popular among climate deniers, such as the effect of solar activity on the climate. Exxon lobbyist and environmental adviser Arthur G. "Randy" Randol III was a key member of the 1998American Petroleum Institute-led "Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan," which determined that[4]"victory will be achieved when those promoting the Kyoto treaty on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality."
In an email, Bernstein declined to comment.
Richard Keil, a spokesman for ExxonMobil, said that Exxon's involvement in groups that sought to slow or halt action on climate change was not a reversal of course from the company's early interest in the issue. Rather, it was an acknowledgement of the uncertainty around much of the science, he said.
"A full reading of Bernstein's email reveals an important point––his assertion that, in the 1980s, we never denied the possible role of human activity as a cause for climate change, and he further makes clear that, at that point in time, there was a great deal of uncertainty and lack of understanding of climate change, even among leading scientists and experts," said Keil, adding that today, Exxon "believes the risk of climate change is clear, and warrants action."
Yet ExxonMobilhas consistently fought off shareholder resolutions [5] to do more on climate change, most recently a proposal to set company-wide standards to cut greenhouse gas emissions. In May, Exxon Chief Executive Rex Tillerson criticized [6] climate models and said humans will adapt to the strains of global warming.
Nancy Cole, UCS's campaign director for climate and energy, said companies such as Exxon need to take a more constructive course. "The deception simply must stop," she said. "It's time for major carbon companies to become part of the solution."
InsideClimate News
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So why, then, does the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), one of the nation's most storied civil rights groups, organizer of the Freedom Rides and the 1963 March on Washington, attack those who want to curb global warming? ExxonMobil, which in 2003 gave CORE $40,000 ($15,000 was earmarked for "global climate outreach"),
would obviously like to avoid any appearance that its products and policies are a slow-moving assault on poor people of color. How better than to turn the accusation around?In that bit of public relations jujitsu, CORE has been most useful. To those familiar with CORE's recent history, its allegiance to ExxonMobil comes as no surprise. In 1968, Roy Innis seized control of CORE and moved the group to the far right. Innis has been accused by founder James Farmer and other black leaders of renting out CORE's historic reputation to corporations like Monsanto and ExxonMobil. (CORE even mounted a counterprotest to environmentalists picketing an ExxonMobil shareholders' meeting.) [...]
Helping CORE form these talking points is its senior policy adviser, Paul Driessen, the author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death, who also works with several other ExxonMobil-funded groups. At a 2004 ExxonMobil shareholders' meeting, Driessen referred to CORE as "one of America's oldest and most respected civil rights organizations" and called for greater funding for the group.
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Exxon's Gamble: 25 Years of Rejecting Shareholder Concerns on Climate Change For 25 years, stockholders have asked Exxon to confront the threat of climate change in all sorts of ways: by investing in renewable energy, cutting harmful emissions, providing carbon risk assessments and adding a board member with climate expertise. Year after year, the oil giant has said no. |
Exxon's 25 Years of 'No': Timeline of Resolutions on Climate Change InsideClimate News compiled a chronology and detailed spreadsheet that examines Exxon's refusal to support dozens of shareholder resolutions on climate change since 1990. |
6/15
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5/15 grist
On May 20, the shareholders of Bunge, one of the biggest farm commodity businesses in the world, will walk into some well-appointed meeting room at the Sofitel in midtown Manhattan to vote on five proposals. The first four votes will be utterly boring to anyone who isn’t deeply absorbed with Bunge’s corporate governance (e.g., appoint Deloitte & Touche as auditor?). But the fifth is unusual: It’s a proposal from shareholders suggesting that the company act decisively to curb deforestation. And so in addition to conducting pro-forma votes on new board members and executive compensation, Bunge shareholders will also hold a referendum on global sustainability.
This proposal asks for the company to “set quantitative, time-bound goals for reducing its supply chain impacts on deforestation and related human rights, and report annually against key performance indicators and metrics that demonstrate progress against these goals.” It suggests that, by failing to adequately account for the problem of deforestation, Bunge is putting its stock value at risk. Bunge’s board recommends that shareholders vote no.
Usually, shareholder activism doesn’t overlap with environmental activism. Usually, activist shareholders launch campaigns when they think a CEO is skimming off too much money for his own compensation, or when they think the corporation would be more successful if it was split in two. But environmental activists have also tried to influence corporations by participating in financial governance. In the early days, activists would just buy a couple shares to gain entrance to a shareholder meeting and urge the company to change from the inside. This tactic didn’t accomplish much: It was clear to everyone involved that the activists were focused on something other than shareholder value, so most other investors didn’t listen.
The activists wanted to stop companies from despoiling nature. The shareholders wanted the company to make money. If capitalism and environmentalism were irreconcilable, the whole story would have simply stopped there. But activists found they could often demonstrate that environmental destruction would, in the long term, undermine profitability. They stopped making moral arguments and started making financial arguments. When they did that, some shareholders started paying attention — especially long-term shareholders. If a business is just looking at the next three months, it makes rational sense for it adopt a smash-and-grab approach. But when a business is focused on the next 20 to 100 years, it has to take care of the place where it does business.
And it turned out that were investors who wanted companies to stop chasing quarterly profits and instead provide the best return on investment over the long run. These investors frequently had power because they were managing massive pension funds. “There are a lot of large asset owners looking at long-term risks instead of just looking at quarter by quarter profits,” said Lucia von Reusner, a shareholder advocate for Green Century Funds, the firm that made the shareholder proposal for Bunge to act more aggressively on deforestation.
