ExxonMobil Rebel Shareholders Want To Confront Climate Change

An old friend, now a law professor at Georgetown, writes about this: Today is the showdown between ExxonMobil and rebel shareholders trying to convince the company to confront climate change and install four new independent directors. The vote will come at today’s ExxonMobil annual meeting. The country’s biggest pension funds have openly sided with rebel shareholders, and the votes of the major fund managers — BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street — hung in the balance.

He asks, “Craig, is it right to read this as a stunning victory for environmental/climate concerns — & a powerful warning to the fossil fuel industry?”

Oh, absolutely.

Here’s what I wrote about this a few days ago: http://www.2greenenergy.com/2021/05/22/exxonmobil-4/.  The entire industry is under tremendous pressure from several different directions:

• The plummeting costs of renewables

• The growing viability of electric transportation and popularity among consumers

• Divestment movements

• Litigation from shareholders and potential criminal charges re: hiding what they knew about climate change and thus the value of their assets

• A rising awareness that there is no path from burning hydrocarbons to decarbonization, i.e., that concepts like carbon capture and sequestration are BS.

• World governments (especially in the EU) banning the sale of new internal combustion engines after, say, 2030/2035

• PR from hell