Last week, the Wall Street Journal came out with an article detailing how small, privately owned companies are displacing Big Oil in many parts of the world as the supermajors pull out from high-risk projects.
The lead says it all: “Under pressure from shareholders and activists, major energy companies are retreating from higher-polluting and riskier projects around the world.”
These shareholders are in some cases also activists, whose main purpose in becoming a shareholder in a Big Oil company is, as publicly stated, to enforce a change in how the company is run in a very specific direction: reduce emissions. Welcome to the world of weaponised shareholdering [sic].
Weaponisation is a very trendy word right now. According to cheerleading media even the weather can be weaponised by the guys we don’t like. But here, it’s all quite literal. Activist groups like Follow This and a myriad of environmentalist establishments are targeting shareholders as a tool for effecting change — benevolent change, of course.
Incidentally, they are totally not making money off that activist shareholdering they advertise as a means of making Big Oil more responsible.
Ironically, this change is not happening they way they planned it, because, put simply, it cannot happen. And all those small, privately owned companies are probably only too happy to grab the opportunity. Meanwhile, the activist shareholders’ biggest strength may yet become their biggest weakness.
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