Inquiries from shareholders about environmental risks helped spur Kellogg’s, ConAgra, Smuckers, Safeway, General Mills, and Target to set deforestation policies. Early this year, Green Century began working with Archer Daniels Midland, and that got the attention of the New York State comptroller’s office, which manages the third largest public pension fund in the nation. The New York State Common Retirement Fund and Green Century filed a shareholder proposal with ADM. But, to the surprise of many (including, I hear, many at ADM Bunge), the company cut off any potential shareholder action at the pass by setting what is perhaps the most sweeping deforestation commitment on record.
Bunge has responded in a different way. Its board said that it was already working on deforestation: “The Board believes that the Company’s existing and planned efforts provide a more focused and effective path forward than that outlined in the proposal,” it wrote in a proxy statement. Bunge already has no-deforestation policies for palm oil, and for soy in the Brazilian Amazon. But what about soy outside the Brazilian Amazon? And what about every other crop besides palm oil and soy?
In an email response to my questions, Stewart Lindsay, Bunge’s director of global corporate affairs, wrote:
We believe in the principle that deforestation should be reduced and ultimately eliminated from agricultural supply chains. Adopting a policy that goes beyond our commitment to zero deforestation in the Amazon and our zero deforestation palm oil policy is really a question of the how and when of implementation. These are challenging issues, but we’re tackling them actively and at the highest levels of the company, so stay tuned. In the meantime, we’re working to map our palm supply chain, with the help of third parties, so we can establish a realistic timeline for 100% implementation of our policy. We hope to have a clear picture on this soon.
Lindsay is saying, look, we’re on board, we just need time to find a realistic path.There is a real danger that these commitments will fall apart if companies don’t fully understand the difficulty in making good on their pledges. It’s important that companies make commitments that they can actually achieve. But this shouldn’t stop them from setting benchmarks. To get anything done in a large organization, you need to set a goal.
“Most companies set policy first, then devote resources to it,” von Reusner said. These things take money, along with teams of employees working full time. Companies are a lot more likely to devote real resources to sustainability after their leaders set a goal and a deadline.
In the last few years, a slew of international agribusiness corporations have madecommitments that — if realized — would slam the brakes on humanity’s sprawl into wild lands. The new challenge is to ensure that companies live up to their promises.
Shareholder activism is well positioned to do this because, instead of exacting concessions through battle, it’s a strategy of ongoing engagement. In this upcoming Bunge vote, for instance, Green Capital doesn’t have a partner like the New York Pension Fund pushing things forward. But von Reusner told me she has had conversations with several of Bunge’s large shareholders, and they are interested in seeing the company move forward quickly to stop deforestation. Regardless of which way the vote goes on May 20, if the sustainability push isn’t progressing as planned, the shareholders will be there to ask why.
===
Altria (Phillip Morris)
PETA investigation of Covance Laboratories, Vienna, VA. - April 2004 - March 2005
In 2005, PETA filed a shareholder resolution at Altria requesting they cease animal testing of of tobacco products. PETA pointed out that animals respond very differently from humans to exposure to tobacco smoke. After decades of of testing, animals do not develop lung cancer; even when hooked up around-the-clock to smoke ventilation machines. Claiming ownership of 114 shares of common stock, PETA submitted a shareholder proposal to eliminate animal testing for the company's tobacco products. Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have placed limits or bans on the testing of tobacco products on animals. A PETA representative attended Altria]´s April 28, 2005, annual meeting in East Hanover, New Jersey on April 28, 2005 to present the resolution, which failed to pass.[10] The Altria Group is a client of Covance Laboratories. [11]
berman
===
not exactly a revolt?
*For Release:February 28, 2014
Contact:Judy Kent at (703) 759-7476 or jkent@nationalcenter.org or David Almasi at (202) 543-4110 x11 or (703) 568-4727 (text enabled) or dalmasi@nationalcenter.org*
Tim Cook to Apple Investors: Drop Dead
Apple CEO Tim Cook tells Investors Who Care More About Return on Investment than Climate Change: Your Money is No Longer Welcome
As Board Member Al Gore Cheers the Tech Giant's Dedication to Environmental Activism, Investors Left to Wonder Just How Much Shareholder Value is Being Destroyed in Efforts to Combat "Climate Change"
Free-Market Activist Presents Shareholder Resolution to Computer Giant Apple Calling for Consumer Transparency on Environmental Issues; Company Balks
Cupertino, CA / Washington, D.C. - At today's annual meeting of Apple shareholders in Cupertino, California, Apple CEO Tim Cook informed investors that are primarily concerned with making reasonable economic returns that their money is no longer welcome.
The message came in response to the National Center for Public Policy Research's shareholder resolution asking the tech giant to be transparent about its environmental activism and a question from the National Center about the company's environmental initiatives.
==
DeSmogBlog [1] / By Sharon Kelly [2]
Responding to Investor Pressure, ExxonMobil Agrees to Disclose Fracking Risks
April 7, 2014 |
ExxonMobil, the nation's largest oil and gas company, will begin disclosing risks associated with shale drilling and fracking to investors, in response to a long-running campaign by a coalition of shareholders.
In February, the groups of investors in a handful of major oil and gas companies including Exxon, Chevron and EOG Resources, demanded [3]for the fifth year in a row more information from companies about the risks associated with fracking. The motion won the support of over 30 percent of Exxon shareholders — an unusually strong showing for a shareholder resolution.
