Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
A ‘moral imperative’ or just another exercize in green politicking?
A ‘moral imperative’ or just another exercize in green politicking?
Mar 18, 2025 11:06 AM

This past Friday, I blogged about the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent decision to allow a vaguely worded proxy resolution proceed to a vote. The resolution was submitted by, among others, members of the religious shareholder activist group the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.

The ICCR resolution calls upon ExxonMobil Corporation to take action intended to mitigate climate change. ExxonMobil requested the SEC deny the ICCR resolution on the grounds it was based mainly on nonspecific greenhouse-gas reduction targets and unclear strategies to achieve them.

Since that post, I received an email from a subject matter expert that helps place the SEC’s decision in perspective. Legal Director Allen Dickerson from the Center for Competitive Politics, a free-speech mented:

The SEC’s decision was routine. It is extraordinarily easy, under U.S. securities laws, to put a proposal before pany’s shareholders, and politically active groups have done so with increasing frequency in recent years. But these policy proposals are seldom adopted. Shareholders generally want corporations to maximize the value of their investment, as management is legally obligated to do, and rebuff attempts to turn the annual meeting into an extension of the broader political arena.

Just so. ICCR members are performing a disservice to panies in which they invest as well as fellow shareholders. Compare Mr. ments to these from an ICCR press release quoting Sr. Patricia D. Daly, OP, of the Sisters of St. Dominic of Caldwell, NJ, the lead filer of the resolution:

This year’s Holy Days are celebrated in the midst of violence and ecological turmoil. As people of faith attempt to respond to the needs of the world, it is critical and timely that our call for ExxonMobil to acknowledge the moral imperative of limiting global warming to 2 ̊C will go to their shareholders for consideration. ExxonMobil and its shareholders now face a choice: acknowledge the untold suffering that climate change will cause and work towards solutions, or remain willfully blind to the impacts of their ‘business as usual’ approach …

The moral responsibility to acknowledge the impacts of human dependence on fossil fuels and take action remains an urgent priority for all, none more so than the producers of these fuels. In asking ExxonMobil to acknowledge the imperative of limiting global warming to 2 ̊C, this resolution seeks to bring Exxon in line with the consensus of over 190 nations, which adopted this goal in the Paris Climate Agreement this past December, as well as the numerous oil and panies that have expressed support for the 2 ̊C target. We strongly encourage all shareholders to support the resolution at ExxonMobil’s annual general meeting on May 25th …

The press release continues, reiterating the “scientific consensus” canard as if ICCR was advertising toothpaste mended by four out of five dentists. There exists no consensus in the first place, and even if there were, science isn’t a democratic process wherein a majority opinion must inherently be perceived as correct.

It is widely acknowledged in the munity that global warming must not exceed 2 ̊C above pre-industrial levels if the worst impacts of climate change are to be avoided. Indeed, this decision from the es only days after the release of a new study from 19 leading climate scientists, including James Hansen, warning that catastrophic impacts may occur even if warming is limited to 2 ̊ C.

