The Fossil Fuelers' nightmares lie not so much with environmentalists and regulators as with shareholders and investors. The energy companies are pretty adept at fending off environmentalists and regulators but shareholders and investors pose even greater challenges.
Lie to the public, lie to the government and big deal. Wall Street has been doing that for decades and even the collapse of 2008 wasn't enough to stop them.
Lie to shareholders and to investors, however, and you can be held personally liable, even criminally liable.
Two advocacy groups, As You Sow and the Unitarian Universalist Association, are using shareholder rights to file resolutions requiring energy companies to report how much of their assets could be left "stranded" if the U.S. was to pass sweeping greenhouse gas regulations.
As You Sow, a shareholder advocacy group for environmental
issues, filed a resolution with Consol Energy late last year. The
Unitarian Universalist Association, a religious organization that
promotes social justice, filed a similar resolution with Alpha Natural
Resources.
The groups' point is that coal and other energy companies
would be dangerously overvalued in a carbon-regulated world, thus
creating a "carbon bubble" that could one day pop.
"This
carbon bubble is so big, it's going to make the housing bubble look like
chump change," Andrew Behar, CEO of As You Sow, said in an interview.
"It's another order of magnitude."
According to a recent report by banking giant HSBC, major firms
like BP, Shell and Statoil could lose up to 60 percent of their market
values if countries get tough on carbon.
Shareholder
activists often use shareholder votes to challenge fossil fuel companies
on climate change issues, but this is the first time social investment
groups filed carbon bubble resolutions.
They represent a "new
and powerful way" of pressuring firms to act on global warming, said
Dan Bakal, director of electric power programs at Ceres, a coalition of
sustainability-focused investors with $11 trillion in assets. "I think
it's likely that more investors will get involved in this kind of
activity."
Next stop, Athabasca.
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