On Thursday, the investors’ coalition announced that Exxon was the first company to agree to disclose risks. The company will publish a report by September that will describe fracking’s potential harm to air quality, water and roads, as well as risks associated with the chemicals used. Exxon agreed to follow criteria identified in a 2013 report, cited by the coalition and called Disclosing the Facts: Transparency and Risk in Hydraulic Fracturing Operations [4], in which Exxon received a failing grade for its transparency.
“We have seen the significant risks that come from hydraulic fracturing activities,” said New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer, custodian and investment advisor for the New York City Pension Funds’ $144 billion in assets, including $1.02 billion in ExxonMobil stock. “Corporate transparency in this arena is truly necessary for assessing risk and ensuring that all stakeholders have the information they need to make informed decisions.”
However, Exxon’s first report will not disclose data on methane leaks – information that shareholders argued strongly should be made public. Natural gas is primarily made of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that has climate changing effects over 80 times more powerful [5] than carbon dioxide during the first two decades after it escapes to the Earth’s atmosphere.
Some environmentalists question whether Exxon's report will represent much of a step forward. Bloomberg reported [6] that much of the company’s disclosures “will be comprised of data and analyses Exxon has published in publicly available filings or the corporate website,” citing an interview with Exxon spokesperson Alan Jeffers.
Shareholder groups say they will vigorously monitor the quality of Exxon’s report. “It does feel like Exxon is changing the way it's doing business,” Danielle Fugere, president of shareholder coalition member As You Sow, told the Wall Street Journal [7], adding that if Exxon’s disclosures are incomplete, “we did reserve our right to bring a resolution next year.”
Researchers have long criticized the quality of the data the oil and gas industry voluntarily makes public. After intense pressure from Congress, environmentalist and the media, the oil and gas industry published a website called FracFocus that provides information on chemicals used by the industry and ostensibly represented a step towards transparency. But a Harvard Law School assessment [8] last year of the website concluded that the site has “serious flaws,” is not vetted, and should not be relied upon by the government or the public.
Still, Thursday’s move represents a major shift in Exxon’s approach to talking about risks. In 2011, in response to investor complaints that the company failed to supply sufficient information about fracking risks, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson flatly responded “You’re just wrong.”
Mr. Tillerson, it should be noted, has first-hand experience with the risks associated with the shale gas boom. In Februrary, he made headlines [9] for joining a lawsuit opposing the unsightly expansion of his own industry’s infrastructure into his wealthy Bartonville, TX neighborhood, citing the “noise nuisance and traffic hazards” as a possible threat to property values.
Energy industry consultants have long warned the drilling industry against a strategy that downplays the hazards of oil and gas extraction. For years, the industry contended [10] that there were no documented cases where fracking contaminated groundwater, despite significant proof [10] to the contrary.
“The public is skeptical of anything we say,” Tisha Conoly-Schuller, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Colorado Oil & Gas Association warned [11]executives gathered at a shale industry conference in Colorado in 2011. Indeed, 49% of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center opposed fracking in September 2013, a sharp spike from the 38% opposed in March of that year.
Exxon is also changing its tone on the broader risks associated with climate change. This week, Exxon also released a report [12] delving into the potential concerns that climate change poses for the company’s investors and how the company plans to manage those risks. That report [13], issued on Monday, was also the result of shareholder activism by As You Sow.
The jury is out on whether Exxon's recently announced report is a publicity stunt or an actual reckoning with the need for public disclosure of risks.
“We understand people have concerns. This activity (fracking) is somewhat new and not understood in some parts of the country,” Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers told Reuters [14]. “People want more information and the more they know, the better.”
See more stories tagged with:
fracking [15],
hydrofracking [16],
exxon [17]
---
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/environment/responding-investor-pressure-exxonmobil-agrees-disclose-fracking-risks
==
FRACKING
A coalition of investors called out five oil and gas companies for failing to measure or reduce risks associated with fracking on Tuesday, singling out companies both large and small for how they’ve handled the myriad risks associated with shale oil and gas extraction.
Shareholders in five companies —ExxonMobil, Chevron, EOG Resources, Occidental Petroleum and Pioneer Resources — filed resolutions [1] objecting to the ways that the companies describe the risks of hydraulic fracturing and their failures to reduce the environmental and social impacts of fracking.
"The damaging impacts of hydraulic fracturing on air, water, and local communities have made the public understandably nervous and resistant to permitting this controversial industrial activity," said Leslie Samuelrich, President of Green Century Capital Management, which together with the New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, filed the resolution at EOG Resources.
"Companies that fail to demonstrate a public commitment to identifying and mitigating their impacts will fail to earn the public trust,” she added, “and may put shareholder value at risk."
Four of the five companies -- ExxonMobil, Chevron, EOG Resources, and Occidental Petroleum -- received failing scores in a recent report [2] that examined how companies disclosed the impact of fossil fuel extraction and graded their efforts to mitigate risks. Disclosing the Facts: Transparency and Risk in Hydraulic Fracturing Operations focused on 24 companies that use fracking, assessing the ways each handled toxic chemicals, water and waste, air emissions, community impacts, and governance. EOG Resources received a score of 6 out of 32, Chevron a score of 3, ExxonMobil and Occidental Petroleum each got a score of just 2.
That has some investors, including those overseeing New York City’s pension fund, worried.
