Exxon XOM 1.17% Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell RDS.A 0.38% PLC suffered significant defeats Wednesday as environmental groups and activist investors step up pressure on the oil industry to address concerns about climate change.
In a first-of-its-kind ruling, a Dutch court found that Shell is partially responsible for climate change, and ordered the company to sharply reduce its carbon emissions. Hours later in the U.S., an activist investor won at least two seats on Exxon’s board, a historic defeat for the oil giant that will likely require it to alter its fossil-fuel focused strategy.
The back-to-back, watershed decisions demonstrated how dramatically the landscape is shifting for oil-and-gas companies as they face increasing pressure from environmentalists, investors, lenders, politicians and regulators to transition to cleaner forms of energy.
“The events of today show definitively that many leaders in the oil-and-gas industry have a tin ear and do not understand that society’s views and […]
Great news, many steps in the right direction today, but the complex problem of energy production and usage remains. We’ll have to have more efficient machines that use far less energy, better non-toxic batteries to store the energy, and choose as individuals together to use far less energy, and to develop a new farsightedness for the future instead of the stubborn bottom-line for this year sort of thinking in order to safely tap the sources of energy that would be beneficial to us and easy on the environment. And we need to do that and more pretty quickly, it seems to me.