Shell will no longer give press conferences when presenting its annual and quarterly results. Only financial analysts will be allowed at the presentation of the oil and gas giant’s third-quarter results and future presentations. Journalists will be allowed to call in and listen but not ask questions, Financieele Dagblad reports.
Shell’s kind of got a point that the purpose of the shareholder meetings isn’t to create a forum for political activists, but to report to shareholders how the company is doing. I mean, it’s going to be disruptive to them doing that, because they’ve got a finite amount of time for that.
If you buy a share of an oil company specifically because you don’t like oil companies and want to show up at the shareholder meeting and complain about oil companies, the shareholders who are interested in the thing as a business probably aren’t going to appreciate it much.
If shareholders were saying “I don’t agree with the CEO pay package” or something, okay, that’s within the realm of the company’s operations.
I’d also add that if you don’t want oil extraction, Shell isn’t the party to talk to, even via another route than shareholder’s meetings. Shell is gonna do what regulators permit if it makes financial sense for Shell. You aren’t gonna convince Shell otherwise. If you want to say “no crude oil extraction”, then you want to talk to regulators and lawmakers, not to the companies operating within the bounds that they set. Hell, even if you did convince Shell, it’d just mean that another oil company would step in to do the same.
If crude oil extraction causes problems to people other than Shell or Shell customers, then that’s an externality, and internalizing that is what regulators are there for. That’s not the job of companies.
I’m not sure if we are on the same side, and honestly in this case it doesn’t matter, since you are right: a corporation only has to care about the externalities as much as they are forced to and not even an inkling more than that.
People who think that an enterprise in a free market will respond to any other force than economic force are wasting activism time that could be better used elsewhere.
If you want a corporation to stop performing a socially harmful business, you need to make that business unprofitable.
I agree with your sentiment, but I wouldn’t call activism (and especially not journalism) a wasted effort in that regard. Bringing issues to light is the first step in creating a visible dent in the balance sheets. Public perception shapes consumer behavior to some degree and can put pressure on lawmakers to introduce legislation against harmful conduct. On the other hand, if the general public only hears the company’s side of the story underlining how clean and ethical they are, there will never be any pressure for change.
This is neigh on impossible. I don’t shop at Amazon, but I doubt they even noticed. I try to avoid brands like Nestle but they’re still going.
The last thing I ordered that wasn’t from Amazon was still delivered by Amazon. I was shocked.
My intention was to suggest that you make those businesses unprofitable by intervening in the market with far-reaching regulations.
You are right, but a corporation is not run by robots. There are individuals making these decisions, and they must - and will be - held accountable.
When Shell stops donations to political parties, candidates and all of its lobbying I’ll agree with you.
Again though, Shell aren’t going to push for that. Their beneficiaries aren’t either, unless the rest of us make it untenable for legislators to fail to ban such donations.