"Rapid advances in hydraulic fracturing have propelled the technology ahead of the science,” said New York City Comptroller [3] Scott M. Stringer, who filed the resolution at ExxonMobil together with As You Sow [4], “placing communities and the companies themselves at risk"
The coalition includes two of the world’s largest institutional investors. As comptroller, Mr. Stringer is custodian and investment advisor for the pensions of New York’s teachers, police and other employees, which wield a total of $144 billion in assets.
The coalition also included New York State’s Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli, whose office is the trustee [5] for $160.7 billion in retirement funds, along with investment advisors Green Century Capital Management, which also manages mutual funds; the non-profit As You Sow; The Investor Environmental Health Network [6]; and The Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia [7].
Since 2009, institutional investors have called for oil and gas companies to ratchet up the ways they disclosure their risk management practices to shareholders, and by proxy, the public. For the fifth consecutive year, ExxonMobil received a shareholder proposal, filed by As You Sow and the New York City pension funds.
Although the resolutions have yet to reach a full majority at shareholder meetings, they’ve received broad support in past years, sending an unusually strong message to company management. Last year, 41.7% of shareholders voted in favor [8] of the Pioneer Resources resolution, and resolutions at Chevron and Exxon’s received roughly 30 percent support.
“Scoring a ‘yes’ vote over 10% is a noteworthy achievement,” said journalist Leon Kaye in a 2011 column [9] on that year’s resolutions, “breaking 20% is especially impressive.”
The list of companies the investors focused on is noteworthy in part because it includes oil companies both large and small. ExxonMobil, the groups noted, scored particularly low on reported management of toxic chemicals, water and waste, and air emissions.
Fracking advocates have at times argued that the real risks of fracking come from the smaller wildcat drillers, which they say have weaker safety cultures and less on the line than the largest oil and gas companies.
Indeed, an investigative report [10] by the Wall Street Journal last year found that the largest oil and gas companies were less likely to be cited for breaking environmental laws in Pennsylvania than their mid-size and small private competitors. But that report also noted the difficulties of drawing conclusions from the ways that environmental laws are enforced, explaining, for example, that sometimes one citation is issued for a variety of violations.
The findings of the “Disclosing the Facts” report suggest that majors can sometimes have track records as bad or worse than smaller operators.
The shareholder resolutions aim to extract more information from oil and gas companies about the risks of fracking. For example, natural gas itself is largely made of the powerful greenhouse gas, methane, and methane leaks, scientists say [11], could make the climate change impact [12] of the current natural gas boom worse than burning coal.
Broader concerns about the risks posed by all fossil fuels have also fueled a growing fossil fuel divestment movement.
Across the U.S., state pensions, universities, religious groups and other institutional investors have been asked to stop to investing in major coal, oil and gas companies out of concern over climate change. Dozens have agreed [13].
On January 30th, 17 major philanthropies announced they had signed a divestment pledge. The philanthropies signed a pledge [14] to“[c]ommit to a timetable and process, commensurate with the pace of climate change, for eliminating all fossil fuels from your investment portfolios,” except to retain stakes for shareholder activism, and to invest instead in renewable and other “clean” technologies.
The threat posed by climate change has ecologists and economists alarmed. On Tuesday, a paper [14] published in the presitigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers at the University of Southamption concluded that coastal regions alone could face damages of up to $1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (in other words, one million dollars times a billion) per year from storm surges by the end of this century, if present patterns continue.
These sorts of numbers have started to turn economists’ heads.
“In corporate boardrooms and the offices of CEOs, climate change is a real and present danger,” wrote the World Bank in a Jan. 23 communiqué [15]. “Rising sea levels and more intense storms put their infrastructure at risk, and the costs will only get worse.”
Awareness of climate change is clearly growing. The question is whether companies will begin to address the true cause: our dependence on fossil fuels like natural gas, oil and coal and our failure to move fast enough to adopt renewables. It's just that simple.
The recent shareholder actions show that more business leaders have begun to confront this reality. But will policy makers follow?
