Foundation News

Sierra Club Foundation is proud to announce that we have co-filed a shareholder resolution demanding that BP disclose strategies for creating shareholder value in the event that demand for oil and gas declines. We co-filed the resolution alongside Follow This and 22 other institutional investors. Shareholders at Shell filed a similar proposal (which we fully support), and for the first time, current and former Shell employees co-filed the resolution.

More than just oil and gas supermajors, BP and Shell are among the world’s largest companies by revenue and profit. Few organizations have as direct an impact on global emissions. Rather than ignoring such companies on principle, Sierra Club Foundation is using our prerogative as a shareholder to demand that they seek profit within parameters that protect the critical systems that support our economy.

Filing shareholder resolutions to reduce emissions isn’t a new tactic, and over the last 15 years, institutional investors including Sierra Club Foundation have attempted to shift organizational behavior through resolutions that directly targeted emissions reductions. But recently, companies have abandoned these goals, showing the vulnerability of resolutions that are only tied to emissions.

Our latest approach is different: because we highlight the inherent economic risk to shareholders of a fossil fuel-based business model, BP cannot dismiss our concerns as non-financial in the same way they could with emissions-focused resolutions.

We know that, beyond imperiling our environment and our health, climate change poses an existential threat to our economy. In the next hour, the world economy will lose more than $16 million thanks to climate change. Climate change threatens everything from our home values to our morning coffee. There isn’t a single industry that is insulated from the greatest crisis of our time.

“Shareholders are rightly requesting vital transparency from BP on its long-term business strategy,” said Sara E. Murphy, Director of System-Level Investing at Sierra Club Foundation. “Multiple trusted analysts, including the IEA & STEPS and APS scenarios, project a decline in oil and gas demand. BP’s current strategy, which assumes growth, thus warrants serious investor concern. The information this proposal requests is essential to shareholders, as the threat climate change poses to diversified portfolios vastly outstrips the costs BP alone will bear.”