Are we at a tipping point?
One side effect of the pandemic was a collapse in demand for oil, which led to “the largest revision to the value of the oil industry’s assets in at least a decade,” reported Collin Eaton and Sarah McFarlane of The Wall Street Journal.
Last week brought another reckoning for big oil as a court ruling and shareholder influence made it clear companies need to revisit their strategies for emissions reductions and clean energy. Here’s what happened:
1. Do it faster. In the Netherlands, a court ruled an Anglo-Dutch oil producer would need to lower its emissions by 45 percent from 2019 levels by 2030, far more quickly than the company had intended.
“Analysts said the…ruling could set a precedent for similar cases against the world’s biggest corporate polluters, which may now face related lawsuits and be forced to overhaul their business models,” reported Derek Brower and Anjli Raval of Financial Times.
2. Change direction. For weeks, a U.S. oil supermajor had done battle with an investment group that holds 0.02 percent of its shares. The investment group wanted the company “to gradually diversify its investments to be ready for a world that will need fewer fossil fuels in coming decades” rather than focus on carbon capture and storage solutions, reported Sarah McFarlane and Christopher Matthews of The Wall Street Journal.
To that end, the investment group nominated four outside board-of-director candidates stating, “A Board that has underperformed this dramatically and defied shareholder sentiment for this long has not earned the right to choose its own new members or pack itself in the face of calls for change…shareholders deserve a Board that works proactively to create long-term value, not defensively in the face of deteriorating returns and the threat of losing their seats.”
Other shareholders agreed and, in a highly unusual outcome, two of the four candidates were elected to the board, reported Ben Geman of Axios.
3. Less is more. Two other multinational energy companies experienced shareholder uprisings recently, reported Sergio Chapa and Caroline Hyde of Bloomberg. Shareholder proposals to aggressively reduce emissions and limit pollution by a company’s customers were approved despite the companies’ boards urging shareholders to vote against the changes.
Major stock indices in the United States finished last week higher.
(The one-year numbers in the scorecard below remain noteworthy. They reflect the strong recovery of U.S. stocks from last year’s coronavirus downturn to the present day.)