Photo Credit: Arrow Down [16], via Shutterstock
Tags:
Chevron Corporation (nyse:cvx) [18]
EOG Resources (NYSE: EOG) [19]
Occidental Petroleum [20]
Pioneer Resources [21]
activist investor [23]
fracking [24]
hydraulic fracturing [25]
risks [26]
disclosure [27]
undisclosed risks [28]
mitigate [29]
Failure [30]
shale oil [31]
shale gas [32]
Green Century Capital Management [33]
New York State Comptroller [34]
Thomas DiNapoli [35]
Scott M. Stringer [36]
New York City Comptroller [37]
pensions [38]
NYC [39]
police [40]
teachers [41]
assets [42]
as you sow [43]
The Investor Environmental Health Netword [44]
The Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia [45]
risk management [48]
votes [50]
support [51]
wildcat drillers [52]
majors [53]
private oil and gas companies [54]
small oil and gas companies [55]
methane leaks [56]
global warming [57]
climate change [58]
costs [59]
$1 quadrillion [60]
sea level rise [61]
storm surge [62]
philathrophies [63]
divestment [64]
350.org [66]
Divest-Invest [67]
World Bank [68]
climate change costs [69]
businesses [70]
capitalists [71]
Read more: Risks of Fracking Boom Draw Renewed Attention from Investors [72]
---
Source URL: http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/02/04/risks-fracking-boom-draw-renewed-attention-investors
Links:
[1] http://"The damaging impacts of hydraulic fracturing on air, water, and local communities have made the public understandably nervous and resistant to permitting this controversial industrial activity," said Leslie Samuelrich,
[2] http://disclosingthefacts.org/
[3] http://comptroller.nyc.gov/office-of-the-comptroller/about-scott-stringer/
[4] http://www.asyousow.org/
[5] https://www.osc.state.ny.us/about/response.htm
[6] http://www.iehn.org/home.php
[7] http://www.osfphila.org/
[8] http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/amall/new_shareholder_resolutions_de.html
[9] http://http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/06/shareholder-resolutions-fracking-gain-traction/
[10] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324582804578346741120261384
[11] http://www.desmogblog.com/2013/10/14/flaws-university-texas-methane-study-draw-criticism-scientists
[12] http://www.technologyreview.com/view/418490/natural-gas-may-be-worse-for-the-planet-than-coal/
[13] http://gofossilfree.org/commitments/
[14] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140204131549.htm
[15] http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2014/01/23/davos-world-bank-president-carbon-pricing
[16] http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-103093133/stock-photo-arrow-down-a-d-people-is-standing-in-the-arrow-above.html?src=f2qh9b4sNbnr4PodouI3uw-1-64
[17] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15236
[18] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/4101
[19] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15237
[20] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/5978
[21] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/13794
[22] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15238
[23] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15239
[24] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/5133
[25] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/5137
[26] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/12099
[27] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/7466
[28] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15240
[29] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15241
[30] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/11475
[31] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/7277
[32] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/5565
[33] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15242
[34] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15243
[35] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/7068
[36] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15244
[37] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15245
[38] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15246
[39] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/7807
[40] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/14092
[41] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/4988
[42] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15247
[43] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/1262
[44] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15248
[45] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15249
[46] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/14740
[47] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15250
[48] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15251
[49] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15252
[50] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15253
[51] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15254
[52] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15255
[53] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15256
[54] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15257
[55] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15258
[56] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/13396
[57] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/913
[58] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/939
[59] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/11450
[60] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15259
[61] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/2207
[62] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15070
[63] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15260
[64] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/11788
[65] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15261
[66] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/4291
[67] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15262
[68] http://www.desmogblog.com/tags/world-bank
[69] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15263
[70] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15264
[71] http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15265
[72]http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/02/04/risks-fracking-boom-draw-renewed-attention-investors
===
Wealth: Li Ka-shing owns stock in Cheung Kong and Hutchison Whampoa (HW). Through HW, Li is the
world’s largest operator of container terminals in what is now the region through which almost all
manufacturing originates for exporting goods across oceans. He is also the world’s largest health and beauty
retailer (by number of outlets), a real estate developer and a major supplier of electricity to Hong Kong. Li is
a majority shareholder in Husky Energy, a Canadian oil firm that recently announced its third oil discovery in
the South China Sea.16Husky Energy is in a joint-venture with BP to develop the Sunrise Oil Sands Project in
Alberta, Canada (which is proceeding despite BP shareholder concerns over its environmental impact).17
Power Networks: Li’s powerful allies include Lee Shau Kee of the Henderson Land Development, New
World Development’s Cheng Yu-tung, casino and property magnate Stanley Ho, the Kwok family of Sun
Hung Kai Properties, and Henry Fok Ying-tung. Li is regarded as one of Asia’s most generous
philanthropists, having donated more than $1.4 billion to charity and other various causes.18 Beneficiaries
include the University of California at Berkeley, which received $40 million from Li to build the Li Ka-shing
Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences, a new biosciences facility set to be completed in 2011. Li also has
==
bad news; http://www.propublica.org/thetrade/item/ixnay-on-say-on-pay
==
41 Years of Faithful Investments in People and Planet http://www.iccr.org/
TheInterfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility is the pioneer coalition of active shareowners who view the management of their investments as a catalyst to promote justice and sustainability in the world. To learn more about our history and current initiatives, visit our About Us page.
==
Shareholder Vote a Loud Signal to Va. Utility on Climate Concerns
Virginia resident Ruth McElroy Amundsen has been using shareholder activism at Dominion Resources Inc., Virginia's largest emitter of greenhouse gases to spur action on climate change.
She has helped spark a growing movement to pressure Dominion to respond to global warming concerns. Last month, shareholders representing nearly a quarter of Dominion's shares voted "yes" on a proposal to require the utility to report to investors on the financial risks that climate change poses to its business.
That wasn't enough to pass the resolution, but it was by far the highest number of "yes" votes ever cast for a climate resolution to Dominion. It was a surprising result, the activists say, because the company has been particularly resistant to climate and renewable energy policies.
===
crypto: Milloy
The Free Enterprise Action Fund is a mutual fund set up by Steven Milloy and Thomas J. Borelli.[1] Milloy is a climate skeptic and has been a Fox News commentator and a paid advocate for Phillip Morris, ExxonMobil and other corporations. He is the founder of JunkScience.com. Borelli was formerly a tobacco scientist at Phillip Morrisand is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research. The Free Enterprise Action Fund aims to counter the trend by corporations to embrace corporate social responsibility and campaigns by activist groups seeking to shift corporate social and environmental policy.
On its website it states that the group aimed "to keep businesses focused on business rather than activist-defined CSR, the Fund aims to promote more generally our system of free enterprise. The Fund will direct advocacy and education efforts at corporate managements, institutional shareholders, the media and the public."
