The following is a guest article from Jerry Bowyer.

[The article from which this excerpt is taken first appeared in World June 1, 2023.]

Yesterday [May 31], ExxonMobil, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, and fellow giant Chevron had their annual shareholder meetings. As has been the case for decades, the ballots of these companies are littered with resolutions by activists that urge them in various ways to stop being oil companies.

It’s almost never packaged as an explicit directive to give up fossil fuels. Most activists take a more gradualist approach, progressively upping the level of demand over time. First, activists pressured companies to make acknowledgments about the alleged role of fossil fuels in global warming. Then came resolutions to study the risks associated with it.

Over time, companies were cajoled by means of requests for assessment of “risk” into confessing to responsibility for various social and environmental harms that allegedly will come if they do not impose on themselves commitments to “net zero” carbon emissions by a certain date. But when companies agreed to some of the activists’ demands, the activists were emboldened, not appeased.

If you’ve agreed, Board of Directors, that your product causes harm and that you will eventually stop selling it, then why not do it faster? ….

Christians should be at the forefront of questioning the rush to throw away the gift of fossil fuels.

Energy companies, banks, tech firms, and now consumer product companies, have been deluged with proposals telling them to lay out, in a myriad of ways, the risks of producing, selling or using the only practical source of energy on which the modern economy runs. This year, however, financial advisor David Bahnsen has started to ask America’s largest publicly traded oil companies to do something else. He has asked them to study and report the risks of not being oil companies any longer.

After so many demands from activists pretending to be looking out for the interests of shareholders, Bahnsen is asking the question that is really looking out for shareholders. In his speech to fellow shareholders he asked “what the risk would be if the company actually gave in to activists’ demands and divested itself from fossil fuels. What if the activists got their wish? What would happen to investors (let alone the world) if the world’s largest investor-owned oil company stopped being an oil company?”

I think we know the answer. It would be financially devastating. [Click here to read the rest.]

Jerry Bowyer is the chief economist of Vident Financial, editor of Townhall Finance, editor of the business channel of The Christian Post, host of Meeting of Minds with Jerry Bowyer podcast, president of Bowyer Research, and author of The Maker Versus the Takers: What Jesus Really Said About Social Justice and Economics. He is also resident economist with Kingdom Advisors, serves on the Editorial Board of Salem Communications, and is senior fellow in financial economics at the Center for Cultural Leadership. Jerry lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, Susan, and the youngest three of his seven children.