Portfolio Manager Will Encourage Major Oil Company To Ignore Activists, Embrace Fossil Fuel Sector

David Bahnsen, the founder and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group, will prompt ExxonMobil at the company’s annual shareholder meeting to fully embrace the fossil fuel sector and disregard activists who push for decarbonization.

The oil and gas behemoth’s annual meeting on Wednesday will feature a number of shareholder resolutions that urge the company to report carbon emissions, pursue net zero emissions within the next few decades, or otherwise pivot away from primary business interests. Another resolution submitted by Bahnsen would ask the firm to establish a “Board Committee on Decarbonization Risk” to evaluate “responses to calls for ExxonMobil decarbonization on activist-established timelines” and detail possible impacts if such policies are pursued.

“Claims about the need for decarbonization at all, but especially by some activist-generated date certain, are based on a long series of assumptions that are either counterfactual or insufficiently examined,” the supporting statement for the resolution remarks. “If decarbonization is neither required nor technologically feasible, ExxonMobil will lose significant markets and revenues to private equity firms and less clean-producing state actors, thus harming shareholders while also harming the environment.”

Opponents of a managed transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy have said that increased carbon emissions from China, as well as India and other developing countries, are outpacing emissions declines in the West. “ExxonMobil’s decarbonization will be meaningless if other countries do not follow the same decarbonization schedules, and there is abundant evidence that they will not,” the resolution from Bahnsen added.

Bahnsen said his intention is to remove politics from the company rather than advance separate political goals within the firm. “I do not use my influence as an investor to pull companies into various political or social causes, as is often done with these shareholder resolutions,” he commented. “I come here as a friend, not a critic, and I invite the company to do something which shareholder activists never do: to defend the business that you as a company are in. I believe that oil and gas resources have vastly increased the standard of living for the human race, and that our company has been part of that.”

ExxonMobil is a frequent target of the environmental, social, and corporate governance movement, also known as ESG, proponents of which contend that corporate power should be leveraged to achieve certain social goals. Skeptics of the movement say the philosophy risks distracting from or subverting obligations to maximize profits.

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Even as a considerable number of investors support executives using financial power to achieve certain objectives, a clear majority would prefer political neutrality and the sole emphasis on profits, according to an exclusive poll from The Daily Wire released last year. Bahnsen said the “silent majority” of shareholders would appreciate efforts from ExxonMobil to clarify the risks associated with decarbonization.

Bahnsen filed another shareholder resolution at JPMorgan Chase earlier this month after the company moved to end ties with several entities with conservative or religious objectives. The investment bank filed a motion with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year to exclude the resolution from the shareholder ballot, a move which the agency rejected.