In the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change organized by the Heartland Institute, Milloy stated that the Fund aims to "be a problem for managements and shareholders", and that he and Borelli "primarily work through shareholder proposals" to "get the shareholders and CEOs to think about what they're doing". He also stated, "We have filed numerous shareholder proposals with companies in the US **:{Climate Action Partnership}:**".[2]
===
http://www.propublica.org/thetrade/item/why-the-shareholder-rescue-never-comes
==
chevron 2013 may ;
San Ramon, CA – Today, more than 150 protested at Chevron's annual shareholder meeting, joining together a unique group of union members, shareholders and community leaders. Every year, Chevron faces opposition at its shareholder meeting, but today's protest drew a larger and more diverse crowd galvanized by the oil giant's year of legal problems, oil spills and fines for reckless business practices.
"CEO Watson's fraudulent omission of the current liabilities the company is facing in Brazil, Ecuador and Nigeria once again highlights his gross negligence when it comes to worker safety, environmental health and human rights. This was reflected in the record high votes for the resolution calling for Watson to be removed as chair of the board," said Ginger Cassady, Change Chevron Campaign Director for Rainforest Action Network.
Chevron is facing more than $43 billion in actual and potential fines: $22 billion for oil spills off the coast of Brazil, $18 billion for oil contamination in Ecuador, $3 million for gas explosions off the coast of Nigeria, and $27 million for tax-dodging in Richmond.
João Antonio de Moraes, National Coordinator of the United Federation of Oil Workers in Brazil, the country's largest union, was denied access to the meeting based on a supposed paperwork error: "I traveled across the globe to call on Chevron to increase the safety of its oil rigs and refineries. Being refused access to the meeting underscores the lack of respect Chevron has for the communities where it operates. Chevron's neglect for worker safety and the environment from Brazil to Ecuador, Nigeria to California will not go unanswered."
The United Federation of Oil Workers filed suit in March to demand the cancelation of all Chevron oil and gas concession contracts in Brazil. Two representatives with the United Steelworkers were also blocked from entering the meeting.
Seven shareholder resolutions were presented to address Chevron's risky operations, including a call for the separation of CEO and chairman that received 38 percent of the vote (double its received in previous years). New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli joined with 39 other investors, with a combined total of $580 billion in assets under management, called on Chevron to settle its two-decade-long legal battle in Ecuador.
"Chevron needs to put its pants on, start acting like a grown up and accept responsibility for its mess in Ecuador," Luz Trinidad Andrea Cusangua, plaintiff in the Ecuador case, said to CEO Watson.
The protest included representatives of the United Steelworkers, including workers at Chevron's Richmond refinery; the lead plaintiffs in the Ecuador case; leaders from Nigeria and Angola; local advocates from Richmond; and members of the True Cost of Chevron Network.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Shareholder rebellion occurs when the owners of a corporation work to throw out management or oppose their decisions. Shareholder rebellion may occur at a corporate annual meeting or through a proxy battle. Shareholders may also threaten to collapse a firm's stock price through concentrated selling.[1] In 1998, the Rockefeller family led a shareholder revolt against Exxon over its climate change policy.[2] In 2005, Michael Eisner retired after Walt Disney's nephew, Roy Disney, led a shareholder revolt, claiming Eisner was a micromanager who had caused a creative brain drain.[3] In 2010, British Petroleum[4] and Shell faced a shareholder revolt over its Canadian tar sands policy.[5]
Recently, shareholder rebellions have occurred over the issue of executive compensation at Cable and Wireless[6] and Shell;[7] Shell in response unveiled a plan to curb executive compensation and bonuses.[8] According to some analysts, institutional shareholders have been lax about holding management accountable because they were concentrating on picking correct stocks rather than protecting their interests in the stocks they owned.[9] With many firms showing poor performance, shareholder revolts are becoming more common.[10]
See also
References
- ^ John C. Coffee, Jr. (Oct., 1991), Liquidity versus Control: The Institutional Investor as Corporate Monitor 91 (6), Columbia Law Review, pp. 1277–1368, JSTOR 1123064
- ^ Clark, Andrew (2008-05-19). "Exxon facing shareholder revolt over approach to climate change". The Guardian (London).
- ^ Lubove, Seth; Fixmer, Andy (2010-03-13). "Brain-eating zombies invade Disney in Iger plan to win boy fans". The Seattle Times.
- ^ http://priceofoil.org/2010/02/08/now-bp-faces-shareholder-revolt-over-tar-sands/
- ^ MacAlister, Terry (2010-01-18). "Shell faces shareholder revolt over Canadian tar sands project". The Guardian (London).
- ^ Wachman, Richard (2010-03-11). "Cable & Wireless facing shareholder revolt over executive pay". The Guardian (London).
- ^ "Shell Shareholder 'Rebellion' Leads To New Limits On Executive Pay, Bonuses". Huffington Post. 2010-02-16.
- ^ http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Shell-unveils-plans-to-curb-apf-853987459.html?x=0
- ^ "Time for a shareholder revolt". Reuters. 2009-10-27.
- ^ Davey, Jenny; Ashton, James (2009-05-10). "To arms investors Its a shareholder revolt". The Times (London).
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B CORP:
Corporate Social Responsibility
Taking The Road Less Traveled - Illinois Registers the First Benefit Corporations
CSRwire - Wed, 01/30/2013 - 7:15pm
The Road Less Traveled® is proud to announce that on January 2, 2013, became the first Benefit Corporations in Illinois. Gathered at the James R. Thompson Center fourteen companies took the necessary steps to bring thought and conscience to the business economy in Illinois.
