{"id":415505,"date":"2018-12-17T06:30:12","date_gmt":"2018-12-17T05:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vn.nl\/?p=415505"},"modified":"2018-12-27T10:27:29","modified_gmt":"2018-12-27T09:27:29","slug":"shareholder-mark-van-baal-shell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vn.nl\/shareholder-mark-van-baal-shell\/","title":{"rendered":"Shareholder Mark van Baal:\u00a0\u2018Imagine Shell really used their brains and billions for the energy transition\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

This story is translated from Dutch to English by Carrie Ballard and\u00a0Anne Hodgkinson. Read the Dutch version here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In 2013, Mark van Baal was writing a novel. The main character was a man who had had a successful thirty-year career in the oil and gas industry and was at the top of the pyramid. Now he had to decide to make the shift to sustainable energy. Slowly he was coming to the realization that he had to say goodbye to the way it had been, that things could no longer go on this way, and that the company\u2019s course would have to change radically.<\/p>\n<\/span>Lees in het Nederlands<\/span>Hoe aandeelhouder Mark van Baal Shell van binnenuit vergroent<\/span>8 december 2018<\/span><\/span><\/a>\n

Van Baal was writing his book alongside his work as a journalist specialized in energy transitions. Many of his columns and articles asked why companies like Shell weren\u2019t investing in sustainable energy any longer. Van Baal\u2019s reasoning was simple: it was getting more and more expensive to get oil out of the ground, while at the same time technologies for wind and solar energy were getting cheaper and cheaper. So why weren\u2019t they shifting their focus? If Shell wasn\u2019t careful, they\u2019d make themselves redundant.<\/p>\n

\u2018Mark, this isn\u2019t my kind of book,\u2019 his wife said, \u2018but it is the manifesto of a movement.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

His calls, warnings, and analyses failed to make much of an impression. Shell employees at every level gave him the same answer: the world\u2019s population was going to grow from seven billion to nine billion, that we\u2019d need twice as much energy in 2050, and that it simply could not be done without fossil fuels. And thus Mark van Baal the journalist was spending his evenings writing about his fantasy CEO who did<\/em> dare to change.<\/p>\n

Once the manuscript was finished, he asked his wife, Marijke Voerman, to read it. \u2018Mark, this isn\u2019t my kind of book,\u2019 she said, \u2018but it is the manifesto of a movement.\u2019 It was the birth of Follow This, a group of shareholders who since 2015 have been trying to get Shell to take the lead in the energy transition. It now has 4,000 \u2018green shareholders\u2019.<\/p>\n

In the head of a CEO like that<\/h5>\n

Van Baal, who has just turned 50, receives visitors in an office in Amsterdam-West, a building of metal and glass full of millennials. They don\u2019t work for him (\u2018We\u2019re not that big yet\u2019) but for Dept, a company that helps enterprises worldwide position themselves online. \u2018The owner is a friend of mine from my student days in Delft, one of the people who joined Follow This early on,\u2019 says Van Baal.<\/p>\n

He has to chuckle when I ask about his never-published novel. \u2018For me, it was an exercise that led to Follow This. I\u2019m fascinated by people who are stuck in their ideas, who do see that something has to change but who say \u201cI can\u2019t take such a decision with my responsibilities, because of job losses, dividends, shareholders…\u201d What has to happen in the head of a CEO like that before he or she can take a brave decision? Of course, I dreamed that my devastating novel would change the world. All the people at Shell would read it and then they\u2019d think: damn, that Van Baal guy is right, let\u2019s do it.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018They could get the combustion engine banned tomorrow. Instead, they\u2019re using all their lobbying power to get the dividend tax abolished.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then he gets serious: \u2018Suppose Shell really used all those billions and all that brainpower for the energy transition. If Shell wanted it, a CO2 tax would be the work of a moment. They could get the combustion engine banned tomorrow. Instead, they\u2019re using all their lobbying power to get the dividend tax abolished.\u2019<\/p>\n

