Green shareholders try to sabotage America’s energy industry

livemint.com:

When the spring proxy season kicks off in April, executives at public companies should expect a flood of political shareholder proposals focused on issues like climate change rather than traditional business concerns. From 2021 to 2023, the number of environmental and social shareholder proposals jumped 52%.

It wasn’t an accident. Weeks after the last presidential election, a well-connected network of asset managers and nonprofits began an effort to use shareholder proposals to push European-style climate policies on U.S.

companies and consumers. In December 2020, the Shareholder Rights Group and the Interfaith Center of Corporate Responsibility—the latter an association of religious organizations, other nonprofit groups, unions and investors with more than $2 trillion in total assets—presented a briefing paper to the Biden transition team that called on the new administration to allow shareholder proposals “to set greenhouse gas targets aligned with global climate goals," in particular the Paris climate accord’s goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The Securities and Exchange Commission complied. In November 2021, new SEC guidance cleared the way for shareholder resolutions proposing Paris-aligned “timeframes or targets to address climate change." From 2022 to 2023, shareholder votes on climate-specific proposals soared by nearly 70%.

According to Vanguard, the “most common subject" of the environmental proposals in 2023 was “target-setting for greenhouse gas emissions." The bulk of these proposals, as a Harvard Law School report pointed out, were filed by the handful of asset managers and nonprofits that pushed the Biden administration to relax shareholder proposal rules. Fortunately, these activists have mostly