Private investors a key element in the drive to keep most fossil fuels in the ground

Rss@dailykos.com (meteor Blades) · Friday, March 25, 2016, 5:22 pm

The three-year-old fossil-fuel divestment movement, initiated by Bill McKibben and other climate activists, has been fairly successful at getting institutions—foundations, municipalities, universities and pension funds—to divest fossil fuels from their stock portfolios. In fact, 509 divesters have shed fossil-fuel investments worth an estimated $3.4 trillion. The latest example is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Although the fund noted in 2014 that it would go through a phased process of divestment, it announced this week that it would “eliminate holdings” of ExxonMobil right away and fossil fuels in general as quickly as possible.

Activist divesting is a lengthy and arduous process driven mostly until now by politics. Divesting based on economics is a whole other matter.

This week, the Securities and Exchange Commission has ruled to force ExxonMobil to lets its shareholders vote on a climate share resolution that, if passed at the company’s annual meeting in May, would require the oil giant to calculate specific risks to it from climate change and climate change-related legislation. That’s something the company has not wanted to do, claiming it already provides enough carbon-related information to its shareholders.

If such rules can be imposed on ExxonMobil, it might not be long before the same thing happens to other fossil-fuel companies who resist such moves. And that could mean that private investors could soon be the biggest fossil-fuel divesters of all.

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