In May 2016, a week before the annual Shell shareholders\u2019 meeting, this magazine published its first story about Van Baal. The article opened with a scene in which Van Baal was in an Amsterdam caf\u00e9 when a well-known TV host, Umberto Tan, passed by and Van Baal tried to interest Tan in his cause. As Vrij Nederland<\/em>-journalists Map Oberndorff and Jaco Alberts noted drily, \u2018A short conversation ensued, after which the host of RTL Late Night<\/em> seemed not terribly impressed.\u2019<\/p>\n

Now, three years on, Follow This is a fixture on the scene when it comes to greening Shell. At the last shareholders\u2019 meeting, the Follow This resolution had the support of six of the Netherlands\u2019 ten largest pension investors; the four others, for the first time including the Netherlands\u2019 largest pension fund, ABP, abstained from voting despite being urged by the Shell board to vote No. Van Baal has appeared on the late-night talk show Pauw<\/em> along with Jort Kelder (also a green shareholder), dance-event company ID&T founder Duncan Stutterheim has joined the movement, and papers like the New York Times<\/em>, The Guardian,<\/em> and the Financial Times<\/em> have written about him.<\/p>\n

Disorderly scene<\/h5>\n

Let\u2019s go back to the beginning, in 2013. Van Baal had often said to his wife that in twenty years he would surely be invited to a late-night chat show to talk about Shell and how they had taken the wrong decisions.\u00a0 Then he would compare them to Kodak, the photo-film company that had gone belly up as a result of its failure to see the digital revolution coming. \u2018My wife said, \u201cI don\u2019t like men who always say in retrospect that they were right. You have to do something about this now<\/em>.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n

The only way to spur Shell to change, Van Baal, concluded, was to acquire real power during the shareholders\u2019 meeting.\u00a0He would have to set up a group that would act as an activist investor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What had always buzzed around in Van Baal\u2019s head was the events at Dutch bank ABN AMRO in 2007. The Children\u2019s Investment Fund, an activist group owning 1% of the shares of the bank, succeeded in getting it split into three parts. Van Baal reasoned that if it could happen with ABN AMRO, it could happen with Shell. The shareholders meet once a year in the Circustheater in Scheveningen near The Hague.<\/p>\n

Traditionally it\u2019s a festive event where shareholders sip coffee together and the board gets to announce how much dividend the company is distributing. Of course there is always disruption by representatives from the Niger Delta or the Inuit in Alaska, invited by (Dutch) Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace, who have come to inform those present about the dramatic consequences of oil contamination.\u00a0 \u2018These meetings get kind of disorderly,\u2019 says Van Baal, \u2018and then the board members dust themselves off and continue merrily on with what they were talking about.\u2019<\/p>\n

The only way to spur Shell to change, Van Baal, concluded, was to acquire real power during the shareholders\u2019 meeting. He would have to set up a group that would act as an activist investor.<\/p>\n

Striking a chord<\/h5>\n

In 2013 and 2014 Van Baal held confidential meetings with a handful of people. Was his analysis right? Was this a feasible strategy?\u00a0 One of these people was Robert Kleiburg who had worked for Shell for twenty-two years, including as vice-president for strategy and planning at Shell Renewables & Hydrogen worldwide. He was one of the people responsible for investing in solar, wind, biofuels, and geothermal and hydrogen power.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u2018I was the sustainable face of Shell,\u2019 says Kleiburg (51). When sustainable energy became less and less important at Shell (to such an extent that his department was abolished), he left for the Netherlands Energy Research Centre in Petten, according to Kleiburg \u2018the Walhalla of renewable energy in the Netherlands\u2019. They knew each other from an interview Van Baal had done with Kleiburg. \u2018I was very enthusiastic from the beginning,\u2019 Kleiburg remembers. \u2018He had the right analysis. If Shell doesn\u2019t invest in renewable energy, it\u2019s putting its survival at stake. It has to be helped to change direction. I think indeed that Shell listens more to shareholders than to journalists.\u2019<\/p>\n

