Financial Times | Follow This has repeatedly tried to use its tiny holding as a lever to force Exxon to expand pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions. This year the oil company has had enough.
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Follow This is led by Mark van Baal, a Dutchman with a mop of curly silver hair who has long argued that investors should use their voting rights to pressure oil companies into reducing emissions and climate change risk.
His group relies on a strategy where climate-conscious, typically small investors buy up shares with the explicit purpose of introducing proposals at annual meetings. The “Trojan horse” strategy holds that if an oil company followed its resolutions it would “conclude that there is no room for further investments in exploring for more oil and gas”, Follow This says.
Follow This initially targeted Shell, formerly headquartered in the Netherlands, filing its first climate resolutions there in 2016.
In the years since, it began making proposals at BP and Chevron, where in 2021 more than 60 per cent of shareholders backed a resolution to force the group to cut its carbon emissions. The majority of shareholders at oil producer ConocoPhillips and refiner Phillips 66 also backed similar Follow This resolutions in 2021.
Some past efforts to throw out its proposals have failed, notably at Occidental Petroleum in 2022. However, investor support for climate proposals has more recently declined.
Van Baal started his group as a one-man operation, and it still counts just a handful of staff. But its agenda has proven popular in Europe. Katharina Lindmeier, senior responsible investment manager at Nest, which divested from Exxon in 2021, said Follow This “do a lot of the heavy lifting” when it comes to the resolutions, making it easier for other big investors to co-file with them.
