The federal government will require Exxon Mobil Corp. to let its shareholders vote on a proposal to require the fossil fuel giant to detail how climate change policies affect the company.
In a letter sent earlier this week to the company, Justin Kisner, an attorney-adviser at the Securities and Exchange Commission, said the government wasn’t buying the various arguments the company made to keep the proposal from coming to a vote.
The proposal would require Exxon Mobil to publish an annual assessment of how public climate change policies affect the energy titan. The proposal states that demand for oil and gas could drop due to the global climate change agreement reached in December, which seeks to limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius.
Exxon Mobil argued the proposal was too vague and the company already has implemented processes to assess how climate change policies affect the company. The government did not agree.
“We are unable to conclude that the proposal is so inherently vague or indefinite that neither the shareholders voting on the proposal, nor the company in implementing the proposal, would be able to determine with any reasonable certainty exactly what actions or measures the proposal requires,” Kisner wrote. “Accordingly, we do not believe that Exxon Mobil may omit the proposal from its proxy materials.”
The letter from Kisner also said the information currently available from Exxon Mobil about how climate change policies will affect the company does not go far enough to address the proposal.
Many scientists believe climate change is caused by the burning of fossil fuels, such as oil and natural gas, which release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and cause the subsequent warming of the globe.
Exxon Mobil has been under siege from environmentalists in recent months after a story published in the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News reported the company knew climate change was real and caused by the burning of fossil fuel for years.
According to the report, Exxon Mobil learned in 1977 from a senior scientist that burning fossil fuels would warm the planet. A year later, the company began researching how carbon dioxide released from the burning of fossil fuels would affect the planet.
After 10 years of exploring the problem, Exxon Mobil — then just Exxon — decided to “engage in a campaign of denial and disinformation,” the lawmakers wrote in their October letter.
In 1982, the company prepared an internal document on carbon dioxide and climate change that stated “major reduction” in fossil fuel use would be needed to avoid catastrophic events. While that was circulating, Exxon Mobil didn’t tell regulators about their findings, according to the Inside Climate News report.
Six years after the internal document was produced, Exxon Mobil went on the offensive, according to the report. The company began paying for efforts that would cast doubt on climate change, including founding the Global Climate Coalition.
At the same time, the company was building climate change projections into the company’s future plans. Among those plans was future drilling in the Arctic because the polar ice caps would melt.
Alan Jeffers, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, said the company would state its position on the proposal soon.
“We will provide the board’s position on the shareholder resolutions in our proxy document, which will be distributed to shareholders next month,” he said.
