Greenwashing or Progress? Exxon Shareholders Issue Calls for Climate Accountability , 27 May 2016 By Candice Bernd, Truthout | At ExxonMobil’s annual shareholder meeting in Dallas this week, activist shareholders and investors demanded the company own up to its deceptive practices regarding climate disruption and begin to implement adaptations and regulations to mitigate climate disruption’s impacts.
Shareholders nixed nearly all of the 11 measures directly or indirectly related to climate disruption during the meeting Wednesday, but 62 percent of them passed a “proxy-access” measure that would allow investors holding at least 3 percent of shares to nominate outsiders for seats on the company’s board.
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New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer sponsored the measure, empowering investors holding at least 3 percent of company shares for more than three years to nominate up to a quarter of the board’s directors annually. While shareholder resolutions are non-binding, the measure could potentially allow a climate activist to become a director on the company’s board. Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson said the boardwould consider enacting the proposal this July.
The proposal is the first to be passed by shareholders since 2006 and breaks a 25-year pattern in which Exxon investors have systematically rejected more than 60 climate- and good-governance-related proposals. Oil giant Chevron also held its annual meeting Wednesday in San Ramon, California, with investors rejecting every climate-related measure.
While Exxon investors still rejected the vast majority of the demands, it seems they can’t entirely tamp down this year’s calls for accountability. The heated public campaign against Exxon comes at a time when the industry is taking a hit from aplunge in oil prices. Last year, Exxon earned its smallest profit since 2002 and lost its top-ranked credit score after its debt more than tripled. Still, Exxon remains one of the most profitable companies in the world.
Perhaps the company’s most contentious meeting in decades, executives contended with one of the largest coalitions between activist shareholders and large-scale investors ever, with more than $8 trillion under their management. Groups including foundations, unions and several religious organizations brought forward resolutions this year.
Still, investors rejected nearly all of the measures, including proposals that would have forced Exxon to report to shareholders how the company would plan for the future under the Paris climate agreement, support a limit on global planetary warming to 2 degrees Celsius, insert a climate expert on its board, and provide reports on its lobbying activities and hydraulic fracturing (fracking).
This week’s meeting was Exxon’s first annual meeting since the Paris agreement was brokered, and since at least three state attorneys general launched investigations into allegations claiming the company intentionally misled the public about the risks and impacts associated with climate disruption.
A series of investigative reports published last year by InsideClimate News and theLos Angeles Times revealed that Exxon began its own internal research on climate disruption as early as the 1970s and understood early on that carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels were driving planetary warming. It then took active steps to cover up its findings.
Since the reports were published, Democratic members of Congress and presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have pressed the Department of Justice to consider bringing a civil racketeering case against Exxon. The department has since referred the requests to the FBI’s criminal division, but it could still file a civil complaint against the company.
Grandchild of Former Exxon Scientist, Flood Victim Speak Out in Dallas
Joining a group of about 80 climate justice activists outside the Exxon meeting in Dallas was Anna Kalinsky, the granddaughter of James Black, a senior Exxon scientist who warned the company about the risks and impacts associated with burning fossil fuels on the global climate system — in 1977.
“Instead of working to address climate change, [Exxon] invested in lobbyists and front groups that contradicted the very science my grandfather had warned them about,” Kalinsky told activists. “When we ignore science, and let companies and government agencies deceive us with spin about the damage that their products cause, we all lose.”
Kalinsky also addressed Exxon executives inside the shareholder meeting, going into more detail about her grandfather’s scientific findings and rebuking Exxon’s funding of groups “that spread misinformation about the science.” The company has spent tens of millions of dollars funding the climate denial networks since 1998…….http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36204-some-exxon-shareholders-issue-calls-for-climate-accountability
