Column: Oil firms and others face unprecedented pressure to come clean on climate change

Chevron, one of the world’s leading oil companies, got a major wake-up call on climate change from its shareholders May 26. “Investors want to know how a company is preparing for a different world where there’s more regulatory change and more environmental change,” says Ann Lipton, a business law expert at Tulane University who has been tracking corporate responses to these inquiries. The guidelines observed that reportable risks could include “significant physical effects of climate change, such as effects on the severity of weather, sea levels, the arability of farmland, and water availability and quality.” The SEC’s concerns largely evaporated during the Trump administration, which was hostile to any official recognition of climate change as well as to new regulations on business. One reason investors are so interested in more information from managements is that the existing standards of corporate disclosure, based on “generally accepted accounting principles”, aren’t useful for assessing novel threats such as climate change. Clearly, the company’s shareholders remain unhappy with its direction on climate change.” Investors at Exxon Mobil took an even harder stance at that company’s annual meeting, held the same day as Chevron’s.