The climate's heating up, and so are shareholder meetings. Today on Parts Pervilion, we look at attempts to influence fossil fuel companies by the people who hold those companies shares. Howdy and welcome once again to Parts Pervilion, the podcast from Bloomberg Environment. I'm your host, David Schultz. For environmental activists, there are a lot of different ways to get what
you want. If there's a company doing something you don't like, you can try to drum up public support by holding a protest, or you can try to lobby the government to enact tighter restrictions on that company. Or you can do what many activists have started doing with fossil fuel companies, go right to the shareholders. That's what some activists did late last month at the annual shareholder meetings for Chevron
and Exxon Mobil. Their pressure led to these companies voting on several resolutions that would force the oil and gas giants to address the issue of climate change. Bloomberg Energy reporter Kevin Crowley attended these meetings, and he spoke with
us by phone from Houston. Crowley says one of the resolutions that both companies faced would have established a new permanent committee on their boards of directors, so this would be a committee within the existing boards that would analyze the risks and opportunities and strategies around around climate change. None of these climate change proposals were adopted at either Exon or Chevron's annual meetings, but Crowley says that doesn't
mean they weren't successful. The votes all went be the way of the board's recommendations, so none of the climate proposals actually passed. However, there were some quite significant protest votes on a number of the proposals, which will certainly give both these companies kind of pause for the thoughts. The fact that Exon and Chevron even had to deal with this issue shows the growing power of so called
activist investors. Activist investors really are just investors. They're the same as anyone else, except they tend to want to play probably a more active role in or at least have a strong say in how the how the company
is run. Active investors can push big companies on any number of topics, but they've been particularly successful in recent years on environmental issues, and Crowley says that's especially the case with energy companies In Europe, where the energy sector isn't the big job powerhouse it is here in the US. Certainly in Europe for BP and Shell, they definitely face much more political pressure in the UK and the Netherlands and climate you know those countries in Europe as well.
They don't actually produce that much oil and gas from their own countries, so the countries are kind of less reliant on these industries for jobs and they, like Crowley says, the main thing that these activist investors want energy companies to do is accelerate their shift away from fossil fuels.
Certainly amongst the European companies who BP and Shell has significantly changed their strategies in the last few years to accommodate a more proactive approach to the energy transition, a look beyond oil and gas to the the energy source of the future. And so I think environmental minded investors have seen some success in Europe and so are looking at the same pressure on the on the American companies.
With policy making in Congress basically at a standstill, it can seem more productive for activists to try to influence the governing bodies of these companies rather than the governing bodies of the entire country. Crowley says shareholder activism isn't a silver bullet for climate change, but it can get quick results. Now, this is not going to solve the climate crisis, but it's it's an easy win that environmentals
have made. It's not it's not the overall answer, but it shows the kind of quick change that can can be affected if you go straight to the companies directly, rather than having to wait years and years while while bills go through Congress. That was Bloomberg's Kevin Crowley. He
covers the fossil fuel energy from Houston, Texas. You can find and more of our reporting on energy and climate change at our website News dot Bloomberg environment dot com, and if you want to chat with us on social media, use the hashtag parts per B. That hashtag, once again is parts per B. Today's episode of Parts Remillion was produced by myself along with Marissa Horn and Jessica Coombs. Nicholas Anzelada is our audio engineer. Special thanks to Adam
Allentin for some emergency technical assistance. The music for this episode is a message by Jazar. It was used under a Creative Comments license. Thanks for listening, Hi there. I'm Amanda Icon, co host of Talking Tax. Each week we dig into the biggest tax and financial accounting challenges and opportunities, from policy to on the ground realities. We bring you corporate leaders, accountants, and industry insiders. You can find us
wherever you get your podcasts. For more, check us out on News dot Bloomberg, tax dot com.