The website Follow-this.org is a very slick looking website that tries to convince people to buy shares in Shell in order to influence the policy of the company. It sounds great, for 34 Euro you can buy a share of Shell and maybe get heard at a shareholder meeting. You could do this on the stock exchange as well, although perhaps buying single shares is not possible there.
Follow this hopes to sway Shell towards sustainability. It even quotes Shell CEO Ben van Beurden on their website as saying (supposedly about the transition to renewable energy) :
“There is actually no problem that we cannot solve.”
“It is very important that we keep pace with the energy transition.”
“An organisation that has so many qualities, so much expertise, so much capital, has to be able to reinvent itself.”
(the link associated with the quotes is dead)
But anyone that knows Shell knows that the energy transiton is the one to gas, not to renewables. So these quotes don’t mean anything. You can rely on someone from Shell to make their statements exclusively in the context of Shell.
Shell does not want to transition away from fossil fuels, it works very hard every day on being a fossil fuel company
As far as we know one needs to have at least more than 50% of the shares in a company to wield any power, and that means, with about 3,894.500.000 shares outstanding that means one needs 1947250001 shares. The counter is now at 9380. Maybe you only need 20% of shares to get something to say, but then that is still 26.482.600.000 Euro.
Follow this seems to need about 26 billion Euro in shares to gain influence
But the people of Follow-this (why not call it something with shell in the name?) believe that when 10.000 shareholders are represented in their question for Shell to transition to sustainable energy in 2030, Shell will do that, because “Other shareholders won’t disagree with it”.
The majority of Shell share owners wants the company to do what it is doing
Meanwhile we read that Shell is accused of misleading shareholders about the risk of arctic drilling. The cost in case of an oil spill are astronomical. Shareholders think they should have been told about this risk. This is another way of dealing with Shell, which may be more powerfull because it can lead to large investors shorting the stock (offering it for sale) which may lead to an avelanche effect that can turn out profitable because the shorting investor can buy the stock he owes for a lower price than he/she payed to short. Hedgefunds do this all the time. The problem is however that our entire credit system depends on fossil fuels.
You can’t trigger a short selling avelanche on Shell, it produces the very thing that allows stock markets to exist
But just like a company can’t shift its core business (keep customers return for fuel they burn) into something totally different (renewables where it now hast to compete with an army of existing wind, solar etc. manufacturers), money and banking can’t do without fossil fuels. The whole idea of credit created (as it is today) out of thin air is that the recipient will use the credit to buy fuel, or buy products and services delivered by people who will use the credit to buy fuel. Credit = fossil fuel, we live in a carboncredit world economy.
Money is fossil fuel credit, that is why money can be created out of thin air.
It all works because the gas stations everywhere remain topped up, and that is a result of oil and gas flowing, and that can only happen if oil/gas and coal companies use every second to make that so. Investment banking, the stock markets will disappear when renewables dominate. Credit markets will shrink to zero. Everybody will own their own source of productive capacity : Solar, wind or other forms of renewable energy.
The shift to renewables reduces cashflow, because people no longer buy and sell energy, they own it
The work to be done is destorying the reputation of oil/gas/coal companies, attackin them on every front. The only acceptable life for them is in providing us with the energy to manufacture renewable energy sources, and that only until there is enough renewable energy to produce more solar panels, wind turbines etc. without the use of fossilfuels.
Every weapon to our disposal should be used to get all fossil fuel companies under confrol of the UN
We are already paying an incredible price for the oil/gas/coal lobby against innovations and changes that will undermine the carbon credit economy. The force from the banking system is as motivated. Every inch of progess counts. And playing around with some stocks doesn’t help very much.