Six on History: Climate Change
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1) Educating for Sustainability in the Post-COVID Era – Alan Singer on Daily Kos
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"ExxonMobil shareholders voted Wednesday to install at least two new independent directors to the company’s board, a resounding defeat for chief executive Darren Woods and a ratification of shareholders’ unhappiness with the way the company had been addressing climate change and its lagging financial performance.
Woods tried to muster votes until the last minute, but failed to win backing for all of his proposed directors. In addition to the election of two new independent directors, the votes over two others from the dissident slate were too close to call. Both sides spent tens of millions of dollars on the hard-fought campaign.
The proxy campaign that rocked the 130-year-old oil behemoth was led by a young, relatively small hedge fund called Engine No. 1. But it quickly won the backing of the three biggest U.S. pension funds, the two biggest advisory services, and the three biggest fund managers. The three fund managers — BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street — hold more than 20 percent of the ExxonMobil’s shares.
BlackRock, the second largest shareholder, cast its votes against ExxonMobil management, Reuters reported. It wasn’t clear what decision Vanguard and State Street had made.
“The vote sends an unmistakable signal that climate action is a financial imperative and leading investors know it and are demanding change,” Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said. “This is a watershed moment for the oil and gas industry. It’s no longer tenable for companies like ExxonMobil to defy calls to align their businesses with decarbonizing the economy.”
“Investors are waking up,” Anne Simpson, managing investment director for board governance and sustainability at the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, said in the run-up to the vote. “The sleeping giant maybe is stirring.”
Chevron investors also flexed their muscle on Wednesday, casting 61 percent of shares in favor of a proposal asking the oil major to cut its total greenhouse gas emissions, including customers’ emissions, a category known as “Scope 3” in addition to its own operations and supply chains. Shareholders voted 61 percent in favor of the proposal, according to a preliminary count announced by Chevron at its annual general meeting.
Separately, a Dutch court on Wednesday ordered Royal Dutch Shell to cut its carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030 compared to 2019 levels in a landmark case brought by climate activist groups. The Hague District Court ruled that the Anglo-Dutch energy giant has a duty to care about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and that its current reduction plans were not concrete enough.
The decision could set a precedent for similar cases against polluting multinationals — including ExxonMobil, one of the biggest corporate greenhouse gas emitters in the world. And the ruling marked a new assertion of judicial authority in a climate matter.
The ExxonMobil annual meeting was closely watched. In the six months since Engine No. 1 launched its campaign, ExxonMobil has steered its policy toward the rebel shareholders, unveiling a new low-carbon fuel division and reshuffling a couple of directors. It also unveiled a plan for a massive carbon capture and storage project in the Houston ship channel, but company officials said the federal government would have to finance it with subsidies.
But it wasn’t enough to stop the rebellion. In the run-up to the meeting, California Public Employees’ Retirement System filed a statement saying that “ExxonMobil’s shareholders have a first-of-its-kind opportunity to drive systemic change at the company by voting in support of the full alternate slate of directors to strengthen the board and contribute to the sustainable value of their investments.”
The brawl over directors was one of the sensitive points. Woods, responding to criticism that the board lacked anyone with expertise in the energy business, reached out for a new director who has experience with a state-owned company in Malaysia.
The Exxon chief executive disparaged the four directors Engine No. 1 put forward, saying they lacked top executive experience or energy experience. Yet the Engine No. 1 slate included two former chief executives and deep experience in the energy business.
The two who won election were Gregg Goff, former chief executive of the oil refining company Andeavor, and Kaisa Hietala, who began her career in oil and gas exploration and crude oil trading and who later served as the head of renewable products at Neste, a petroleum refining and marketing company, through 2019.
Goff had been named an outstanding chief executive by a Harvard Business School group. Stephen Brown, a former senior executive at Andeavor, was irked by Exxon’s disparagement of Goff. “I was fortunate enough to get to work with him closely on a number of things and what he taught me is invaluable to this day,” Brown said. “Exxon should be so lucky to get someone of his caliber.”
A poll of 1,200 registered voters released Tuesday by the Competitive Enterprise Institute found that 35% were unwilling to spend any of their own money to reduce the impact of climate change, with another 15% saying they would only go as high as $10 per month.
Another 6% said they would be willing to spend between $11 and $20 per month. At the other end of the spectrum were those who said they would part with between $901 and $1,000 per month on climate — they numbered 1%.
The results of the survey by CRC Research are consistent with previous polls showing that by and large, Americans are climate tightwads.
The 2019 AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs survey that found 57% were willing to spend an additional $1 per month on climate change, but only 28% would pay $10."
“THE STONE age did not end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of petroleum.” That battle cry has long animated critics of Big Oil, who dream of a phase-out of hydrocarbons in favour of cleaner fuels and technologies. Their bête noire is ExxonMobil, long the richest and mightiest of Western oil supermajors—and the most unrepentant in its defence of crude. Lee Raymond, a formidable former boss of the Texan titan, once told your correspondent to get out of his office after being challenged over his flagrant denial of climate science.
How the times have changed. Darren Woods, who currently does Mr Raymond’s old job, does not deny that climate change is real. And he is about to confront the stiffest challenge posed to the firm’s management in living memory. At his company’s shareholder meeting on May 26th a coalition of activist investors led by Engine No.1, a small hedge fund, will try to put four green-tinged directors on the board to promote a lower-carbon strategy of the sort espoused by European supermajors such as BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Total. Proxy advisers, who counsel shareholders on such votes, have backed some of Engine No.1’s demands.
Unlike earlier foiled attempts to contest ExxonMobil’s carbon-addiction, this one is not a foregone conclusion. The voting could be a close-run thing, with a mixed outcome. Huge institutional investors must square their climate-friendly rhetoric with the desire for healthy returns, which have outperformed those at the European rivals as the oil price has rebounded from its pandemic-induced collapse (see chart). But even if the dissidents do not win outright, there are reasons to think that Mr Woods is unlikely to emerge from the proxy battle as brashly self-confident as he and his predecessors have from previous dust-ups.
Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis, the proxy-advisory duopoly, recommend the election of three and two of Engine No.1’s directors, respectively. But even one dissident director could make a big difference, says Charles Elson, a corporate-governance expert at the University of Delaware who has served as a courteous rebel on various boards. In a report published on May 14th ISS declared that the hedge fund “made a compelling case that additional board change is needed to provide shareholders with sufficient confidence” in ExxonMobil’s prospects.
Outside pressure for the oil business to embrace the transition to a low-carbon future is growing intense. On May 18th the International Energy Agency (IEA), an international forecaster not known for alarmism, warned that investments in all new fossil-fuel projects must stop now if the global energy sector is to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. President Joe Biden wants America’s power sector to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere 15 years earlier than that.
So far it has been Europe’s oil giants that were pushed harder to go greener—by activists, consumers, regulators and some investors. Last year BP vowed to slash the carbon intensity of the products it sells by 50% in the next 30 years. This month Shell won shareholder approval for its plan to create a carbon-neutral business, including emissions from the fuel burned by end-users, by mid-century.
The activists would like to push ExxonMobil down a similar path. In response to their badgering, earlier this year it already unveiled plans for a new “low carbon solutions” division, which will develop technologies to capture carbon and store it underground. It has also pledged to cut the carbon intensity of its own exploration and production operations by 15-20% by 2025.
Not good enough, Engine No.1 and its backers retort. They point to ExxonMobil’s plans to spend only about $3bn in total over the next five years on its low-carbon effort, compared with around $20bn a year on dirtier traditional investments. Unlike Shell, the company has promised only to reduce emissions from its own operations, not the vastly greater ones produced when its products are used by consumers.
The big reason such arguments are no longer falling on deaf ears is that ExxonMobil’s once mighty reputation for being tightly run has slipped. Historically prudent capital spending has been replaced by indiscipline. The company has torched billions in shareholder value in the past few years. The most eye-popping chart in Engine No.1’s 80-page manifesto shows its return on capital languishing at or well below its weighted-average cost of capital since 2015.
Last summer, as ExxonMobil’s share price headed to a two-decade low and the company was knocked out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average after nearly a century in the blue-chip index, Ms Simpson’s argument would have sounded incontrovertible. To many it remains compelling. But many investors in energy firms appear to be getting cold feet about a green shift. Thanks to dearer oil ExxonMobil has clawed back $110bn in market capitalisation since October, handily besting the European giants whose promised wind and solar projects are years away from profitability and could meanwhile eat into their dividends. This puts huge asset managers such as BlackRock, the world’s biggest, in a bind. Its boss, Larry Fink, who rarely misses a chance to talk up the importance of curbing global warming, also has a fiduciary duty to guarantee optimal returns to investors in his firm’s funds.
Crude prices are, of course, cyclical by nature. They will fall again at some point, unlike the carbon dioxide relentlessly accumulating in the air as more oil is burned. Mainstream investors now view climate risk as “a core component of long-term value”, insists Timothy Youmans of EOS, which offers stewardship services to owners of $1.5trn in assets and supports Engine No.1. This week’s shareholder battle will not be the last one Mr Woods and his successors will face."
“For too long, we failed to use the most important word when it comes to
meeting the climate crisis: jobs, jobs, jobs.”
– Joe Biden to Congress 4/28/2021
"I had just begun reading Bright Green Lies when Biden made this ultimately Ecocidal statement.
If Bright Green Lies – How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Kieth and Max Wilbert does anything, it obliterates this mindless pro-Endless Growth/“Jobs” nonsense!
“The living planet and nonhumans both have the right to exist.”
Back in 2009, my pal, fellow Flintoid Jeff Gibbs and I were appalled by and delving deeply into Biomass energy – burning living Nature for Electrons and calling it “green.” Jeff, being a documentarian (Co-Producer of “Bowling for Columbine,” “Fahrenheit 9/11,” etc.) decided the issue needed a documentary and after a decade of research and countless hours put in by Jeff and his allies on the ever shifting issue, “Planet of the Humans” premiered to much acclaim from Biocentrists and much contentless abuse from Anthropocentrics.
“Bright Green Lies” has burst on the scene, picking right up where “Planet of the Humans” left off. And, being a full-length (472 pages) book. BGL delves deeply into those “Hows” and “Whats.” The Whats boil down to “…there are real solutions. Simply put, we have to stop destroying the planet and let natural life come back.”
“Growth for its own sake is the ideology of a cancer cell.” ~ Ed Abbey
The book starts off with a Preface and Prologue which define the issue as one in which the Bright Greens’ years of peddling Hopium/Endless Growth – telling everyone we can have our planet and eat it, too – has led us to an extinction crisis where in the last five decades (since that first Earth Day), “humans have killed 60 percent of the earth’s animals.”
The first chapter “The Problem” takes a deep look at all that has been lost and what causes it. Ancient Forests leveled, mountains blown up for minerals, mine poison pits, rivers choked with tar sands offal, industrial agriculture’s depletion of the soils and, of course, the “Climate Holocaust” caused by ever-increasing fossil fuel-derived atmospheric carbon pollution.
“All technologies are political.” ~ Chellis Glendinning
The great Native poet/activist John Trudell used to talk of “tech-no-logic predators.” Right from the start, the “logical” links between Agriculture, Imperialism and Technology are well-examined in the book.
The Second Chapter “Solving for the Wrong Variable” nails the “How” part of the “Lost Way” equation. Numerous prominent professional environmentalists are quoted defining the issue in terms of its Impact on Civilization. Bill McKibben’s quote in his article “Civilization’s Last Chance” sums up the Big Green Anthropocentric view: ‘We’re losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, MOST OF ALL, we remain in denial about the peril human civilization is in.”
A 2014 Declaration on Climate Change signed by “160 leading environmentalists from 44 countries” never mentions inviolate protection of the natural world. It places the issue as: global warming “threatens to cause the fabric of CIVILIZATION to crash.”
The German Renewables Myth
Getting that Bright Green baseline tenet – Industrial Civilization must be saved at the expense of Wild Nature – out right away, BGL then delves deeply into the correct variables. The next few chapters analyze/debunk Solar and Wind as the saviors of civilization. The true ecological costs of these technologies are revealed with lots of supporting citations and graphs, etc.
This falsehood is repeated so often it has become Bright Green dogma. But, BGL notes that 80% of Munich’s energy consumption is not in the form of electricity. McKibben and the other usual suspects conflate one 2011 May Saturday (a non-work day) when, for two hours, Munich got 50% of its electricity from solar panels. Even if true for just electrical energy, this meme ignores the real world ecological impacts. The Bright Green entire argument boils down to solely citing economic impacts of the technology – (falsely).
The fact is: large swaths of the Southeast US, the Amazon, etc., grind up the trees, ship them to Europe where Germany (and other European nations) burn them for electrons. To add insult to injury, Germany et al. then get Carbon Credits and Bright Green praise for it! .... "
