As the Guardian has reported this morning:
Such resolutions have been put forward before. They always fail. And usually, they are non-binding anyway, making a mockery of supposed shareholder control.
But, the move by the funds is good. As are the numbers of people they represent.
The point is very simple. BP clearly acts in the interests of a few. Those few - clustered in fund management offices where they think themselves immune from climate change - will vote for BP's management.
In contrast, those few brave pension funds that will oppose are, in effect, mass movements.
The majority have no say in finance right now. The time will come when they will.
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Let’s hope so eh?
A welcome development, if only for the publicity it may create.
As one of those ‘represented’, I’m particularly pleased to see USS up there among the brave.
BP is interesting because it began as a state enterprise – the Anglo-Persian Oil company, in 1908. In many respects it remains culturally a British de facto state enterprise; and if it is going to remain an effective operation for the British people it should remain so: it is by far the best placed, technically, financially, management expertise the best placed British institution capable of driving the cutting adge in the Green scientific/industrial revolution.
As you have said Richard, the likelihood of any impact is minimal. Surely the really brave action is to pull out and invest elsewhere.
That means they think they can get away with it
Historically though BP has been popular with Pension Funds because of its dividends
Back in the 1990s BP had a division that was a leader in ,,,,,,,solar panels (strange but true). It eventually got out of the business (shortly before the market took-off in the late 2000s. BP and Shell are very similar, both have the resources to fund a massive build-out of renewables but just can’t be arsed. A guy from Shell admitted as much to me (on the funding – they have the resources to do it all on-balance sheet) in 2018 – 5 years ago. The situation has not changed since then – BP and Shell have the resources, it’s just that they want to devote those resources to bolstering dividends/share prices. Given the state the planet is in, I’ll leave it to readers to decide what combo of stupid/short-sighted/irresponsible it is. I won’t call them imbeciles – cos they ain’t – these are bright people – they know what they are doing (or not doing) which of course makes it even worse.
Mr Parr, I couldn’t agree more. I was trying to make the same point, but from historical perspective; the essential point was that for most of its history BP was an exercise in State Capitalism. BP remains the best instrument to drive the British industrial Green revolution: it is just so obvious. They will never do it on their own volition; the Government has to be involved directly in BP.
It is clear that some companies such as BP don’t have a sufficient incentive to diversify meaningfully into low-carbon energies.
Some time ago RIchard suggested here a possible accounting requirement, and that might concentrate minds if they had to demonstrate how they were preparing for successive reductions in fossil fuel use. However it is hard to see how you could force someone to be realistic, including all the hypothetical costs of future adaptation to low carbon would make every company bankrupt on paper unless they were able to balance them with an equally fictitious figure of future earnings. And while BP could (and should) take effective action, most companies like most individuals have little control over the future. I can take small steps towards reducing my overall energy consumption, but what I cannot do is control the speed at which renewable sources contribute to my electricity supply. Nor technological developments which (in an ideal world) might help things by improving the efficiency of things like photovoltaic, improving battery storage to allow intermittent sources to contribute better, sequestering carbon dioxide, or bringing in completely new energy sources.
We keep pretending that we have all the time in the world, that we can keep calm and carry on, that we have a plan to resolve anthropogenic climate change, and this is all very manageable. Even though the plans mostly depend on magic technology that does not exist, and we have not been sticking to carbon reduction targets anyway.
In nature, you often have a more or less stable position with fluctuations, but there is a degree of hysteresis and unknown thresholds or tipping points when things suddenly change and things you can’t go back to how they used to be. Cod stocks on the Grand Banks have not recovered after 30 years. They may never recover. The Aral Sea essentially does not exist and would be so polluted as to be almost useless if it were refilled.
Call me Cassandra if you like, but I fear something is going to snap, and possibly quite soon. If we keep warming the sea then eventually huge amounts of polar ice will melt, and we also lose a large amount of albedo, so the heating increases. Like many things, the impacts will not be distributed evenly. Here we go: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-65339934
I agree with you
I live in a suppressed state of near continual anxiety about it
Just a case in point: COP 28 this year will be held in the UAE. The President-Designate is Sultan Al Jaber. He is the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
The world has agreed to essentially halve carbon outputs by 2030 (compared to 2010 levels) but instead we are on course to increase them. And his company has accelerated plans to double their oil output from 2.7 million barrels per day in 2021, to 5 mbpd by 2027.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-64269436
In the grand scheme of things, this is relatively small – the US, Russia and Saudi account for nearly half of the world’s 75 mbpd – but does this make any sense?
This is the kissing your arse goodbye scenario