Sydney Morning Herald
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Sherryn GrochAs governments lag on climate policy, people are looking to drive change in
other ways. What are their tactics and do they work?
In the middle of the shareholder revolt, the board called a sudden recess. It
was May 2021, 40 minutes into the annual shareholder meeting of Exxon Mobil. A
decade earlier, the oil and gas giant had been the most powerful company in the
world. Now it was in danger of losing control of four board seats – in one
vote.
Annual shareholder meetings are usually reliably dull, well-choreographed
affairs, especially for a giant like Exxon. “Most people are there for the free
sandwiches,” laughs Daniel Gocher at the Australasian Centre for Corporate
Responsibility.
But this was a coup worthy of a storyline in
Succession. A plucky hedge
fund holding less than 0.02 per cent of Exxon shares had campaigned to flip
board seats in favour of its own hand-picked candidates. Only this wasn’t about
the usual power struggles of big business or family dynasties. This was about
climate change. Exxon wanted to expand its fossil fuel extraction, despite
posting recent losses of billions of dollars as demand fell.
The
hedge fund, known as Engine No. 1, argued that “driving humanity off a cliff” no
longer made good business sense. With votes still trickling in – and swayable –
before polls closed, a hasty break was called and the Exxon executives hit the
phones to try to convince key investors to come back. It didn’t work. Engine No.
1 won control of a quarter of the board, installing three new directors
committed to driving the company towards a clean energy transition.
The same day, another fossil fuel giant, Chevron, faced a similar
climate-related shareholder campaign, demanding the company cut emissions – not
just from its operations but from the oil and gas it sold, meaning an overhaul
of its core business. And that morning, even more dramatic news broke that oil
and gas multinational Shell had been ordered by a Dutch court to cut its total
emissions almost in half by 2030 to meet the Paris Agreement goal of keeping the
world well below 2 degrees of warming.
This month, deals made between nations at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow
fell short of what the science tells us is needed. While there was real progress
(such as stronger emissions cut pledges and agreements to end deforestation),
the most critical negotiations to phase out planet-warming fossil fuels failed
to get some key countries on board.
Government policy is crucial to
accelerating the clean energy transition, but it’s not the only lever to pull
for climate action. People are increasingly taking the fight to boardrooms, to
courtrooms and to the streets as they target the same fossil fuel giants
lobbying governments to delay climate action.
So, beyond COP, where are the key battlegrounds? And can people power really
save the world?
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School strikers rallied in Melbourne in May 2021 for climate
action. Credit: Luis Ascui
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How are environmental protests changing (and do they work)?
Ella Simons was 13 and sleeping in the shadow of a mountain when the
fire alarms went off. It was the dead of night, just three days into 2020 but
already months into a horror bushfire season. Ella had been camping near
Mansfield with a youth group. Now the smoke was choking, and the black sky
streaked orange as the fire advanced. Seven-year-olds ran past her, crying,
coughing. Ella followed them onto the bus.
For much of that past year, she’d been organising protests in Victoria as part
of the global “school strike for climate” movement – wrangling police permits
and speaker line-ups between classes and soon drawing crowds bigger than any
seen before at an Australian protest. “The scientists had been saying these
fires were coming and, suddenly, here they were,” Ella says. “It was
terrifying.”
A year later, she found herself in Mallacoota as part of a bumper-to-bumper
convoy of travellers rushing to beat pandemic lockouts at the Victorian border.
“The trees were still black where the fires went through,” Ella says. But she
could see green shoots sprouting up through the dirt too, clinging to the bark.
Thousands of them. “I thought, wow, nature is fighting back. We’ve lost all this
momentum during COVID but we can’t forget what happened that summer.”
David Ritter, chief executive of Greenpeace Australia Pacific has been thinking
a lot about regeneration too, about the seeds buried so deep only a firestorm
can unleash them. “Those seeds are still there after COVID, they’re growing. The
school strikers have re-energised the entire climate movement.”
Last month, Ella turned 15 the same day she hopped on a plane to Milan to
represent Australia at the UN’s youth climate summit ahead of COP26. Young
people came from all over the world to draft policy and march in the streets
behind Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teen who ignited the climate strike movement
in 2019 when she skipped school to protest outside her parliament every Friday.
