Activists Push Kyoto Protocol Company by Company

It’s shareholder resolution season and global warming is again a hot issue. Environmental activists and their partners in the investment community are turning up the heat on corporate managements to implement the activists’ agenda. Some managers are resisting, but a disturbing number of others appear to be hoping appeasement works. Worst of all, most investors seem oblivious to the struggle and its significance.In mid-March, six energy companies – Chevron-Texaco, Anadarko, Apache, Unocal, Marathon, and Tesoro – surrendered to activist demands to “take action” on global warming, including disclosure of greenhouse gas emissions, the setting of emission goals, and integrating global warming into core business strategies.In exchange for these concessions, the activists withdrew their shareholder resolutions on these issues – resolutions which, even if they receive a majority of shareholder votes, are nonbinding on management.Ford Motor Company announced this week it would appease activists by agreeing to study how global-warming policy options might affect the company’s business.“We have long identified climate change as a serious environmental issue, and shareholders are increasingly asking about the risks as well as the opportunities associated with it,” said Ford CEO Bill Ford “It’s time for a broader, more inclusive public dialogue on the complex and important challenge of climate change.”Mr. Ford apparently missed the very extensive public dialogue that started in the 1980s, and which resulted in the Senate rejecting the Kyoto Protocol by a vote of 95-0 in 1997 and President Bush pulling America out of the treaty altogether in 2001.One of the early corporate capitulators on global warming, energy producer Cinergy, issued its annual report this week featuring a section titled, “Global Warming: Connecting the Dots to Find Common Ground” – it’s disheartening evidence of how global warming hysteria has influenced corporate managers.Global warming “must be dealt with holistically,” says Cinergy in New Age-speak more appropriate for a spa brochure. “We must act now,” warns Cinergy, even though “we may never know for sure [whether we will accomplish anything]. Cinergy quoted a retired college professor who echoed the company’s abandonment of science. “Humility is central to good science,” says the professor.But science is about data, not humility – and the scientific debate continues to rage over whether humans are adversely affecting global climate. Just a few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that a key computer model relied on by global warming believers is seriously flawed.To the extent that there is any resistance to the activists, ExxonMobil leads the way, taking a stance that forced the Securities and Exchange Commission to overrule the company’s objections to allowing shareholders to vote on two global warming resolutions.One activist investment manager recently told the Boston Globe that, “We now see a significant trend among a range of companies to address climate change. If we’re not at the tipping point, we’re coming close to it.”The main roadblocks for the activists are large shareholders like Fidelity Investments who aren’t interested in shareholder activism. If they don’t like how a company operates, they look elsewhere to invest. “It’s not our job to become involved in the management of a company,” a Fidelity spokesman told the Globe.But this is a short-sighted strategy.If radical social-activist investors continue to successfully pressure companies on global warming and other aspects of their agendas, those investment alternatives that Fidelity and others look for will eventually disappear. Investors will have to invest in businesses hamstrung by the Green agenda.Through our public political process, we’ve already rejected the economic disaster known as the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty whose provisions would impose $100 trillion in societal costs for a hypothetical reduction in average global temperature of 1 degree Centigrade.Not accepting the verdict of the political process, the activists are moving to implement the Kyoto Protocol on a corporation-by-corporation basis, thus circumventing our democratic process.It may not be Fidelity’s job to be involved with corporate management, but then this struggle is about more than the financial performance of individual companies, it’s about businesses being free to operate within the bounds of the law.Mr. Milloy is an adviser to the Free Enterprise Action Fund, www.FreeEnterpriseActionFund.com.

Activists Push Kyoto Protocol Company by Company

Activists Push Kyoto Protocol Company by Company

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