On its first day of legislation, with Public Act 97-0885 RLT became Illinois first Benefit Corporation. The legislation was sponsored by Senator Michael Frerichs and Representative Sara Feigenholtz. “Since our inception 22 years ago, The Road Less Traveled® has been a business committed to the fundamental philosophy of ‘do no harm’ in business and throughout the world. When we left the corporate world over two decades ago, we were inspired to build a company that, at the end of the day we could feel good about. We were young, passionate, and determined to make a difference. Thousands of students have traveled with us to dozens of countries around the globe with The Road Less Traveled® forging new roads through social and environmental service and creating change as stewards in the world.” said Donna Stein, Co-Founder, of The Road Less Traveled®.
Benefit corporations enjoy legal protection to create value for society, not just shareholders, while meeting higher standards of accountability and transparency. Current law requires corporations to prioritize the financial interests of shareholders over the interests of workers, communities, and the environment. This legislation is a deliberate effort to change the nature of business by changing corporate law.
Benefit corporations are a new kind of corporation legally required to: 1) have a corporate purpose to create a material positive impact on society and the environment; 2) expand fiduciary duty to require consideration of the interests of workers, community and the environment; and 3) publicly report annually on its overall social and environmental performance using a comprehensive, credible, independent, and transparent third party standard. This offers business more freedom in defining success and provides legal protection for those looking to pursue a corporate purpose other than maximizing profits for shareholders.
The thousands of students who have traveled on The Road Less Traveled® will be leading the charge into the future with the B Corp. Donna-Reece Stein says, “They have seen the world, and the beauty of the people and the far off places. They will be the ones demanding that those they work for, and with, conduct their businesses with thought and conscience. This has always been our ultimate work and dream – for Road Less Traveled® students to see and believe in themselves and their individual and collective abilities to impact and shape our world and the future of the 21st century. Our hope is that they will create a future for their children and their children's children that ensures businesses are purpose driven and conducted with thought and conscience. Our hope is that B Corporation will be supported and embraced by all and will give people a choice in how and where they choose to spend their time and money.” http://climate.society.gmu.edu/aggregator/categories/3%3Fpag?page=35 looks legit
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[CITATION] Strategic corporate social responsibility: Stakeholders in a global environment
WB Werther Jr, D Chandler - 2010 - SAGE Publications, Incorporated
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**Corporate Responsibility** - Chevron.com
www.chevron.com/
Learn about Chevron's Dedication to Local Communities & the Environment
===
crypto: Milloy
Massey energy, Do the Math 350 mckibben apartheid
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The Free Enterprise Action Fund is a mutual fund set up by Steven Milloy and Thomas J. Borelli.[1] Milloy is a climate skeptic and has been a Fox News commentator and a paid advocate for Phillip Morris, ExxonMobil and other corporations. He is the founder of JunkScience.com. Borelli was formerly a tobacco scientist at Phillip Morrisand is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research. The Free Enterprise Action Fund aims to counter the trend by corporations to embrace corporate social responsibility and campaigns by activist groups seeking to shift corporate social and environmental policy.
On its website it states that the group aimed "to keep businesses focused on business rather than activist-defined CSR, the Fund aims to promote more generally our system of free enterprise. The Fund will direct advocacy and education efforts at corporate managements, institutional shareholders, the media and the public."
In the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change organized by the Heartland Institute, Milloy stated that the Fund aims to "be a problem for managements and shareholders", and that he and Borelli "primarily work through shareholder proposals" to "get the shareholders and CEOs to think about what they're doing". He also stated, "We have filed numerous shareholder proposals with companies in the US Climate Action Partnership".[2]
During 2005, the Fund underperformed the S&P 500 index by more than 50%, while rewarding its managers with above-average management fees of 2%.
Contents [hide] |
Finances
According to a January 26, 2006 report in the Chicago Tribune, "The fund's advocacy stance boils down to opposing many of the things supported by traditional 'social investment funds,' because issues like global warming or corporate governance distract business from its real role of operating in the best interests of shareholders." However, its performance as an investment has been less than stellar.
The Tribune called it the "Stupid Investment of the Week ... Strip away the rhetoric, and you're getting a very expensive, underperforming index fund, while Milloy and partner Thomas Borelli get a platform for raising their pet issues. ... An expense ratio capped at 2 percent--ridiculously high for a portfolio of corporate giants--makes stock market returns unrealistic. From inception on March 1 of last year through Dec. 31, Free Enterprise Action returned 2.32 percent; the S&P 500 returned 4.72 percent. That's ugly."[3]
In 2006, the Independent noted that: "The fund has about $6m (£4m) under management at the moment but claims to be growing fast" and "is supported by a network of right-wing think-tanks including the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute."[4] [NB ^stratfor ^was ^going ^into ^investment ^biz?
^
Personnel
Contact details
Free Enterprise Action Fund
P.O. Box 182490
Columbus, OH 43218-2490
Phone: 301-258-2852
Email: media AT freeenterpriseactionfund.com
Web: http://www.freeenterpriseactionfund.com
Other SourceWatch resources
Sources
- ↑ Kate Sheppard, "Thank You for Global Warming," Mother Jones, November 22, 2010
- ↑ "How to Stop Climate Change Legislation in the US", Steven Milloy, March 2008.
- ↑ http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0601260062jan26,1,7543219.story
- ↑ http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article356920.ece
External links
- Larry Kudlow, "Steven Milloy of the Free Enterprise Action Fund discusses his organization's work against corporate social responsibility", Kudlow & Company, CNBC, March 28, 2005.