Initially Van Baal thought that someone else, perhaps a Dutch celebrity or a pension fund, should execute his ideas. \u2018I talked with various people. They all thought it was a wonderful idea but they didn\u2019t have enough time to do it. So I decided I\u2019d better do it myself.\u2019 Van Baal and his wife had a little savings and agreed to live off her income for a while.<\/p>\n

In April 2015 Van Baal launched the Follow This website. Using slogans like \u2018Change the world, buy Shell\u2019 and \u2018Get a share in a clean future\u2019, he called on everyone to become a green shareholder. A few hundred people each bought a green share for \u20ac30 and sent an email to Shell CEO Ben van Beurden with the message \u2018Hi Ben, I\u2019m your newest shareholder. You can change the world. You have my support.\u2019<\/p>\n

The website featured catchy text like \u2018A company that wants to survive in the long term will have to focus on the future instead of just next quarter\u2019s figures.\u00a0 It will have to adapt to the changing world.\u2019 Although the initiative only made the back pages of the newspapers, Van Baal had struck a chord. In the weeks and months that followed, volunteers and new and existing Shell shareholders came on board in droves.<\/p>\n

Aloof<\/h5>\n

On 19 May of that year, Van Baal went to the annual shareholders\u2019 meeting in Scheveningen for the first time, representing the first few hundred new shareholders. There were many more shareholders there besides him who were concerned about climate change. At the entrance, environmental groups were protesting drilling in Alaska, the pollution in Nigeria, and gas extraction in Groningen [which had caused earthquakes, ed.].\u00a0 Large shareholders were pressing for transparency about the effects of climate change on Shell\u2019s business model. This resolution had massive support, since the Shell board had co-written it and advised shareholders to vote for it.<\/p>\n

\u2018We want you to look towards the future; as shareholders, we don\u2019t want you to be the next Kodak or Nokia. Invest the billions you have, and the brains you have, in sustainable energy.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But Follow This wanted to go much further. At the time, Shell was still planning to drill at the North Pole. \u2018We would like to ask you not to put your profits into drilling for oil in Alaska but in wind farms in the North Sea,\u2019 said Van Baal. \u2018We want you to look towards the future; as shareholders, we don\u2019t want you to be the next Kodak or Nokia. Invest the billions you have, and the brains you have, in sustainable energy.\u2019<\/p>\n

Shell CEO Ben van Beurden\u2019s response to Van Baal\u2019s plea was not unsympathetic (\u2018I read them all,\u2019 he said about the hundreds of emails) but still a little aloof. Yes, Shell intended to make a contribution to the energy transition, but \u2018that won\u2019t go as fast as you want if you want to have your dividend safe.\u2019 \u00a0Investments in sustainable energy were, according to CFO Simon Henry, only profitable because of subsidies. \u2018And we don\u2019t think that it is sustainable to let our company\u2019s entire future depend on subsidies.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018We have more confidence in you than you have in yourself,\u2019 was Van Baal\u2019s retort. \u2018We think you have the billions and brains not only to follow this change but to lead it. How can we help you?\u2019<\/p>\n

The message was: we\u2019ll fix it ourselves, we don\u2019t need you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And his performance got noticed. His name was in The Guardian<\/em> and the Netherlands\u2019 het\u00a0<\/em>Financieele Dagblad<\/em>. But, at least for the time being, it stopped there. \u2018The wealth managers weren\u2019t exactly breaking down the door. For them, I was nothing more than a journalist with a little idea.\u2019 When Van Baal contacted pension funds, they were reserved.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t do \u2018engagement\u2019 with Shell. When Van Baal pressed, the answer was, \u2018We discuss things with Shell; slowly we\u2019ll turn them round.\u2019\u00a0And so it went, turning in a circle. The message was: we\u2019ll fix it ourselves, we don\u2019t need you.<\/p>\n

Early birds<\/h5>\n

If Follow This was to have more influence, it would have to grow, and Van Baal had to get more people behind him. To encourage him, his wife, Marijke, showed him a YouTube video, which now has 15 million views, of a solitary dancer at a festival. \u2018The guy is dancing a little oddly, at first all alone, then two or three more join him and he welcomes them enthusiastically, which is important, and then the others follow. I\u2019ve always remembered that. You have to look after those early birds.\u2019<\/p>\n

