Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Über green Apple Corporation apparently plans to use a legal technicality to block a demand by shareholders that all activities, including manufacturing by third party suppliers, be included in a commitment to zero net CO2 emissions by 2030.
How Apple Could Block Climate Change Vote: SEC Limits Shareholder Power
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The Securities and Exchange Commission told Apple that the company would not face sanctions if executives blocked shareholders from voting on a non-binding proposal to eliminate Apple’s climate-related pollution — in effect, allowing Apple to disenfranchise its own stockholders without fear of punishment.
“The proposal seeks to micromanage the company by probing too deeply into matters of a complex nature upon which shareholders, as a group, would not be in a position to make an informed judgment,” SEC special counsel Evan S. Jacobson said in a December 5th letter to Apple executives, informing them that regulators would not recommend enforcement action if the company omits the resolution from its proxy materials, thereby preventing a vote.
… the company says it is moving towards its “goal to run 100 percent of its worldwide operations on renewable energy and lead the way towards reducing carbon emissions from manufacturing.”
That stated goal was cited by Christie Jantz, whose Boston-based firm specializes in socially responsible investments, in her push for the shareholder resolution. The initiative proposed to let shareholders cast an up-or-down vote on a resolution saying, “shareholders request that the Board of Directors generate a feasible plan for the Company to reach a net-zero [greenhouse gas] emission status by the year 2030 for all aspects of the business which are directly owned by the Company and major suppliers.”
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“The company is not in a position to require its major suppliers to change their business operations to reduce their emissions or engage in other operations to offset their emissions,” Levoff wrote. “Because the Company cannot compel its major suppliers and regulatory agencies in countries where they operate to take action on carbon emissions as requested by the proposal, it is impossible for the company to produce the plan without intervening actions by third parties.”
Green businesses are often accused of using offshoring of jobs to sweep emissions under the carpet. The CO2 emissions still occur, but they happen out of sight. Companies greenwash their business activities by closing US factories and offshoring jobs to countries which either don’t monitor emissions, or countries like China which get free pass from greens, because they are considered to be a “developing” nation.
This Apple legal manoeuvring in my opinion is yet another example of callous corporate green hypocrisy. Apple could fully manufacture their products in the USA, and in doing so provide new manufacturing jobs for 10s of thousands of Americans, but to do so might mean increased scrutiny of their supply chain and business operations, particularly their now rather tarnished claims that they care about CO2 emissions.
‘Block Climate Change ….’ –
diminish to a ‘social conflict’
Diminishing to social stress.
Anyone want to buy an abacus, slide rule and/or book of logarithmic tables?
That brings back memories.
What’s worrying here is the hypocracy, or is it double standards, or lying or mind blowing stupidity?
The shareholders say they want ‘green’ but by the definition of being shareholders, they want money. They want their investment(s) to grow or yield dividends.
Where the fook do they think this extra money is coming from, if not via the age old process of ‘adding value’?
IOW, taking A Resource and doing work or expending energy on it to increase its value.
As we all recognise, ‘recycling’ is the biggest joke of all, expending time/money/effort on worthless junk like paper/plastic/glass. Unless your time & energy are remarkably cheap – as per China for example.
But we’re talking very high tech semiconductors here. A figure I recall from 2 or 3 years ago said that it took as much energy to manufacture one single Large Scale Integration chip (eg a graphics controller or memory chip) as the energy used by the entire computer it was installed in over the typical 3 year life of that computer.
Look in your laptop, there might be 16 such chips making up a SODIMM memory card and thats before you’ve got a processor, graphics, screen controller, HDD, DVD drive or even plugged a mouse into it.
Maybe not so many in a phone but still a massive expenditure of energy for the chips in there plus the screen – none of which are, or even can be, recycled.
Do these green folks realise this? Are they wilfully dumb or just plain dumb?
Then look at all the infrastructure to make the phones work, networking & servers & switches etc. Recently the good ol’ BBC admitted it burned more kWh running servers ‘broadcasting’ its iPlayer over the internet (maybe 1M consumers) than it used powering its entire conventional broadcasting network = masts, repeater stations broadcasting to 60M consumers.
Do such things even register in people’s minds…..
They register in the minds of those running google, amazon, apple, etc who are all working at driving their operations on 100% renewable electricity… especially their server farms.
That is what they are telling YOU, Griff, because YOU want to hear it. That YOU believe they are actually doing it will certainly warm the hearts of executives in the marketing department. The production departments will be saying, internally, “No. This will ruin us.”
Griff really does believe his own propaganda.
No company with a brain is going to hamstring themselves if they don’t have to… even if they have publicists that try to make you think so.
Especially when there’s no viable reason to, other than hysterical greenies.
It’s so much easier to just tell the Greenies that you agree with them, but do nothing.
As Griff demonstrates, as long as he has a press release to point to, he’s happy.
So SEC rules that the stockholders do not own the company – that the executives do?
The corporate rules are probably same as in the UK. The shareholders own the company and a share of rights to profits. And they can vote to decide who sits on the board of directors. But directors rule and run the company. Their first legal responsibility is not to the the shareholders, but to the company itself, which in many respects has rights like individual people also have rights.
No, they ruled that the executives run the company. If the shareholders want to run the company, they can change the charter.
CAGW will stay a symbol like ISIS.