Ella was the youngest delegate there – almost every year of her life
has now ranked among the hottest on record. While she shares Thunberg’s
frustration with the stagnating political process, she says being with Thunberg
and her peers and the thousands of adults from all walks of life now standing
behind the school strikers has given her hope. “At school we learn about
history. Well, we’ve been creating it too.”
And, Ritter says, the climate movement is learning from it. As Ella and her
fellow school strikers gear up for more protests next year, other groups are
waking from pandemic hibernation too, including Extinction Rebellion (XR), which
came to global attention when activists scaled bridges, blockaded roads and shut
down much of central London traffic over 11 days in 2019.
On the
final night, a mural by street artist Banksy appeared depicting a child with the
XR hourglass symbol and the words, “From this moment despair ends and tactics
begin”. Days later, a UK Parliament under pressure declared a climate
emergency.
Before XR, these “direct action” tactics had mostly been
used by environmentalists against specific projects (not peak-hour traffic). Non
-violent civil disobedience, which draws on the legacies of the suffragettes and
the civil rights movement, is polarising, but it has led to big wins in the
past.
Blockades and protest camps saved the Franklin River in
Tasmania from a dam in the 1980s, and in recent years has helped shrink and
delay huge coal mines planned for the Galilee Basin in Queensland. When
Greenpeace sent one of its ships – the same ships largely credited with saving
whales from hunting decades earlier – to the Great Australian Bight off the
coast of South Australia, the resulting flotilla of fishermen, traditional
owners and concerned locals helped scare off the last of the big companies
planning to drill for oil beneath those waters.
In 2012, when
activists in inflatable boats tried to block the Margiris supertrawler from
docking to fish in Australian waters, an eleventh-hour government ban banished
the controversial ship just days later. And Greenpeace’s habit of occupying oil
rigs at sea created an even more hostile climate for Shell’s Arctic drilling
ambitions, which it
eventually abandoned
after a long opposition campaign.
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A Banksy artwork appeared on the final night of Extinction
Rebellion’s London blockade in 2019. Credit: Facebook/XR
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These wins are not always clear-cut; sometimes they’re short-lived or fraught
with danger (Greenpeace’s first ship was
bombed by the French secret service). And they almost always take time. In the US, the decade-long campaign to
stop the Keystone oil pipeline
could have been looked on as a failure until it wasn’t – President Joe Biden
vetoed it in his first days in office.
In that fight, and in many others, Indigenous people have been a driving force.
The World Bank calculates
they safeguard about 80 per cent of all biodiversity left
on Earth, and experts say there are big environmental wins when Indigenous
nations manage their land.
But Gomeroi woman Karra Kinchela says
heritage and native title laws are weak in Australia. Sometimes a nation will
not agree on whether to allow development. “It can be used to divide us, or
they’ll come in and try and buy us off,” she says.
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In 2014, former Wallabies captain David Pocock locked onto
equipment with farmer Rick Laird to disrupt work on a coal mine
threatening the Leard State Forest in NSW. Credit: Twitter
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In her home of Narrabri in NSW, Kinchela is fighting to stop Santos from
expanding its gas fields. “This is beautiful country but I’ve seen it change.
We’re now surrounded by coal mines and gas fields.” The river where she and her
father once swam is now clogged with sediment.
To drill 850 new gas
wells, Santos plans to cut roads through much of the Pilliga forest, a r
efuge for koalas, quolls and the rare Pilliga mouse. And the whole area sits on a
key recharge zone for the Great Artesian Basin
– the mammoth groundwater system that feeds much of inland Australia – drawing
concern from farmers about well contamination.
The proposal, which
Santos says will create local jobs and has careful restrictions around water,
drew a record 23,000 community submissions in NSW, almost all opposed. But this
year, it was
fast-tracked by the federal government
(even before approvals were in) as part of its gas-led COVID recovery. Santos
did not respond to requests for comment.
Kinchela says the community is running out of options, but it won’t back down.
“Our Country has been hurting from the drought, then the fires. What will be
left for us when they come and take what they want?”