The first large shareholders to join Follow This were a few friends, businesspeople who prefer to remain anonymous. The next one, who came out of the blue, was Bob Cr\u00e9bas, founder of a group of second-hand stores Het Goed and the website Marktplaats.nl.\u00a0 The former welfare recipient and anti-nuclear activist sold Marktplaats for \u20ac225 million to eBay, making him suddenly one of the richest people in the Netherlands. In October of 2015 Cr\u00e9bas heard about Follow This for the first time and the idea appealed to him right away. \u2018I\u2019ve been concerned about the climate and energy for forty years now. It seemed like a great campaign, and Mark looked like the right man for the job,\u2019 says Cr\u00e9bas.<\/p>\n

Silent heroes<\/h5>\n

Around that time, Van Baal received the first signals of interest in his initiative from the world of financial institutions. During a radio show, he met a manager of Actiam, an asset management company with invested capital of \u20ac56.3 billion. Within a couple of weeks, Van Baal had been invited to a closed round-table discussion about oil drilling at the North Pole. There were representatives from pension funds there as well as someone from Greenpeace. \u2018The world that had shut me out was starting to let me in more and more often,\u2019 says Van Baal.<\/p>\n

\u2018Everyone has to have an opinion; journalists are going to be asking you about it which helps enormously.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2018And I discovered that in that conservative world, there are also people who want to make the world a better place in their lifetimes, who want things to change. They operate under the radar. They have a political mindset and make sure that decisions get taken and that their bosses can keep some backbone when Shell rings them up. They avoid publicity, but I hope that in ten years or so we can all have a drink together and I can tell them that what they did was really important. To me, they\u2019re the silent heroes of this story.\u2019<\/p>\n

Van Baal\u2019s 2015 performance in the Circustheater entailed nothing more than an appeal to Shell on behalf of a few hundred Follow This green shareholders. For the 2016 meeting, he wanted to submit a resolution that the meeting would have to vote on. Van Baal says, \u2018Then you\u2019re on the agenda. Everyone has to have an opinion; journalists are going to be asking you about it which helps enormously.\u2019<\/p>\n

To be eligible to submit a resolution, however, Follow This had to have \u20ac5 million in shares. Van Baal managed to find ten shareholders who were each willing to register half a million euros\u2019 worth of their stock with Follow This (including Bob Cr\u00e9bas, dance-event mogul Duncan Stutterheim, and Bart Manuel) and another hundred people who each owned one symbolic share. But it wasn\u2019t that simple, as it turned out two weeks before the submission deadline. Each of those shareholders, Shell informed them one Friday afternoon, had to maintain a separate portfolio with a bank, with its own account number. At that point, only the ten large shareholders had portfolios; the ninety others who had one share apiece were in one big bloc at Follow This.<\/p>\n

Panic broke out in the Van Baal household. How could they manage to get a separate account number for all those shareholders within two weeks? Salvation came from a friend who played rugby on the same team as a board member of Binck Bank, who immediately went for the idea and wanted to help.<\/p>\n

The managers of the cr\u00e8che were interested right away and wanted to join in. Suddenly I had eight new Follow This members. And they<\/em> were all going to talk to their<\/em> parents as well.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

According to Marijke Voerman, \u2018Over the next few days, our house was transformed into the headquarters of a well-oiled operation. We were at the dining-room table with five faithful friends, phoning all the shareholders until late into the evening.\u2019 They couldn\u2019t talk about anything else any more. Van Baal told his story with passion at a party at his son Barend\u2019s cr\u00e8che. \u2018The parents of the other children were interested right away and wanted to join in. Suddenly I had eight new Follow This members. And they<\/em> were all going to talk to their<\/em> parents as well.\u2019<\/p>\n

