Kudos to Sister Patricia Daley, for holding ExxonMobil's hand and forcing a discussion of climate change.
Resolved: Public Corporations Shall Take Us Seriously - New York Times:
Daly’s order, the Sisters of Saint Dominic of Caldwell, N.J., owns about 300 of the 5.5 billion Exxon Mobile shares outstanding, but she has used those few shares to keep the company talking about an issue that it would just as soon ignore. In a few weeks’ time, the company’s millions of shareholders would be able to vote on a resolution she wrote, which asked ExxonMobil to set a firm date for reporting on its progress to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from both its operations and its products. The board opposed the resolution, as it did each and every one of the 20 resolutions related to climate change submitted over the past 10 years but Henry [who is Henry? I'm guessing VP Investor Relations and Secretary, Henry H. Hubble, who has worked for Exxon since 1975, back when climate change science was something you didn't discuss at the dinner table.] wasn’t calling to debate the issue. That had already been done, ad nauseam, in countless meetings and phone calls between representatives of the company and its dissident shareholders, and it would be done again at the annual meeting on May 30. This was a courtesy call.“At one point he said, ‘Well, global warming can’t be going on because we just had an ice storm here in April,’ ” she related. “I mean, can we review that global warming means that the upper atmosphere is warming, which is creating really weird and severe climate incidents — like ice storms in Dallas in April?” She fell back in her chair, clutching her head in astonishment.
I wonder if Henry is willfully ignorant, or just obtuse.
these days, corporations are increasingly judged not only by their quarterly earnings but also by their commitment to social and environmental values, and by governance standards like openness and accountability. By these standards, ExxonMobil is a mess. The company retains a reputation for environmental skullduggery that dates from the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. Its skeptical stance on global warming has earned it the disapprobation of everyone from the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific academy, to Senators Olympia Snowe and Jay Rockefeller. The company is known to be insular and hostile to the press (its representatives declined to be formally interviewed for this article), and its rumored and oft-denied participation in Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force did nothing to increase its popularity.As a result, ExxonMobil has the dubious distinction of outperforming the competition in both the size of its shareholder dividends and the intensity of its shareholder discontent. This year, the company faced 15 separate shareholder resolutions — many more than most companies in the nation — on topics that include executive compensation and shareholder rights as well as global warming. For Daly, who has spent 30 years persuading companies like Dow, General Electric, Nestlé, Ford, Pepsi and General Motors to do things they didn’t want to do, ExxonMobil is the great white whale of multinational corporations, unparalleled in size, power and elusiveness. “I’ve never worked with a company this long with so little progress,” she says.
Oh, Henry is David Henry. Somebody needs to edit this article.
It’s fair to ask, of course, if shareholder activists are promoting interest-group politics or economic goals when they ask companies to take action on global warming. While environmentalists have long framed the issue in terms like “the health of the planet” or “the future of our children,” activists like Daly now talk about “risk” and “long-term profitability.” Their argument goes like this: climate change poses an enormous risk to nearly every sector of the economy. It is therefore prudent to plan for both its environmental impacts and the inevitable regulatory constraints that are coming.Daly does have a vested interest in keeping ExxonMobil profitable — her own retirement depends on it. But her approach is undoubtedly a rhetorical strategy as much as a financial one; return on investment isn’t what keeps her on the phone with people like David Henry. “In any conversation with a company,” she admits, “it’s clear that I’m there because of a faith commitment.”
Technorati Tags: climate_change, global_warming, ExxonMobil, Science
For years the company denied that global climate change was occurring. According to a Greenpeace report in May, ExxonMobil funnels more than $2 million a year to groups that dispute the reality of global warming. The company’s current C.E.O., Rex Tillerson, made headlines in February when he admitted that the risks from climate change “could prove to be significant,” but he continues to emphasize the uncertainty of the science. In May he said: “I know people like to boil it down to something very simple — the polar ice caps are melting, the planet is seven-tenths of a degree centigrade warmer. It’s really not that simple of an equation.” And while BP, Shell and ConocoPhillips have joined the United States Climate Action Partnership, which is lobbying for mandatory carbon limits, and are investing in renewable energy sources like wind, solar and biofuels, ExxonMobil remains coy about which, if any, carbon constraints it would support and has stated unequivocally that the company will not be putting money into renewables.
