Climate activists have been ramping up stress on companies during shareholder meetings, utilizing varied ways to demand motion on carbon emissions and climate change. These tactics range from asking numerous questions to extra creative approaches, corresponding to singing or even throwing cake at executives.
Volkswagen’s latest shareholder assembly grew to become a focus for activists, with a cake thrown at supervisory board member Wolfgang Porsche as he celebrated his eightieth birthday. Scientist Rebellion activists additionally held up indicators criticising the emissions from the company’s vehicles, while another protester removed her prime in protest of Volkswagen’s operations in China’s Xinjiang area, where human rights teams and the US claim genocide is going on, reported Bangkok Post.
In Paris, Scientist Rebellion members focused BNP Paribas, bombarding executives with questions concerning the European banking giant’s local weather strategy. This led to frustration amongst shareholders, who hurled insults on the scientists. However, BNP executives did reply the questions.
CEO Jean-Laurent Bonnafe, who refused to draw a line regarding companies investing in new fossil fuel fields, said…
“Do not underestimate the targets we now have set.”
Meanwhile, in London, local weather activists disrupted HSBC’s gathering, demanding the financial institution stop investing in fossil gas firms and accusing the firm of mendacity. Executives eventually requested for the activists to be removed. Earlier, a bunch of activists interrupted the Barclays Bank assembly, changing the lyrics to a Spice Girls song to sing “Stop funding fossil fuels and end this madness.”
Lorette Philippot, a campaigner on the environmental group Friends of Earth, defined that shareholder meetings are the place corporations discuss their performance and make new pledges. She said…
“So it’s our position as a counter-power to each tell the truth about their actions and stop this annual display of greenwashing.”
Activist interventions at shareholder conferences usually are not new, but Benedicte Hautefort, the co-founder of financial technology agency Scalens, noted that the “climate concern is rising in a somewhat radicalised way” with “more and extra confrontations, typically violent.”
In the United States, some corporations have avoided confrontation by continuing to hold virtual meetings, such as oil giants ExxonMobil and Chevron and the banking group JPMorgan Chase.
Accessible , senior director for oil and fuel at Ceres, a nonprofit that helps sustainability policies through capital markets, said…