Peak ESG behind us: Investors throw out climate fantasies
By Joanne Nova
How times have changed. After the energy crisis of 2022, investors at major oil and gas firms are spurning climate activism. A year ago, nearly a third of investors at Chevron and Exxon voted for the draconian “Scope 3” emissions targets. These targets are ludicrous — requiring the oil and gas giants to adopt a plan to reduce third-party use of their own products. It’s like a form of corporate sabotage.
This year, only about 10% of the same investors voted for these measures. And apparently, there’s a similar trend on the other side of the Atlantic, with BP and Shell investors rejecting activism too.
This is a very encouraging sign that the dominance of BlackRock et al is waning — they are bullying the world with other people’s money, and word is spreading now that the US states fight back.
ESG Blowback: Investors Reject Climate Measures at Exxon, Chevron
By Collin Eaton and Jenny Strasburg, The Wall Street Journal
The votes were abysmal for climate activists. According to preliminary results, All but two of the 20 shareholder proposals for the two companies garnered less than 25% of investors’ votes, with some performing much worse than similar proposals put forward last year.
In recent weeks, similar climate proposals failed to win over most shareholders at annual meetings of British oil and gas giants BP and Shell in London.
It’s still bonkers that 10% of oil investors would vote for a plan to get their customers not to use their own product, but if that 10% were BlackRock and Vanguard, the giant financial asset managers themselves, then they have other ways to profit from these votes.
The ESG spell is broken:
But Wednesday’s votes demonstrated how some shareholders have backed off from pushing major oil companies to embrace certain climate goals. Investors said many voices pushing ESG measures had been drowned out following Russia’s war in Ukraine, which caused oil and gas prices to skyrocket as global supplies were crimped.
Investments in fossil fuels pushed many oil companies to record profits last year, which lured back some investors who had fled after years of meager returns from the industry. Exxon Chief Executive Darren Woods said Wednesday the company had benefited from investing in fossil fuels when others pulled back.
But Woods and other industry executives have argued some climate-related proposals would backfire or leave the economy worse off. Woods added that several proposals rejected Wednesday would have required the company to assume the world will cut carbon emissions at a much faster pace than observers have projected.
“Some [would] go so far as to force us to decrease oil and gas development,” he said. “This would do nothing to reduce global demand.”
This is a good sign that the free market is not dead yet.
Author
Joanne Nova
A prize-winning science graduate in molecular biology. She has given keynotes about the medical revolution, gene technology and aging at conferences. She hosted a children’s TV series on Channel Nine, and has done over 200 radio interviews, many on the Australian ABC. She was formerly an associate lecturer in Science Communication at the ANU. She’s author of The Skeptics Handbook which has been translated into 15 languages. Each day 5,000 people read joannenova.com.au
From cfact.org