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The campaign against the Keystone pipeline was driven by First
Nations people across the US. Credit: Bismarck/Tribune/AP
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How are campaigners following the money?
Damaging the planet is done for profit, so much of modern
environmental campaigning focuses on the financials. As Australia ducked calls
to up its climate ambition at COP26, Prime Minister Scott Morrison declared that
“can-do capitalism” would fix the climate crisis, not government
intervention.
He was right in one way. Although nations such as Australia still pour billions
of dollars into taxpayer subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, the transition
to clean energy is already well under way, says Will van de Pol at Market
Forces. Renewables are now cheap and
efficient. Already, they make up
almost a third of world energy use.
The question is whether the phase-out of fossil fuels will happen
fast enough to avoid the trillions of dollars (not to mention many lives) that
will be lost the further beyond 1.5 degrees of warming we go – and how much
companies will extract of the coal, oil and gas reserves that scientists say
must stay in the ground.
“That’s why we follow the money: to make sure it’s used as a force for good,”
says van de Pol. Just 100 companies worldwide are
estimated to have produced about 70 per cent of the emissions
since 1988.
One tactic, divestment, involves convincing an investor – be they an individual
or a large fund or bank – to pull their financing of fossil fuel projects. “A
clear red line drawn by the scientists, and
now the [world energy authority] the IEA, is that the world can’t afford any new fossil fuel projects,” says van de
Pol.
Divestment has already killed off projects around the world, including in the
Bight. And it’s whittled down Indian company Adani’s coal mining in the Galilee
as
a growing international list of banks, investors and insurance companies rule
out
involvement in the project often described as a “carbon bomb” such is its
approved scale.
Large institutions including Harvard and Oxford
universities and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund have also
pulled out from fossil fuel investments
of any kind following hard-fought campaigns. Billions and likely trillions of
dollars are now estimated to have been divested globally, including by the
British royal family and the Vatican. “But it’s not happening fast enough”, says
van de Pol, “because clearly fossil fuels are still getting financed too
often.”
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Emma Thompson pulls a giant polar bear puppet outside Shell’s
London headquarters in 2015 to protest planned oil drilling in the
Arctic. Credit: Jiri Rezac / Greenpeace.
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How does shareholder climate activism work?
If you have a stake in a public company, however small, you can try to drive
change from within. Gocher and van de Pol have helped run shareholder campaigns
at some of Australia’s biggest fossil fuel players as well as the big four
banks. Gocher says it means a lot of talking – on the phone, on Zoom, at
webinars – as well as chasing big fish investors such as super funds to sway
large blocks of votes.
In Australia, where rules around shareholder
resolutions are less open than in the US, it’s particularly hard. “People vote
in line with relationships too,” Gocher says. “Still, less than a decade ago
when we started we were laughed out of the room. Climate change was put in the
corner with recycling and gender balance. Now we’re getting access to CEOs and
boards.”
Part of the reason for the change of heart is the realities of the declining
fossil fuel market. “These companies are facing an existential threat,” he says.
“Their businesses are looking less profitable by the day and investors are
hurting. Often they’ve lost money on these companies because they’ve failed to
manage the transition.”
For a long time, companies have argued that, beyond their own operational
emissions, the carbon released by burning their product was their customers’
problem, not theirs, Gocher says. “But investors now expect companies to take
responsibility for all their production. So the question becomes: do they change
their core business or do they wind down? Neither path is easy and investors
want plans.”
Businesses that don’t move fast and switch from brown
energy to green – as companies such as Next Era in the US and Denmark’s Ørsted
already have – are in danger of being squeezed out of the clean economy by new
players. “Think of Tesla disrupting the car market with [electric],” says
Gocher.
Major companies such as Rio Tinto are selling off fossil fuel assets, including
coal mines in Australia, and investing in renewables. Shell has just
bought Australian renewable and gas retailer Powershop
(a move making some customers drawn to Powershop’s green credentials uneasy
given Shell is also still expanding in gas and fighting to overturn the court
ruling that it must cut emissions).
Meanwhile, though many companies
have already pledged to go net zero by 2050, including Shell, when investigators
such as Gocher and van de Pol peer behind the veneer at how such commitments are
translating into reality, they are frequently disappointed.
