Exxon Investors Seek Assurance as Climate Shifts, Along With Attitudes l The New York Times

By Clifford Krauss and John Schwartz ,May 23, 2016

• HOUSTON — Exxon Mobil has been under pressure for over a year to explain its handling of climate change issues in the past. Now the company faces new pressure to explain its future, particularly how it will change in response to a warming world.

  At the company’s planned annual meeting on Wednesday in Dallas, shareholders will vote on a resolution to prod Exxon Mobil to disclose the risks of climate change to its business.

From The Dwight Hall SRI Fund at Yale University

Last week, our shareholder engagement team at the Dwight Hall SRI Fund received some positive news. We learned that the shareholder resolution that we had co-filed at ExxonMobil was to be included in the company’s annual proxy statement and would be voted on by the company’s shareholders in May.

This is our latest milestone in an unfinished journey, which began in August of 2014. At that time, the Yale Corporation Committee on Investor Responsibility announced that the Yale Endowment would adopt a special proxy voting directive for the issue of climate change:

“Yale will generally support reasonable and well-constructed shareholder resolutions seeking company disclosure of greenhouse gas emissions, analyses of the impact of climate change on a company’s business activities, strategies designed to reduce the company’s long-term impact on the global climate, and company support of sound and effective governmental policies on climate change.”

As a student-run socially responsible investment fund, we at Dwight Hall SRI sought to file a resolution that the Yale Endowment might be able to vote for in accordance with the new directive. Moreover, Yale’s decades-old guidelines for ethical investment hold that when the exercise of shareholder voice seems unlikely to eliminate a grave social injury within a reasonable timeframe, the University should divest. So we recognized that filing a resolution would be a valuable opportunity to examine the efficacy of shareholder engagement in this context.

Pictured Above: Members of the Shareholder Engagement Team 

After some deliberation, we chose ExxonMobil over other possible companies, partly because of its status as the largest publicly traded international oil and gas company in the world. Early in December of 2014, we purchased stock in ExxonMobil. The SEC requires that shareholders must continuously hold a minimum of $2,000 in a company’s stock for at least one year in order to file a resolution.

CalPERS, the Nation's Largest Pension Fund, Takes Unprecedented Climate Change Action l Governing

By: Liz Farmer, March 17th, 2016

• On Monday, the investment committee for California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) voted to start requiring the corporations it invests in to include people on their boards who have expertise in climate change risk management strategies. It is the first U.S. pension system to establish such a requirement.

Institutional Investors Continue to Press Companies for Disclosure of Lobbying In 2016 l AFSCME

By: Timothy Smith, March 17th, 2016

• Corporate lobbying disclosure remains a top shareholder proposal topic for 2016. At least 66 investors have filed proposals at 50 companies asking for lobbying reports that include federal and state lobbying payments, payments to trade associations used for lobbying, and payments to any tax-exempt organization that writes and endorses model legislation. Political activity remains a top investor topic for the sixth consecutive year, with more than 90 proposals filed for 2016 that seek disclosure of either lobbying or political contributions.

Climate talks mark turning point for investors l Financial Times

By John Aurthers, December 16, 2015

• COP21 Paris conference appears to have marked a turning point for institutional investment. 

Climate needs 'forceful stewardship' by shareholders l Financial News

By Howard Covington and John Rodgers, December 1, 2015

• Shareholder Engagement is one way that investors can deal with climate risk. 

Northwestern to Adopt United Nations Supported Principles for Responsible Investing l Northwestern University 

By Alan K. Cubbage, November 20, 2015

• Northwestern University plans to sign on to the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investing, joining Harvard University and the University of California-Berkeley as the only U.S. universities to do so. 

ClearBridge Investments is a global investment manager. ClearBridge has a ESG program for clients who have adopted social investment policy guidelines. Through this program, ClearBridge encourages active company engagement and shareholder advocacy. ClearBridge recently launched the ClearBridge Sustainability Leaders Fund.

www.clearbridge.com

Green Century Funds was founded by non-profit environmental advocacy groups as way of providing an investment option for people who care about the environment. They offer was they call the "triple-green" approach in order for those who invest to receive competitive returns while also remaining confident that they are investing in sustainable companies. Green Century offers two completely fossil fuel free mutual funds - the Green Century Equity Fund and Green Century Balanced Fund. 

www.greencentury.com

Sustainable Investment Management for engaged investors nationwide.

Sustainable investing starts from the understanding that a just society, a healthy environment, and competitive financial returns are all “bottom line” issues. Arjuna’s team brings five decades of sustainable investing experience to the partnerships we forge with our clients. Together, we invest in the kind of world we want to live in. 

 www.arjunacapital.com