Exxon Lost a Board Battle with a Small Hedge Fund
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Even Vanguard, hardly a hotbed of investment-as-activism, voted for two of the Engine candidates:
> “Over the years, we have shared with Exxon our concerns about the lack of energy sector expertise in its boardroom and questions about board independence. And for years, we did not witness sufficient progress on either front.”
(Source: the WSJ write up at https://www.wsj.com/articles/investors-give-exxon-payback-fo... )
Before this moment, how could Vanguard / Blackrock convince Exxon Board members to invest into renewable technologies?
1. No "activist investor" has ever done something like this before. So the status-quo is very much a surprise to pretty much everyone involved. Before these two new board members were elected, it was more or less considered impossible for them to be elected.
2. Vanguard / Blackrock cannot sell their shares, because they're index fund companies. So the #1 way of exerting control over the board (aka: "leaving" as an investor) is gone. These large companies are basically "permanent" shareholders, because they are primarily holding retirement money.
3. Board members typically run unopposed. So there's no other person to vote against.
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Ultimately, it goes to show that becoming an "activist investor", even with very very small amounts of money, can become very powerful if you convince Vanguard / Blackrock that you're doing the right thing.
It shows that large ETF companies can in fact, exert control over the board. They are no longer "passive" investors, but active ones who think about the betterment of... something? Its not quite clear what Vanguard / Blackrock is thinking (The concepts of "ESG" investing are only beginning)
Still not clear to me what the intentions of Engine No.1 are.
This notion of comparing chemical manufacturing to an addiction is insane. Don't know who came up with this idea, but it is not good even as a joke.
Humanity managed to survive for thousands of years without mineral oil. The problem with our current economic system that depends on infinite growth is that, similar to a pyramid scheme, the growth will end at some point in time - when all resources are exhausted. And that will be the equivalent of going cold turkey.
The better solution is to, indeed, wean off humanity of its dependence on way too cheap oil and its byproducts before the pain of doing so gets too high and no action will be taken at all, which will turn into a disaster. And yes that includes eliminating certain classes of product entirely (e.g. plastic bags, single use bottles), switching vehicles of all kind to electric where possible, mandating longer product life times and repairability and a lot of other things.
> biofuels will refine themselves.
Just a sidenote, biofuels are about the worst thing that humanity can offer. Climate change already causes massive food insecurity with droughts and floods, we can't really afford it as a species to use arable land for growing fuel instead of food for billions of people.
No it did not, people were dying by the millions from diseases, hunger, and poor living conditions. That is why global population was stagnant for thousands of years. Global population started taking off with the industrial revolution and really ramped up after chemical manufacturing was up and running (1800) and later oil enabled exponential growth (1900) [1].
> The problem with our current economic system that depends on infinite growth is that, similar to a pyramid scheme, the growth will end at some point in time - when all resources are exhausted. And that will be the equivalent of going cold turkey.
Resources can be recycled, and the sun provides us with infinite energy. It is an engineering problem that future generations will have to deal with. Same way that our generation had to tame the oceans and extract oil from there, instead of just opening a well in our ranch.
What you are proposing, but you are not saying it loud, is forced population decline, that is to kill people now so that a greater cause (to your mind) is achieved. This is scary stuff.
> Just a sidenote, biofuels are about the worst thing that humanity can offer. Climate change already causes massive food insecurity with droughts and floods, we can't really afford it as a species to use arable land for growing fuel instead of food for billions of people.
Agreed.
The key thing is: we are not sure if it is possible or technically feasible. In the worst case, oil runs out before this engineering problem has been solved, and then everyone is straight f..d. The way it currently is, we are leaving the future generations a guaranteed wasteland with pumping our rivers and seas full with plastic waste, radioactive contamination and especially chemical contamination. Half the Silicon Valley is a Superfund site - the US and Europe have only managed to shift the dirty stuff to Taiwan and China!
> What you are proposing, but you are not saying it loud, is forced population decline, that is to kill people now so that a greater cause (to your mind) is achieved. This is scary stuff.
I am not talking about killing off people, ffs. I'm talking about reducing our usage and waste of resources. A third to a half of the food that gets produced is thrown away before it reaches the mouth of a person. Enormous amounts of resources are wasted in creating ever more new appliances instead of building modular ones that can be serviced. Cities are made for cars, not for bicyclists or mass transit. Endless amounts of energy (both electricity and mental energy) are wasted for fucking ads and shitcoins. The richest individuals in the world have more than enough money hoarded to solve world hunger ten times over. Take the mega-rich, cap their wealth at 10 billion $ and use everything above that to reduce inequality in the world and you'll save lives.
Besides: mass death of people is what is looming in the very near future already - just look at Africa. Water shortages are more and more dire, even places in countries as far in the north as Germany have to warn about water shortages now (https://www.sueddeutsche.de/meinung/klimawandel-wasser-duerr...). We need drastic measures to prevent this.
Why do you have to kill people? You can just no make as many new people.
You can either plan a degrowth or plateauing in population and resource consumption or you condemn humanity to the same tragedy of any colony that invades a host and consumes it until there is nothing left to consume.
Whether solar energy and sufficiently advanced recycling will fix our resource problems is an open question, and we can expect some miracles but it's unlikely to solve everyting. Can we make 10 billion people eat meat, heat up enormous houses, and fly twice a year? No, not really.
For what it's worth, we can. 1/3 to 1/2 of produced food is wasted before it ever reaches a mouth, we can use geothermal energy for heating and cooling (and enforce that big heat providers like datacenters are providing heat for their neighborhood), and we can cut down on unnecessary flights (most business flights can be replaced by a videocall, as Corona proved) so that people can still fly to holiday.
I always thought that given sufficient energy, you could make whatever you like. Meaning using fossil fuels is just a matter of using up fossilized energy because it's cheaper.
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