While the Exxon board coup wasn’t the first successful climate push by
shareholders, it had perhaps the most tangible returns, producing not just
pressure on the board but a major shake-up of its directors. Crucially, big
investment funds commanding trillions in capital such as BlackRock, sided with
the Engine campaign – and that has put boardrooms on notice worldwide.
The science of global warming has now crystallised clearly
into the language of risk, says van de Pol. For big investors with diversified
portfolios across many sectors, “climate damage is going to hit all of them,
it’ll outweigh any gains they make from their fossil-fuel slice short-term”.
And, after a flagging share price and major losses at Exxon, the
Engine No.1 argument that a climate focus would be good for business appears to
be holding: Exxon’s share price has rebounded since the new board directors
arrived.
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Protesters named fossil fuel giants in their rallies for climate
action outside the COP26 summit in Glasgow.
Credit: Peter Summers/Getty Images
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In Australia, van de Pol says, shareholder climate pushes are progressing beyond
“fairly mundane requests for climate risk disclosure to actually calling on
companies to wind up production in line with the world’s climate goals”.
“We saw a fifth of Woodside shareholders earlier this year tell the company to
manage down production,” he says, even as the company plans to keep on
expanding, including with its new
Scarborough/Pluto oil and gas development
in WA alongside BHP (estimated to be
one of the highest polluting projects approved in Australia in a decade).
A Woodside spokeswoman says the company will put its climate reporting to
shareholders at next year’s meeting but denied the project was out of step with
its “aspiration to be net zero by 2050 or sooner”, defending the role of gas in
the energy transition. While the International Energy Agency has warned that new
fossil fuel projects risk
becoming billion-dollar dud investments, Woodside says market outlooks for gas and oil remain strong, and it has
already sold more than half of the gas from Scarborough.
In September, Greenpeace backed an 18-year-old student to run for the board of
energy company AGL, Australia’s largest emitter. He lost the vote, but “that
wasn’t the point”, Ritter says.
The focus on climate at AGL’s
shareholder meeting (as well as
anger over its falling share price) saw a resolution calling for emissions reduction targets in line with the
Paris goal
win 53 per cent of the vote
– against the advice of the board.
AGL’s board says the company is already investing in renewables but, given most
of its power is still from coal, transitioning is complicated. Chief operating
officer Markus Brokhof says the planned closure of the Liddell power station in
NSW next year is the first step – that will slash AGL’s emissions by about 23
per cent, and plans are in the works for “grid-scale batteries, solar storage,
pumped hydro and waste-to-energy facilities”.
But “our power
stations currently play an important role in delivering affordable and reliable
supply of electricity to millions of Australian households and businesses,” he
says. “Currently, there is not adequate generation capacity in place or under
development in Australia to ensure system strength if we were to turn off these
power stations all at once.”
Though the company
intends at this stage to keep running some coal-fired power until 2048
(well beyond safe timelines calculated by scientists and the IEA), Brokhof
maintains AGL’s plan is not out of step with the COP26 agreement.
Van de Pol says that board directors around the world ignoring investor calls
for climate action have “painted a target on their backs”, as those with a stake
in the company consider whether they are the right people to lead a
transition.
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Tuvalu Foreign Minister Simon Kofe addresses COP26 standing in the
rising seas threatening his island, which could be lost beyond 1.5
degrees of warming.
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How else are people influencing companies?
If all else fails – or the company in sight is a private firm harder to
influence from within – good old-fashioned bad publicity works too, Ritter says.
He recalls some of Greenpeace’s most infamous campaigns embarrassing
big companies from
Mattel, which makes Barbie dolls,
to Nestle over their little-known links to deforestation – including a macabre
ad featuring a KitKat unwrapped to reveal a dead orangutan finger. (Many such
companies have now pledged to stop using palm oil made off destructive logging
after their supply chains were exposed.)
Increasingly, though, Ritter says companies are open to joining the clean energy
boom. Greenpeace has been convincing more and more major corporations in
Australia to run their operations off 100 per cent renewable electricity by
2025, including Coles, Telstra, Woolworths and Bunnings.
