Reassessing Engine No. 1’s Fight Against Exxon Mobil
What did Exxon’s main agitators really achieve?
ExxonMobil’s annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday was attended by activist investors and major shareholders. Legal and general investment managementtakes over the company. A series of proxy measures It aims to promote emissions reductions and accelerate decarbonization efforts.
Climate change investors don’t expect repeat victories About what happened two years ago That’s when Engine Number 1, a San Francisco-based activist hedge fund, surprised the corporate world by welcoming three environmentally conscious candidates to Exxon’s board.
Climate activists wrote in Dealbook that Engine 1’s efforts have yielded negligible results, Vivian Walt wrote. they say:
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“Exxon has continued to invest aggressively in expanding oil and gas production,” said Mark Kramer, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. Last year, I wrote a case study on Engine number 1.
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Daniel Fougeret, president and chief counsel at As You So, an investor advocacy group in Berkeley, Calif., said the first engine “did not make a noticeable difference to Exxon’s climate change efforts.” He led a shareholder campaign and submitted a resolution for Wednesday’s meeting.
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Mark van Barr, founder of the activist shareholder group Follow This, was more outspoken. He said hedge funds were “the biggest disappointment in the fight against climate change.”
Engine No. 1 rejected that assessment. In an email to DealBook, Exxon announced a series of changes, including the introduction of net-zero targets at its Permian Basin operations in Texas and New Mexico, early-stage carbon capture and hydrogen projects, and investments in lithium mining. emphasized. “These efforts were never in the company’s plans prior to the introduction of Engine No. 1,” said a spokesperson.
But critics say green investments still make up a small percentage of Exxon’s spending, and the company is still grappling with fossil fuels. They also wonder if the push for green energy has more to do with anti-inflation law subsidies and tax incentives than a true transition.
Legal & General considers the hedge fund proxy contest to be an example. “Changed the story.”
Engine No. 1 has not run a similar campaign since. Charlie Penner, who led the fund’s proxy war, resigned shortly thereafter. The hedge fund focuses on corporate research, working with oil companies to reduce methane emissions, helping Tesla (diversify the workforce), Amazon (improve working conditions in warehouses) and Home Depot (end deforestation). ) and other groups in their shareholder resolutions. .
Through exchange-traded funds, the company invests in polluting energy, transportation and agriculture companies, which it says will help sustain the pressure to decarbonise.
Two years ago, Exxon was particularly vulnerable. As stocks languished, big investors began to get impatient with leadership. BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, and the New York and California public pension funds all backed Engine No. 1’s proxy race. Since then, Exxon stock has skyrocketed, adding about $160 billion to its market capitalization and taking a hit on earnings. about $56 billion Last year was driven by soaring prices for conventional fossil fuels.
It did not facilitate the transition to the environment. Instead, The company doubled its oil and gas procurement, significantly increased drilling in the Permian Basin and expanded offshore drilling. in Guyana.
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Jamie Dimon returns to China
JPMorgan Chase & Co. kicked off a star-studded business conference in Shanghai on Wednesday, US bank chief Jamie Dimon said. Return to Mainland China First time since the pandemic started.
Dimon and Tesla chief Elon Musk both made separate visits to the country, insisting the two companies remain committed to doing business in the world’s second-largest economy. But these promises come at a time of heightened tensions between the United States and China that will not ease any time soon.
Dimon doesn’t believe the US and Chinese economies will be “decoupled.” He told Bloomberg Television on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Tesla’s chief executive said the company had released a statement from the Chinese government regarding the meeting between Musk and the country’s foreign minister, Qin Gang. Opposite Efforts to sever trade ties between the two countries.
American companies share these sentiments, Judging by the size and power of the star Attendee list CEOs such as Pfizer’s Albert Bourra and Starbucks’ Luxman Narasimhan were among the 2,500 expected to attend the JPMorgan conference. Leaders from China’s top companies, including automakers BYD and Geely, and tech giant Baidu, were among the speakers.
To underscore the importance of maintaining trade bonds, JP Morgan tapped Henry Kissinger, who served as Secretary of State to open up US-China relations, as a speaker.
All of this reminds us of the delicate balance that businesses are trying to achieve. Apple CEO Tim Cook used his first visit to the country since the pandemic began to “Symbiotic” relationship between the company and China.
Dimon acknowledged that things are “much more complicated now.” Given the U.S. government’s efforts to restrict chip exports to China’s high-tech industry and the Chinese government’s crackdown on foreign consulting firms doing business in China. Dimon told Bloomberg that “over time, trade will decline,” calling himself an American patriot who will ultimately follow Washington’s lead.
Beijing also has its own economic problems to solve. Recent data Suggests a post-pandemic boom after deregulation running out of steam. Industrial production, property sales, investment and consumer spending have all fallen, raising concerns about China’s near-term growth prospects. Dimon also pointed to a level he called a “terrifying” youth unemployment rate of 20%.
What is happening now is starting to lose the confidence of the Chinese people, He said“And confidence is very important for growth.”
$1 trillion
— Nvidia announced on Tuesday that the stock market capitalization 7th U.S. Company And we’re the first chipmaker to reach that goal. (Its value retreated to about $991 billion at the close of trading.) The stock’s rally over the past year has been fueled by surges in demand for chips that run artificial intelligence programs.
robot expression
Generative AI is beginning to transform legal practice, but the transition will be a bit more challenging. Last week, a lawsuit made waves when a judge found that lawyers cited a number of non-existent lawsuits after using ChatGPT in their preparations. But lawyers experimenting with AI tools designed for professionals envision a future where machines do much of the heavy lifting, and venture capitalists are betting on it.
The race to invest in legal AI is on. Thomson Reuters, owner of legal research giant Westlaw, was among the group that invested in Spellbook. AI assistant, last week. This followed a funding round last month for startup founding practice Harvey. A large language model for law firms, It was led by Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. (Harvey launched last year with the backing of his OpenAI and his head of AI at Google)
Should we be afraid of robot representation? Platforms like ChatGPT are trained on large datasets from the web that are often full of misinformation. It can lead to “hallucinations”, resulting in false information being confidently relayed by the platform. Laura Safdie, chief operating officer of Casetext, developer of AI legal assistant CoCounsel, says the key to reliable legal AI is limiting input to a “database of real knowledge” to reduce the risk of error. It is said that
AI is already a boon for some lawyers. “We have limited resources to scrutinize the sheer volume of information,” said Michael Semanczyk, lead attorney at the California Innocence Project, a nonprofit that exonerates wrongfully convicted prisoners. . He said he uses AI to quickly identify problems in large case files and can imagine every law firm using the tool.
When it comes to investigations, immigration attorney Greg Siskind told Dealbook that the legal AI “does in hours what used to take a week” and “does a very good job most of the time.” Told.
Lawyers say robots will never replace humans Because someone always needs to check the work. Ultimately, this revolution may just reduce the number of billable hours spent on tedious tasks and relatively unsophisticated tasks, allowing people to focus more on their legal work.
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