Shareholders Will Not Let the SEC or the Oil Companies Stop Their Efforts on Climate Change

They can run, but they can’t hide. Efforts by ExxonMobil to squelch shareholder initiatives on climate change have led to escalation, including a high-visibility call to withhold votes for the nominees for the company’s board. Directors at Exxon Mobil Corp. are facing a withhold campaign from two institutional shareholders alleging the energy company has failed to be sufficiently responsive to climate change. The Office of the New York State Comptroller and Church Commissioners for England announced they would vote against all Exxon board directors at the company’s annual meeting on May 29, alleging that environmental oversight practices lag behind those of peer companies. The proposal was filed after the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ruled that Exxon could exclude from a vote a shareholder proposal that would have required the disclosure of targets for emissions reductions.

In 2017, ExxonMobil shareholders voted in favor of a shareholder proposal calling for the company to disclose data on its greenhouse gas emissions. Even though shareholder proposals are advisory only, so that a 100 percent vote does not force the company to do anything, the prospect of another vote this year so profoundly shivered the timbers of the $324 billion dollar international superpower of a company…