A New Way To Tackle Climate Change - Join Us

Oil companies only listen to their shareholders. Follow This files climate resolutions at oil and gas companies asking them to reduce their emissions to limit global warming to 1.5°C. Their shareholders vote on these resolutions at Annual General Meetings.

Buying a share not only gives you a vote, it also encourages big institutional investors (banks, pensions, insurers, asset managers etc) with millions of votes to follow our lead.The more members we represent, the easier it becomes to show large investors that people all over the world want Big Oil to shift their investments from fossil fuels to renewables

Thanks to the votes of institutional investors in favour of the Follow This Climate Resolutions, Shell, Equinor, BP, Phillips66, and Chevron have all reluctantly accepted accountability for their product emissions (Scope 3 = emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, not just the emissions created in producing them).

And our resolutions have even stood up in court as evidence that indicated that Shell was far from being Paris-aligned or had any intention to devise a strategy that was.

With 99% of shareholders usually voting as they are told by the board, it’s important to recognise how much impact we’ve already had together.

The 2021 Shell AGM saw 30% of votes supporting the Follow This resolution against the advice of the Shell board and we’re only getting started.

In 2015, the founder of Follow This, Mark van Baal, attended the Shell AGM where Ben van Beurden (CEO of Shell) did not take him seriously.

The next year, in 2016, the first climate resolution was on the ballot and Mark was speaking on behalf of a hundreds of shareholders.

They still did not take him seriously.

But this soon changed.

In 2016 the resolution got 3% of votes in favour of it, in 2017, it received 6%.

That was serious enough for Shell to take action and they became the first oil company to announce Scope 3 targets. Ben van Beurden even said: “We could see a kernel of truth and relevance in there,”.

Although Shell reacted negatively to every climate resolution afterwards, the support for the resolution from investors increased and in 2021 30% of investors in Shell supported the Follow This resolution.

The same pattern is noticeable at all other oil companies. We’ve shown that oil majors start taking it seriously as soon as it gets backed up by investors, which is why we need you to add your name to the votes in favour of our resolution.

The more members we have, the more able we are to convince large institutional investors to wake up and use their huge number of votes in support of what more and more people need and want - action on climate change.