And it worked. At the end of those two weeks, Maarten Bax, a young volunteer with Follow This, boarded a plane (there was no time for a boat or train) in order to deliver a folder containing signed documents and copies of share portfolios to Shell\u2019s statutory headquarters in London. \u2018The company secretary was amazed that we had done this in two weeks,\u2019 says Van Baal, still visibly proud.<\/p>\n

Gooseflesh<\/h5>\n

The Follow This resolution didn\u2019t pull any punches. From now on, Shell would invest its profits from oil and gas in sustainable energy. Far-reaching resolutions like these are a rarity in the investment world, since they put the shareholders in the driver\u2019s seat as it were. Nevertheless, before the meeting Van Baal got a phone call from his contact at Actiam. They would be voting in favour of the resolution, making them the first large pension fund to support Follow This. \u2018I got gooseflesh,\u2019 says Van Baal. \u2018I thought, \u201cYes! It\u2019s going to work!\u201d.\u2019<\/p>\n

Who wouldn\u2019t want to fill their tank with petrol from a company that was investing in sustainable alternatives?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On 24 May 2016, Van Baal once again was the spokesperson at the shareholders\u2019 meeting, where he soon found himself in a lively exchange of words with Ben van Beurden. Van Baal started by complimenting the company for going in the right direction with measures such as giving up its ambitions to drill in the North Pole, and aiming to build wind farms in the North Sea and invest in solar and wind energy.<\/p>\n

These are all steps in the right direction, said Van Baal, but wouldn\u2019t the company like to take it one step further? Not by stopping oil and gas production today, but by deciding not to make any new investments in exploring for fossil fuels. Imagine if you threw all of your efforts into sustainables, he said. Wouldn\u2019t that be inspirational? Who wouldn\u2019t want to fill their tank with petrol from a company that was investing in sustainable alternatives?<\/p>\n

Van Beurden was his affable self that day. Although he understood the feeling very well, he said, going along with the proposal would lead to \u2018value destruction\u2019 or even the end of the company. And that couldn\u2019t have been what Van Baal wanted. Yes, the company was making a transition, but all the parties in society would have to work together to bring it about. It wasn\u2019t Shell\u2019s job to solve everything; consumers also had a part to play. And so Shell\u2019s board recommended a No vote on the Follow This resolution. Despite this, 3% of the shareholders voted in favour of the text, including asset manager Actiam.<\/p>\n

Much too activist<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Van Baal was sitting in the hall with five volunteers from Follow This and a hundred or so green shareholders. One of them was Rob Hulsman (50), by day the controller at a multinational company. Hulsman and Van Baal had written the text of the resolution together. \u2018I was flabbergasted that we got 3%,\u2019 says Hulsman. \u2018That\u2019s really very rare. The fact that Van Beurden took several minutes to respond to Mark proved that we were being taken seriously by the top management of Shell. We were clearly on to something; we were on the right track.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Van Baal: \u2018Afterwards we were accused of being much too activist. That it wasn\u2019t appropriate to tell the board of Shell what to do. How could we know? We were in a learning process. But we did get three billion in invested capital behind us.\u2019<\/p>\n

After the 2016 shareholder meeting, Follow This was taken more seriously. Van Baal was no longer dancing alone, and now it wasn\u2019t three other guys but an enormous group dancing with him. Not only were enthusiastic volunteers streaming through the doors, but the doors of the pension funds were opening as well. \u2018In the course of 2016 we had confidential meetings with representatives of those funds and asked how we could word the resolution so that they could get behind it the next time,\u2019 says Van Baal.<\/p>\n

Goldilocks and the three bears<\/strong><\/h5>\n

One of Van Baal\u2019s inspirations was Adam Grant\u2019s book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World.<\/em> Among other things, Grant describes the trials and tribulations of Lucy Stone, a nineteenth-century American women\u2019s suffrage activist. Although Stone herself was a liberal, she sought collaboration with the conservative Woman\u2019s Christian Temperance Union in order to get what she wanted.<\/p>\n

