Amazon Shareholders Rejected Employees' Call to Respond to Climate Change
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The vast majority of shareholder resolutions fail to achieve a majority (>50%) support. In fact, most shareholder resolutions are considered a 'success' anytime they garner any substantial amount of vote (>10%), and the company will usually take preemptive actions to address the issue when resolutions reach that level[0].
One thing most people don't realize is these votes are all non-binding. Companies have no legal obligation to do anything based on shareholder resolutions. Essentially they're a big survey.
Companies want to serve their shareholders -- that's the whole point. If the past is any indication, this effort will drive Amazon to substantially improve its sustainability practices.
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[0] From one of my working papers:
Proposals that do not achieve majority vote can still have impact by opening up a dialogue. Glac (2010) presents an example of a proposal asking Amoco to adopt the Valdez environmental principles which only got 8.6% approval, but Amoco began to shift environmental policies. A similar proposal the next year was withdrawn because of Amoco’s policy shift. Sometimes, the media impact of a failed vote can lead to future progress. For example, Guay et al. (2004) argue that the media impact of a resolution filed with Talisman on operations in Sudan led the company to withdraw a year later.
In my experience, "using a science-based approach" translates to "maximizing shareholder value" with plausible deniability.
Large data centers are strong candidates for renewable energy conversions because they need backup power regardless. If the "backup power" is supplied by renewables then that becomes the primary generation source and the power grid becomes the backup. Doing it that way is sustainable and profitable.
It's arguably a problem when short-term profit seeking causes long-term damage.
And if it isn't but you want them to use it anyway, that's easy too -- put a carbon tax on that coal fired grid power so that the solar is cheaper and they're back to doing what you want them to.
But don't expect them to choose to lose money while their competitors burn coal, undercut them and put them out of business because you decided that them doing that should be perfectly legal.
> But don't expect them to choose to lose money while their competitors burn coal, undercut them and put them out of business because you decided that them doing that should be perfectly legal.
The problem is that entrenched corporations more or less own governments, so they get the laws that work for them.
So what are you proposing to do about it?
Notice also that the corporations in this case are the fossil fuel companies, not the data center companies. To Amazon a marginal increase (if that) in energy costs to use solar is just something they get to mark up and pass on to the customer, as long as their competitors have to do the same thing. To oil and coal companies an effective carbon tax is ultimately the end of their business and they'll use every dirty trick in the book to try to prevent that.
So how do you get a much-needed carbon tax when it would cost oil and coal companies literally trillions of dollars and they'll fight that hard to prevent it? What's your proposal?
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
I don't think mirimir was putting forth a fully-formed plan to upend global corporate takeover, and I don't think they're required to. All they were pointing out was the falseness of your implication that mirimir themselves (meaning, the people collectively) are somehow responsible for these broken laws. That blame was cast in exactly the wrong direction.
These broken laws are in fact operating as designed. As Warren Buffett observed, "there's class warfare all right, but it's my class — the rich class — that's making war, and we're winning."
I don't have one. As you say, they'll do whatever it takes to prevent that. Maybe they'll eventually give up, once climate change has destroyed civilization, but then it'll be moot.
Bottom line, it's hopeless.
Upon reflection, maybe strong AI will emerge before human civilization collapses. Then it'll carry on after humans more or less become extinct. As Spielberg "predicts" in "A.I. Artificial Intelligence".
Source: I know a guy who got spammed.
Check out the AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch [1], can you imagine retail investors approving executive compensation to the rate of 200x or even 5900x (in the case of Weight Watchers) median employee pay? Those executive compensation votes usually pass without much more than a squeak from a couple of small investors or activist fund managers who typically get trounced when it comes time to vote.
Even if it's seemingly pointless, I always read the proposals and vote. It's also a great way to learn and get a sense of what's going on at the companies you are invested in.
[0] http://buzz.money.cnn.com/2014/06/12/shareholders-dont-vote/
It's actually becoming rather a problem because you have these gigantic containers of wealth but there is no one captaining the ship who can do anything bold with it, because that requires shareholder approval but the underlying shareholders don't even know what companies they own much less have any idea what comes up for a vote. Meanwhile the fund managers are the most conservative people imaginable and are far more interested in stable returns than making the world a better place, so the entities that have the resources for moonshots don't have the stones to actually attempt them.
This leads to the rather interesting insight that the current direction and actions of of Alpha/Google/YouTube etc have been ultimately under the exclusive control of Brin and Page; similarly for Zuckerberg/Facebook. These companies' actions give the most honest insight possible into their owners' worldviews. Not the most comforting thought.
Zuck/Brin/Page's argument was that their tech visionary abilities deserved special protection to take risks others don't see. You're seeing a lot of investors dispute that increasingly. And that argument has no traction at all in more mature industries where senior management is more of an actual management role, serving as employees of the board.
Matt Levine occasionally writes about amusing corner cases where corporate governance gets metaphysical [1].
I would guess that Google and Facebook might not have turned out quite like the founders had hoped, though of course they have more power than anyone to turn things around.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-05-24/compan...
Fundamentally, we believe it's unrealistic to expect them to pay attention, so we're trying to build an experience where they sync their accounts, demonstrate what they care about, and then we pay attention for them via push notifications. Would love to hear your feedback! www.yourstake.org.
"6 people own a share of a bookshop" isn't really an analogy.
You have actually given another premise to my argument. The world's resources (represented in paper money) is not being used to benefit the world, if fact, it's being used to lobby gov't to remove subsidies on renewable energy.
Feudal lords own the land just like today's capitalists (especially the whales) own capital.