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Control over one-third of ExxonMobil’s board of directors was captured by climate activists at the recent annual shareholder meeting. Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins dismissed the astonishing accomplishment as a “peudo-event” — one “arranged or brought about merely for the sake of the publicity it generates.” That is just wrong.
The oil giant has now contracted a chronic management-level cancer that may very well spread and be fatal in just a few years – not only to ExxonMobil’s oil business but to our (relatively) free market economy, standard of living and political system.
First, it’s important to note that the activists don’t actually own one-third of ExxonMobil. But they are able to exert that much control over the company because, acting through ideologically aligned institutional investors, they have now succeeded in installing four of ExxonMobil’s 12 board members. Keep in mind that the institutional investors don’t even rally own ExxonMobil for themselves but rather own it on behalf of pension plans and other investors who don’t necessarily align with the institutional investors left-wing politics.
The climate activists did not get their agents elected to ExxonMobil’s board for publicity purposes as Jenkins suggests or, as they advertise, to save ExxonMobil from being stuck in the oil business as the world moves to save the planet with green energy.
Climate has always has been about political power. UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher promoted climate alarm in the 1980s as a means of breaking the death grip coal miners had on the British economy. President Obama, whose policies drove the destruction of 95 percent of the coal industry market value from 2011-2016, didn’t destroy the coal industry during the 2010s to improve the climate. He destroyed it because it was a well-moneyed and powerful political force standing in the way of his radical socialist agenda. And at any climate protest nowadays, you will see people carrying signs that proclaim, “System Change, Not Climate Change.”
The left-wing activists leading today’s radical climate movement aren’t stupid people. They know that even if there were no ExxonMobil, global emissions would still be increasing with no end in sight. They know nothing happens in our world without fossil fuels. They’ve heard of China. And they know that the U.S. could stop emitting today and forever and it would not matter to climate. Even President Biden and his climate envoy John Kerry have both publicly admitted this.
Since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, leftists shave been looking to spread their revolution. It what’s they spend their full-time jobs doing. While they have had a mixed track record in capturing and permanently seizing nations (e.g., the Soviet Union failed but Communist China is alive and kicking), they have a had a fairly steady track record of infiltrating and capturing U.S. institutions – think unions, universities, charities and just about everything else. Leftists are focused, disciplined, persistent and patient. They plan and execute their plans well.
In his 2004 book, “Biz-War and the Out-of-Power Elite: The Progressive-Left Attack on the Corporation,” George Washington University professor Jarol Mannheim described how wealthy left-wing activists got together after the 1980 election of President Ronald Reagan to plan their attack to capture and turn corporations into tools of the left.
Fast forward 40 years and we can see how this has worked out. From corporate media to Big Tech to professional sports to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and beyond, left-wing activists have had incredible success in steadily infiltrating, capturing and turning large brand-name businesses them to their own political ends. Just look at how big companies have funded and participated in political issues like race, gender, COVID and election reform.
But as a hostile takeover, ExxonMobil is their boldest effort to date.
ExxonMobil management has been trying to appease the climate movement since 2006 when Rex Tillerson took over as CEO. ExxonMobil now claims to support a carbon tax and the Paris climate accord. But it has never lobbied for either very hard and it has certainly never taken its eye off the ball of profiting immensely from producing oil. As recently as 2020, Tillerson’s successor Darren Woods stated quite clearly that ExxonMobil planned to sell all the oil it could to meet ever-increasing demand.
This year, though, the activists mobilized enough institutional shareholder support to prevail in placing like-minded directors on ExxonMobil’s board. As more directors retire or directors come up for re-election as soon as next year, the activists and their institutional shareholder allies will be able to actually take control of the company.
But it’s not that the activists will shut down ExxonMobil’s oil production when they do gain control. After all, even their vision of a socialist future will require serious energy, that is fossil fuels. But until they acquire permanent power, they will turn ExxonMobil’s profitable business and resources into a machine for more power-grabbing left-wing politics – just corporate media, Big Tech, pro sports and the rest do now.
I would like to think that the two-thirds of the ExxonMobil board not controlled by the climate activists will awake from its stupor and its failed appeasement strategy, and take action to save the company from the activists. But they will need to do so before the 2022 shareholder meeting.
Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA.”
AGW is pseudo-science and only buffoons or charlatans espouse it. Unfortunately there are plenty of those. The logical strategy for those environmentalists if they do gain control is to have Exxon self-liquidate — no new projects, just run down what is on line until the oil/gas runs out.
This Exxon story is just one piece in a larger story: The high court in Hague just ruled against Royal Dutch putting them into a similar situation as Exxon. Total, France’s largest oilco, has announced it’s rebranding itself as a green energy company. What that means is unclear, but arguably it means they’re getting out of the oil and gas drilling business. Finally the IEA has pronounced that there should be no new exploration projects.
All of this may lead to $100 oil for a long time as it creates shortages.
The irony of all this is that Exxon might actually create more value for shareholders under this strategy. Oil shortages should keep prices high and without the huge capital outlays to find new sources of hydrocarbons, Exxon should coin money.
Your analysis is dead on. I am a small holder of Exxon stock both as an individual shareholder and as part of an Index ETF. I voted my shares in favor of the current management.
Exxon has, in part, brought this disaster upon itself. It, like most other energy companies, played the greenwash game with stupid ads claiming to “love” fish, or birds, or whatever. The did not explain that reliable, inexpensive energy is necessary for us to survive in a world that’s deadly without the energy that protects us. (Consider who Texans fared during the “cold snap” last winter, when their unreliable wind and solar energy failed — and the gas pipelines failed because they’d replaced their “gas fired pumps” with electric pumps in the misguided attempt to placate the “greens.”) There is a moral case for fossil fuels, and the energy industry has been very poor at embracing or explaining it. I’ll be selling my Exxon stock, soon.