"RISK: SEC reverses Bush-era policy on climate disclosures"[eenews.net]
“In a policy reversal long sought by shareholder advocates, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ruled yesterday that investors can directly call on public companies to describe the financial risks they face from global warming,” according to E&E News ClimateWire. Trillium has been a leader in pushing the SEC on this issue, and Senior Social Research Analyst Jonas Kron is mentioned in the article. More on Trillium’s involvement can be found here: https://archive.trilliuminvest.com/news-articles-category/big-victory-for-shareholder-rights/ …
Big Victory for Shareholder Rights!
October 27, 2009 – This morning the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced a reversal in policy that will allow shareholders to resume filing resolutions that ask companies to discuss the risks associated with climate change, toxic chemicals, rising health care costs and other significant social and environmental policies issues. Under the Bush Administration, the “risk evaluation” exclusion severely cramped the ability of shareholders to hold corporations fully accountable for the financial, environmental and social implications of their policies in these high profile issue areas. Trillium Asset Management Corporation (“Trillium”) has been a leader in pushing the SEC on …
Trillium Lobbies Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders in Support of Sustainability Reporting Proposal
Click here to read the press release. Boston, MA (April 27, 2009) Trillium Asset Management Corporation (“Trillium”) is joining two nonprofit advocacy organizations, the International Labor Rights Forum and the International Rivers Network, in calling on fellow Berkshire Hathaway investors to back a proposal on the agenda for the company’s upcoming May 2, 2009 annual meeting which requests that Berkshire prepare a Sustainability Report on its performance on environmental and social issues. Boston-based Trillium today released a letter filed last week with the Securities and Exchange Commission and sent to Berkshire’s nearly 2,000 institutional shareholders, who own more than …
Yes, We Can, Too
Everyone, from the progressive Left to “Obamican” crossovers, has high hopes for the new administration. Social investors are no exception. We share the expectation that the Obama administration will take a hands-on approach to many of the problems we’ve addressed for years, including climate change and other environmental priorities, predatory lending, inadequate regulation of the financial markets and much more. There’s a subset of policy reforms, however, that are being championed more or less exclusively by the social investing community, and those are the subject of this article. What follows is a brief summary of some of the policy reforms …
Trillium Spearheads Effort to Protect and Enhance Shareholder Rights
Obama Administration has the Opportunity to Reverse SEC Policies that Censored Environmental and Social Inquiries The current financial and economic crisis demonstrates the extent to which all sectors and all participants in the market, whether companies, investors, employees, or communities, are interrelated and deeply affected by the actions of any one participant. Protecting and enhancing the rights of investors to seek and receive information from their companies about company activities improves the stability of the financial system as a whole. President-elect Barack Obama can help to avoid future market disruptions and also pave the way for a sustainable economy if …
Fundamental Rethinking of Financial Disclosure
The Securities and Exchange Commission has asked investors and investment advisers to help them engage in “a fundamental rethinking of financial disclosure, beginning with the basic purposes of disclosure from the perspective of investors and markets.” This sounds too good to be true, because in a sense it is. The 21st Century Disclosure Initiative, as it is termed, is primarily focused on harnessing new technologies (hardware and software) to improve reporting, transparency and the usefulness of data. However, the SEC did open the door to a meaningful re-examination of disclosure when they recently asked investors and investment advisors to comment …
The Thanksgiving Column
Thanks (presumably) to 34,000 emails vehemently opposing the repeal of shareholders’ right to file non-binding ballot proposals, social investors dodged a bullet this fall. On November 28, the Securities and Exchange Commission failed to follow through on its earlier hints that the rules governing shareholder proposals might be significantly tightened, even to the point of where they might succumb to the fate of the dodo. Therefore, a hearty cheer and very grateful thank-you to those readers who responded to our action alert last fall! You know who you are, and we are very grateful for the time you took to …
2008 Advocacy Priorities
For the 2007-2008 shareholder resolution season (which roughly parallels an academic year), Trillium Asset Management Corporation (“Trillium”) has filed 18 shareholder proposals addressing a wide range of environmental and social justice concerns. Thirteen resolutions on which we are acting as lead* filer are highlighted in this article. All the proposals we are involved in are posted on our web site. Among its Wall Street peers, Bank of America (BAC)‘s internal greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goals look good upon a first read: the bank has pledged that emissions from its own offices by will decline 7 percent from 2004 levels by …
SEC Proposals Threaten Shareholder Advocates' Rights to File Resolutions
The cicada is a locust-like insect that emerges from a long hibernation every umpteen years to create an incessant buzzing across the country. Equally annoying in death as in life, when spent, cicadas drop from trees en masse, littering once-pleasant lawns and parks with piles of crunchy carcasses. On this tenth anniversary of the last Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last attempt to cripple shareholder advocacy, the commission has again floated potentially drastic changes to the shareholder resolution process that make our advocacy many times more difficult. In 1997, the story had a happy ending. After a barrage of support …
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