Resolved: Public Corporations Shall Take Us Seriously
By DASHKA SLATER
NYT Magazine
Daly’s order, the Sisters of Saint Dominic of Caldwell, N.J., owns about 300 of the 5.5 billion Exxon Mobile shares outstanding, but she has used those few shares to keep the company talking about an issue that it would just as soon ignore. In a few weeks’ time, the company’s millions of shareholders would be able to vote on a resolution she wrote, which asked ExxonMobil to set a firm date for reporting on its progress to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from both its operations and its products. The board opposed the resolution, as it did each and every one of the 20 resolutions related to climate change submitted over the past 10 years, but Henry wasn’t calling to debate the issue. That had already been done, ad nauseam, in countless meetings and phone calls between representatives of the company and its dissident shareholders, and it would be done again at the annual meeting on May 30. This was a courtesy call.
Daly assured Henry that she would be there to present her resolution in person, and then she smiled at the phone and made small talk, first about Ford Motor Company’s annual meeting, which she attended earlier that day, and then about the weather.
“Very pleasant,” she remarked afterward. “We can laugh about a few things.” Then her mouth turned downward in a gesture that managed to convey simultaneously humor, pathos and wry acceptance. “At one point he said, ‘Well, global warming can’t be going on because we just had an ice storm here in April,’ ” she related. “I mean, can we review that global warming means that the upper atmosphere is warming, which is creating really weird and severe climate incidents — like ice storms in Dallas in April?” She fell back in her chair, clutching her head in astonishment.
For a certain kind of shareholder, particularly a religious shareholder, ExxonMobil poses a quandary. By every conventional measure, it is an exemplary investment. The company made $39.5 billion in profits in 2006, earnings that keep the value of its stock at around $85 per share and make it the most profitable American corporation, with a market value that is larger than the national budget of France. It is also the most technologically advanced of all the world’s oil companies, and it has an admirable record of workplace safety and spill reduction.
(Continued here.)
NYT Magazine
Daly’s order, the Sisters of Saint Dominic of Caldwell, N.J., owns about 300 of the 5.5 billion Exxon Mobile shares outstanding, but she has used those few shares to keep the company talking about an issue that it would just as soon ignore. In a few weeks’ time, the company’s millions of shareholders would be able to vote on a resolution she wrote, which asked ExxonMobil to set a firm date for reporting on its progress to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from both its operations and its products. The board opposed the resolution, as it did each and every one of the 20 resolutions related to climate change submitted over the past 10 years, but Henry wasn’t calling to debate the issue. That had already been done, ad nauseam, in countless meetings and phone calls between representatives of the company and its dissident shareholders, and it would be done again at the annual meeting on May 30. This was a courtesy call.
Daly assured Henry that she would be there to present her resolution in person, and then she smiled at the phone and made small talk, first about Ford Motor Company’s annual meeting, which she attended earlier that day, and then about the weather.
“Very pleasant,” she remarked afterward. “We can laugh about a few things.” Then her mouth turned downward in a gesture that managed to convey simultaneously humor, pathos and wry acceptance. “At one point he said, ‘Well, global warming can’t be going on because we just had an ice storm here in April,’ ” she related. “I mean, can we review that global warming means that the upper atmosphere is warming, which is creating really weird and severe climate incidents — like ice storms in Dallas in April?” She fell back in her chair, clutching her head in astonishment.
For a certain kind of shareholder, particularly a religious shareholder, ExxonMobil poses a quandary. By every conventional measure, it is an exemplary investment. The company made $39.5 billion in profits in 2006, earnings that keep the value of its stock at around $85 per share and make it the most profitable American corporation, with a market value that is larger than the national budget of France. It is also the most technologically advanced of all the world’s oil companies, and it has an admirable record of workplace safety and spill reduction.
(Continued here.)
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