\u2018Her radical idea was that women should get to vote. Ours is that the oil industry should go sustainable. Like them, we\u2019re not stomping on the established order but are trying to change it from within. To get things moving, you have to convince the established order, and if one of them shows that it\u2019s with you \u2013 which in our case was Actiam \u2013 the others will follow.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018After that first resolution, it was clear to us that if we wanted to get more shareholders behind us, we\u2019d have to tone it down a bit.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Van Baal was also inspired by what is known as the \u2018Goldilocks principle\u2019, from the tale of Goldilocks and the three bears. She took the porridge not from the biggest bowl, which was too hot, nor the smallest, which was too cold, but from the one in the middle that was \u2018just right\u2019. \u2018After that first resolution, it was clear to us that if we wanted to get more shareholders behind us, we\u2019d have to tone it down a bit. We came up with \u201cshareholders support Shell in committing to the Paris climate agreement\u201d. It was also kind of a Trojan horse. The essence of committing to Paris comes down to the same thing: we still think that Shell has to use its brains and its billions for the energy transition.\u2019<\/p>\n

While Van Baal was trying to change things from the inside, the Dutch Friends of the Earth, a group called Milieudefensie, filed a lawsuit against Shell. \u2018I think they have a strong case,\u2019 says Van Baal. \u2018They\u2019re using Shell\u2019s rejection of our resolutions as evidence. All pressure to accelerate the energy transition is welcome. Shell can only avert the suit by committing to meeting \u201cParis\u201d.\u2019<\/p>\n

People at the right level<\/strong><\/h5>\n

The Follow This resolution at the shareholders\u2019 meeting in May of 2017 would have required Shell not only to set emissions-reduction targets in line with the Paris Climate Agreement, but also to take responsibility for reducing CO2 emissions by its consumers of petrol, natural gas, and LPG. Shell felt the last goal was unreasonable, since it might hamper their ability to grow in the short term. The Goldilocks approach worked: 6.3% of the shareholders voted for the resolution and another 5% abstained from voting despite the fact that the Shell board had strongly urged a No vote.<\/p>\n

\u2018At this point we\u2019re the most influential shareholders, and it\u2019s tough for Shell that such a small group has so much clout.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That Follow This would be a full-fledged player from now on became clear in the months that followed. Van Baal grew to become a worthy partner in talks with Shell which were held in The Hague [Shell\u2019s Dutch headquarters, ed.], along with former Shell vice-president for renewables Robert Kleiburg. Van Baal will not name the people with whom he spoke. \u2018I always say \u201cwith people at the right level\u201d. It doesn\u2019t help the mood to name names.\u2019<\/p>\n

They were real talks, Van Baal emphasises. \u2018At this point we\u2019re the most influential shareholders, and it\u2019s tough for Shell that such a small group has so much clout. The company reasons from a position of power \u2013 they like to talk about how they see the world, and we all have to listen. They say that in the twenty-first century, fossil fuels are still going to be important and that Shell will play an important part. That other companies are much worse and why don\u2019t we take aim at them instead. Shell had indicated it wanted to work with us, but on its terms. We didn\u2019t come to an agreement then, but we\u2019re in talks again.\u2019<\/p>\n

A huge step<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Partly due to the influence of Follow This, on 28 November 2017, the company made a remarkable move. At its annual meeting of large investors and analysts in London, Van Beurden announced that the company intended to drastically lower its CO2 emissions.<\/p>\n

\u2018Shell is the first oil company in the world to do this. They\u2019re leading the industry.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And the reduction would not be limited to the company and its suppliers: for the first time, Shell acknowledged it would also be responsible for the CO2 emitted by the products consumers purchased at its petrol stations \u2013 precisely what Follow This had asked for in its resolution. By 2035 the company aimed to have the relative emissions reduced by 20%, and by half in 2050. However, given the increasing demand for energy, in absolute terms this meant a reduction of only 30%.<\/p>\n

The phone never stopped ringing that day. \u2018I was pleasantly surprised,\u2019 says Van Baal. \u2018Shell is the first oil company in the world to do this. They\u2019re leading the industry.\u2019<\/p>\n