“The CEOs
are coming back to us and saying, ‘Look, we ran the numbers and it works, our
stakeholders expect this from us’, and there’s usually a moment where people get
personal and add, ‘And I’ve got to sleep at night.’
”Greenpeace
calculates that its “re-energise” campaign has shifted more than 4 per cent of
the national electricity market to renewables since it launched less than two
years ago.
As one of Australia’s largest electricity users, Telstra has been offsetting its
emissions by investing in wind and solar.
Now the company says
renewables are so promising it plans to sell green power to its customers
directly (by becoming a retailer).
Of climate change, chief
executive Andrew Penn says, “The biggest risk is believing it’s someone else’s
problem to fix.”
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Anjali Sharma, with “litigation guardian” Sister Brigid Arthur,
joined seven other teens to take the federal government to court.
Credit: Justin McManus
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How is the climate fight playing out in courtrooms?
In 2017, James Hansen, the NASA scientist who first introduced the wider world
to climate change,
called for a wave of lawsuits to combat the threat. Since then, a
ccording to the UN, the number of climate cases globally has shot up to at least 1500 filed
across 38 countries.
Among this “growing tidal wave”, the UN
identified some key trends: applicants suing for their “climate rights” such as
to life, health, food and water; groups targeting governments for failing to
enforce emissions cuts; and suits against corporations for “greenwashing” and
hiding their dirty practices under PR spin.
This year in Australia, eight teenagers (with the aid of an 86-year-old nun)
sued the federal environment minister for negligence. They argued that the
minister owed a duty of care to protect them from climate harm when approving
new coal mines.
The court didn’t grant the teens the injunction they
were after to stop minister Sussan Ley from approving the particular coal mine
expansion in question (by Whitehaven near Gunnedah in NSW), arguing they
couldn’t predict the decision she would make. But it did find that the minister
owed that duty of care when making it.
It was a landmark moment for climate litigation worldwide, says lead lawyer
David Barnden of Equity Generation Lawyers, relying not on existing human rights
protections (as many successful cases in Europe have) but simple common law.
“This case says that every single new coal mine matters.”
One of the teen litigants,Tom Webster-Arbizu,watched it unfold via video link
between classes. “It was fascinating and exciting, and sometimes listening to
the minister’s side make the case that she didn’t owe us a duty of care, it was
kind of sad.” But Tom, now 16, recalls the “spine-tingling” words of the
judgment too. The climate crisis “might fairly be described as the greatest
inter-generational injustice ever inflicted by one generation of humans upon the
next,” Justice Bromberg wrote.
“ We understand the judgment’s had quite a cultural impact already,” Barnden
says. “Not only among the public, but also within various levels of government
because, well, nobody wants to be involved in harming children.”
Still, after it came down, the minister’s office immediately filed an appeal and
approved four new coal mines in one month. If the appeal judgment, likely to be
released in the next month or two, upholds the duty of care, Barnden says the
minister may need to answer for those approvals in court.
She fell back on a common “drug dealer’s defence” in justifying the
new projects, saying another mine won’t make a difference to global emissions
because the energy market will fill demand for coal from elsewhere.
“That argument doesn’t hold any more,” Barnden says. Where previously
environmental court challenges were made project-by-project, he says the science
is now so precise it is easier to link all fossil fuels together as inflicting
harm.
In Pakistan, a farmer successfully argued climate change-related drought was
threatening his right to life. In Brazil, climate lawyers have called for
President Jair Bolsonaro to be investigated for crimes against humanity over his
destruction of the planet’s vital Amazon rainforest. The Hague ruled that the
Dutch government was failing in its duty of care to citizens by not making
steeper emissions cuts.
Ritter, who was once a lawyer himself, says Australia’s treaty obligations to
protect the Great Barrier Reef “to the utmost of its resources” could even leave
the government open to another lawsuit – given its climate policy is out of step
with
the 1.5 degree global warming limit the reef needs to stay alive.
“We’re considering our options there,” he says. “As much as we want to weep with
frustration at Canberra [inaction], we know there is still space for decisions
to be made by states, territories, cities, businesses and institutions, which
can shift the dial. That’s really the lesson I take from 50 years of
Greenpeace.
“If you are strategic, and you are brave, there are always wins.”
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