Rather than going into the weeds refuting the vague claims above, ExxonMobil explained to the SEC already that, even if such predictions are correct, it’s widely acknowledged that the Paris Climate Agreement e close to achieving a 2 ̊ C target. Furthermore, the Clean Power Plan, which was the U.S. strategy to reduce its carbon footprint to achieve the 2 ̊ C goal, was stayed by the U.S. Supreme Court prior to the SEC determination on the ICCR proxy resolution. With all this lack of clarity on the climate-change public policy front, the SEC decision is all the more puzzling.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Video: Wayne Grudem And Barry Asmus On A Solution To The Poverty Of Nations
So far, 2015 has given us our busiest Acton Lecture Series ever, and we’re pleased to share more of it with you today on the PowerBlog. Back on April 16, Acton had the privilegeof hosting Wayne Grudem and Barry Asmus, who spoke on the topic of the book they jointly authored,The Poverty of Nations: A Sustainable Solution. First, the bios: Wayne Grudem is Research Professor of Theology and Biblical Studies at Phoenix Seminary; he is the author or co-author of...
Psalm 19 and Human Flourishing
The mission of the Acton Institute is to promote a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles. We seek to articulate a vision of society that is both free and virtuous, the end of which is human flourishing. That phrase—“human flourishing”—has e such a buzzword, though, that it’s in danger of losing any real meaning. As Scott Swain says, “Due to its widespread usage across our culture, its susceptibility to multiple meanings, and its...
Acton Institute Selected as Templeton Freedom Award Finalist for Poverty Inc. Documentary
The Acton Institute has been named as one of six finalists for this year’s $100,000 Templeton Freedom Award for its documentary film, Poverty, Inc. The announcement of the finalists was made Monday by the Atlas Network, a Washington-based organization that advances the work of market-oriented public policy organizations all over the world. The winner will be selected Nov. 12 in New York. Atlas’ description of Poverty, Inc. says the documentary “provides prehensive perspective on the issue, giving voice to charity...
Rev. Sirico on Francis’ ‘Year of Mercy’
Pope Francis recently announced a “year of mercy,” making it easier for the Catholic Church to forgive women for having abortions. Acton’s President and Co-founder Robert Sirico went on WSJ Live to discuss this. Watch below: ...
Creation Care and Catholic Social Teaching
Pope Francis recently declared September 1 as the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, an annual day of prayer begun by the Orthodox Church in 1989. In conjunction with the event, Catholic Relief Services and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops have released “Care for God’s Creation,” the first of a seven-part video series on Catholic social teaching. (Via: Crux) ...
Can Capitalism Save the Arts?
Capitalism is routinely castigated as an enemy of the arts, with much of the finger-pointing bent toward monsters of profit and efficiency. Other critiques take aim at more systemic features, fearing that the type of industrialization that markets sometimes tend toward will inevitably detach artists from healthy social contexts, sucking dry any potential for flourishing as a result. But what if the opposite is true? I offer the argument over at The Federalist. Free economies introduce their own unique challenges...
Subsidizing Subsidiarity: How Conservatives Failed New Orleans
This week marks the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina making landfall on the Gulf Coast. As always happens when remembering suchignominious events, we look back in hindsight to attempt to learn what could have been done differently. If we’re being honest with ourselves, we conservatives will admit that we share some of the blame for the disaster—just not in the way many of us realize. The colossal failures in leadership in the wake of Hurricane Katrina proved once again that,...
The Moral Dimension of Work
“The world is not a parsimonious place, in spite of the dogmas of the ecologists,” says James V. Schall in this week’s Acton Commentary. Our most unsettling economic problems are actually not economic but moral—moral ones that cannot be simply passed on from generation to generation. They need to be chosen and internalized by each person in each generation at the risk of deflecting material goods from their proper purposes. Work likewise is not exclusively for its own sake. Rather...
Court Rules March for Life Qualifies for Abortifacient Mandate Exemption Based on Moral, Not Just Religious, Objections
Imagine if the government were to tell an organization dedicated to veganism that, because of a new mandate, they must purchase a meat platter to serve at their monthly meetings and that the chair cushions in their conference room must be made of leather. Appalled by this governmental intrusion, the vegans ask to be excluded from the mandate since none of their members wish to eat bologna while sitting on dead cow skin. They also point out that a group...
Catholicism’s tension with the Enlightenment
In a recent article for The Stream, Acton’s Director of Research, Samuel Gregg asks the question, “Is Catholicism Compatible with the American Experiment?” Gregg cites an article by political philosopher Patrick Deneen who suggested that “the main argument among American Catholics will concern the relationship of modern liberal democracies–and, at a deeper level, the American Founding–with Catholicism.” Gregg doesn’t necessarily disagree with this assertion, but argues that it “reaches further back to the early modern period often called the Enlightenment.”...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved