How oil divestment plans backfired at Exxon, Shell meetings

Ask any of the student protesters who shut down college campuses across the U.S. this past month what their goals were and the biggest was usually for the divestment of the universities from any and all holdings associated with Israel. But as climate advocates found out to great distress in the past 10 days, divestment strategies don’t do much to stop a company, or country, from making changes.

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Following years of divestment campaigns that saw several university and state and local pension funds divest from Big Oil, climate activism at the shareholder meetings of the largest companies has ground to a halt. Both Exxon and Shell easily avoided climate measures at their meetings this past week and the week before, with massive shareholder majorities voting with management’s strategies in both cases.

A few big asset managers who stood against management were drowned out by the rest of the shareholders, in Exxon’s case by 95%. We have often made the case that by selling a company’s shares, an investor gives up the right to work with or prod management to make changes from the inside. Often, they end up selling to another investor that would rather just make a profit by producing more oil.

A clearer example of this in the results of the oil annual meetings, and the ongoing consolidation of the industry as seen by the $22.5 billion ConocoPhillips deal to buy Marathon, we’ve yet to see.

For now, the lack of climate voices inside the shareholder base of these oil and gas majors is leading to very predictable results.

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