FoxBusiness: NLPC Proposes Pro-Fossil Fuel Board Member for ExxonMobil

Writing this week for FoxBusiness.com, reporter Fred Lucas explains NLPC’s efforts to convince the leaders at ExxonMobil to add scientist and judge Donald van der Vaart to its board of directors.

From the article:

Last year, progressive investment fund Engine No. 1 proposed a competing set of recommendations for Exxon Mobil’s board, and three of its four choices won approval to be board members. This was a victory for the ESG movement, which stands for environment, social, and governance. In this case, governance would be members of the governing board.

 

“Engine No. 1 got three of their nominees on the board. Conservatives see that as kind of an insurgency by the pro-ESG folks to try to turn Exxon away from its core competencies and address their climate agenda,” said Paul Chesser, director of the corporate integrity project for the National Legal and Policy Center, which owns shares in dozens of companies and has frequently submitted shareholder resolutions…

 

“We’re serious about it. If we couldn’t have found a good recommendation, we wouldn’t have done it,” Chesser told Fox News Digital. “How Exxon receives it and how they process it, we don’t know. Just through the little bit of communications we’ve had with the company, we get the sense that they are taking it seriously and we are encouraged by that.”…

 

“I can say that not only do ESG strategies deviate from ones based on purely fiduciary responsibilities, the arbiters of ESG strategies are often overly simplistic in their understanding of the science,” van der Vaart told Fox News Digital in an email. “An example is the terrible environmental and social costs of electric vehicles – and yet the ESG ‘judges’ demand investment in electrification of our transportation sector.”

Read the whole story at FoxBusiness.com.

To learn more about NLPC’s recommendation of Dr. van der Vaart to Exxon’s board, click here. Our recommendation letter to the company can be viewed here.