2008 Advocacy Review
For our 2008 advocacy efforts, we’re pleased to report a fair amount of progress — never as much as we’d like (we’d like superhero powers), but enough to confirm that shareholder activism remains a potent tool for change. Climate change. Our shareholder resolution at ConocoPhillips requesting a report on the environmental and social impacts of tar sands drilling won almost 28% of the vote, an impressive vote in this arena. Our resolution at Bank of America addressing its financing of coal-fired power plants and mountaintop coal removal was deemed inadmissible by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but we eventually …
Big Coal Losing Momentum in the U.S.
Poor coal. For so long, it has gotten away with being the largest contributor (41 percent) to global CO2 emissions from energy use, a widespread public health hazard by virtue of lead, mercury and other pollutants, the source of black lung disease, and now we can add deforestation to its achievements. “Coal will be coal,” they said. “Isn’t it great that it’s cheap and abundant?” Coal claims that it’s now clean and has offered to change its ways by burying its carbon instead of spewing it all over the atmosphere, but its persecutors have obtained restraining orders and are bent …
Turn Down the Heat – It's Getting Warmer
With all the talk out there about energy efficiency and reduced use, I can’t help but think of my mom, telling us kids to put on a sweater, the heat would not go up. I laugh at the person I’ve become, as I tell my own kids the same thing, adding the environmental commentary that it’s one little thing we can do and if we don’t, climate change will turn up the heat more than we’d like – before we know it. So what’s a shareholder to do, in this day and age of climate change, when a company in …
Alliant Energy – Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction (2008)
WHEREAS In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are now believed, with greater than 90 percent certainty, to be the cause. In October 2007, a group representing the world’s 150 scientific and engineering academies including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences issued a report urging governments to lower greenhouse gas emissions by establishing a firm and rising price for such emissions and by doubling energy research budgets to accelerate deployment of cleaner and more efficient technologies. In October 2006, a report authored by …
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