by Steve Milloy, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow and Junkscience.com Founder
As Appearing on RealClearEnergy.com
Control over one-third of ExxonMobil’s board of directors was captured by climate activists at the recent annual shareholder meeting. Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins dismissed the astonishing accomplishment as a “peudo-event” — one “arranged or brought about merely for the sake of the publicity it generates.” That is just wrong.
The oil giant has now contracted a chronic management-level cancer that may very well spread and be fatal in just a few years – not only to ExxonMobil’s oil business but to our (relatively) free market economy, standard of living and political system.
First, it’s important to note that the activists don’t actually own one-third of ExxonMobil. But they are able to exert that much control over the company because, acting through ideologically aligned institutional investors, they have now succeeded in installing four of ExxonMobil’s 12 board members. Keep in mind that the institutional investors don’t even rally own ExxonMobil for themselves but rather own it on behalf of pension plans and other investors who don’t necessarily align with the institutional investors left-wing politics.