But is that enough? No, says Van Baal, it\u2019s not enough. \u2018Shell has taken a huge step, but the reduction it mentions of about 30% does not meet the Paris Agreement, which requires a 70\u2013100% reduction. Shell keeps saying that it wants to be flexible in a \u201cwhatever world\u201d and therefore not commit to anything. They keep talking about ambitions<\/em>, while we\u2019re asking for targets<\/em>. They don\u2019t want to be leading here but to follow the rest of society.\u2019<\/p>\n

Open letter<\/strong><\/h5>\n

By now, Follow This had the full and open support of large pension funds. In the run-up to the shareholders\u2019 meeting in May of this year, the Church of England, a majority shareholder, wrote an open letter to Shell stating that they were supporting Follow This because \u2018targets are more meaningful than ambitions\u2019.<\/p>\n

There was another open letter in the Financial Times<\/em> signed by asset managers who had invested a total of \u20ac10 billion. They called on all oil companies to make \u2018concrete commitments\u2019 and also asked them to make it clear how their investments were in line with the targets set in Paris. Van Baal: \u2018The large asset managers see very clearly that their investments worldwide are in danger from climate change.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018At Aegon (an insurer, ed.] they said literally that halving emissions is not enough, that the net CO2 emissions must be headed toward zero by 2050, and that we can\u2019t get any yields in a world that is over 2\u00b0C warmer. Big financial institutions aren\u2019t only concerned about socially responsible entrepreneurship and doing good for the world. Their attitude to oil companies is informed by a strong financial incentive.\u2019<\/p>\n

Shell did not go along with the demands. The company stated that if they were forced to take measures, it would \u2018not be in the best interest of Shell or its shareholders\u2019.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re moving with society when it comes to sustainable energy.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This year, Shell will invest \u20ac25 billion in exploration of new oil and gas reserves, and from 2020, only \u20ac1\u20132 billion in new sustainable energy sources. In October of this year, Van Beurden announced unambiguously during a meeting with investors that the future of Shell in the next few years is firmly linked with oil and gas. \u2018We\u2019re moving with society when it comes to sustainable energy.\u2019<\/p>\n

Van Baal: \u2018We still have a battle to fight. Apparently we need more support from shareholders.\u2019<\/p>\n

Proposal for philanthropists<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Now that Follow This has come so far in a short time, Van Baal is also setting his sights further abroad. \u2018We\u2019re planning to get going with four more large oil companies in May 2019.\u00a0 It\u2019s logical to start in the English-speaking world and Norway, where the threshold for submitting resolutions is low. That gives you companies like BP in Great Britain and Equinor, formerly Statoil, in Norway. But you need money and people who know the local markets. Right now we\u2019re writing a proposal for philanthropists.\u2019<\/p>\n

As long as there\u2019s no change in course by Shell and the rest of the oil industry, we\u2019ll be well over 2\u00b0C. And we don\u2019t want to be there.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In early October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a report in which they pleaded for new, unprecedented changes in energy policy and transportation to avert the worst effects of climate change. According to the scientists, it\u2019s still possible if there is the political will to change things.<\/p>\n

For Mark van Baal, the report underlines more than ever the necessity of continuing with Follow This. \u2018We can stay within the 1.5\u00b0C temperature rise, but companies like Shell will have to show leadership. As long as there\u2019s no change in course by Shell and the rest of the oil industry, we\u2019ll be well over 2\u00b0C. And we don\u2019t want to be there.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This story is translated from Dutch to English by Carrie Ballard and\u00a0Anne Hodgkinson. Read the Dutch version here. In 2013, Mark van Baal was writing a novel. The main character was a man who had had a successful thirty-year career in the oil and gas industry and was at the top of the pyramid. Now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1023,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"class_list":["post-415505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"acf":[],"author_name":"Harm Ede Botje","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vn.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vn.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vn.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vn.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=415505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vn.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415505\/revisions"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"name":"Harm Ede Botje","href":"https:\/\/www.vn.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/1023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vn.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=415505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vn.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=415505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}