- Kathleen Rhodes, "Free Enterprise Mutual Fund Seeks to Counter Leftist Influence", CNSNews.com, March 28, 2005.
- "Free Enterprise Action Fund Requests Audit Committee Review of:{ JP Morgan Chase Capitulation to Social Activist Demands:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:: Action Fund Management, LLC, the investment adviser to the Free Enterprise Action Fund, called for the Audit Committee review", Media Release, April 26, 2005.
- Free Enterprise Action Fund, "Free Enterprise Action Fund Prospectus and Privacy Policy", May 1, 2005.
- Chuck Jaffe, "When Making Money Takes Back Seat to Advocacy," Chicago Tribune, January 26, 2006.
- Simon English, "Tell Lord Browne that we are coming," The Independent (UK), April 10, 2006.
- Amity Shlaes, "Mr. Immelt, Explain Yourself, Fund Says", Bloomberg.com, April 5, 2006.
- Daniel Gross, "Thank You for Investing: A Very Curious Right-Wing Mutal Fund," Slate.com, May 4, 2006.
Published: 10 April 2006
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John D. Rockefeller founded the core business that is now ExxonMobil, creating a family fortune worth billions of dollars. A report in the Guardian.co.uk yesterday says that family fortune is now leading a “shareholder revolt” against Exxon, calling for a shake-up in leadership at the world’s largest, and some might argue least favorite, oil company (if anyone really has a “favorite” oil company).
At the heart of the growing investor dissatisfaction is Exxon’s intransigence in its position on climate change. While other large oil companies are committing large scale investment in alternative energy Exxon remains committed to the idea that such technology is not economically viable.
The Rockefeller family has sponsored four shareholder resolutions demanding changes in Exxon’s governance. One of the resolutions is for CEO Rex Tillerson to step down from his role as chairman to allow an outsider to sit on the board and bring a fresh perspective – get a real debate going on the board and perhaps bring about a change of direction.
In the UK, the resolution calling for an independent board chairman is backed by F&C Asset Management, Morley Fund Management, the Co-Operative Insurance Society, and the West Midlands Pension Fund.
In the U.S. advisory firms RiskMetrics, Glass Lewis, and Proxy Governance all urge fund managers to back the resolution.
The growing support for the resolution and dissatisfaction from investors may lead to an embarrassing defeat for ExxonMobile at its annual meeting later this month.
Exxon’s general response to the brewing revolt is that the board knows best. In a written response earlier this month Exxon said that the board has “considerable experience and unique knowledge of the challengers and opportunities the company faces”
Apparently a growing number of investors don’t agree.
Further ReadingGlobalWarmingisReal: Wind Energy Investment Can Provide Jobs and Energy Security for the Cost of Four Months in Iraq
Energy and Capital: The True Cost of Oil
AlterNet: It’s the Obscene Profits, Stupid! Exxon’s Enormous Gains from the U.S. Keep Growing
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_social_responsibility
cf
Corporate social responsibility (CSR, also called corporate conscience, corporate citizenship, social performance, or sustainable responsible business/ Responsible Business)[1] is a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business model. CSR policy functions as a built-in, self-regulating mechanism whereby a business monitors and ensures its active compliance with the spirit of the law, ethical standards, and international norms. In some models, a firm's implementation of CSR goes beyond compliance and engages in "actions that appear to further some social good, beyond the interests of the firm and that which is required by law."[2][3] CSR is a process with the aim to embrace responsibility for the company's actions and encourage a positive impact through its activities on the environment, consumers, employees, communities, stakeholders and all other members of the public sphere who may also be considered as stakeholders.
The term "corporate social responsibility" came into common use in the late 1960s and early 1970s after many multinational corporations formed the term stakeholder, meaning those on whom an organization's activities have an impact. It was used to describe corporate owners beyond shareholders as a result of an influential book by R. Edward Freeman, Strategic management: a stakeholder approach in 1984.[4]
Proponents argue that corporations make more long term profits by operating with a perspective, while critics argue that CSR distracts from the economic role of businesses. McWilliams and Siegal's article (2000) published in Strategic Management Journal, cited by over 1000, compared existing econometric studies of the relationship between social and financial performance. They concluded that the contradictory results of previous studies reporting positive, negative, and neutral financial impact, were due to flawed empirical analysis. McWilliams and Siegal demonstrated that by properly specifying the model, by controlling for investment in Research and Development, an important determinant of financial performance, they found that CSR had a neutral impact on financial outcomes.[5]
In his widely-cited book[6][7] entitled Misguided Virtue: False Notions of Corporate Social Responsibility (2001) David Henderson argued forcefully against the way in which CSR broke from traditional corporate value-setting. He questioned the "lofty" and sometimes "unrealistic expectations" in CSR.[8]
Some argue that CSR is merely window-dressing, or an attempt to pre-empt the role of governments as a watchdog over powerful multinational corporations.
CSR is titled to aid an organization's mission as well as a guide to what the company stands for and will uphold to its consumers. Development business ethics is one of the forms of applied ethics that examines ethical principles and moral or ethical problems that can arise in a business environment. ISO 26000 is the recognized international standard for CSR. Public sector organizations (the United Nations for example) adhere to the triple bottom line (TBL). It is widely accepted that CSR adheres to similar principles but with no formal act of legislation. The UN has developed the Principles for Responsible Investment as guidelines for investing entities.