[emckay]

Here are the promised citations:

1. $10 trillion divested: https://gofossilfree.org/divestment/commitments/

2. Chevron's shareholder proposal: https://www.asyousow.org/resolutions/2017/12/31/chevron-corp...

3. Chevron makes up about 1% of the S&P 500. 1% * 10% * $10 trillion = $100 million = 78 million shares of CVX at price during 2018 shareholder meeting

4. If 78 million shares voted YES on proposal instead of NO, vote would have passed with 52% in favor (as opposed to 54% in original post)

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Also, for those interested in other arguments against divestment:

1. Economics Nobel Laureate Oliver Hart wrote a paper calling on companies to maximize shareholder "welfare" (including environmental concerns) not just financial value. In this paper he explicitly calls for a fund that uses engagement rather than divestment. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3004794

2. Luigi Zingales (co-author of above paper) calls on UChicago graduates not to divest, but to engage in his 2019 convocation address: https://promarket.org/dear-graduates-heres-what-you-can-do-t...

3. In the New Yorker, philosopher William MacAskill goes into more detail than Bill Gates on why divestment is ineffective: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/does-divestment-...

[strainer]

Does this case extend to general advice though - that people should stay invested in fossil fuel companies in order to regulate them a bit? It should follow that if we invest more in fossil fuel extraction we can regulate them more. It seems to confound reasonable expectations of what results from investment.

[patrickthebold]

I think it's important to note that when you buy shares on the secondary market the company doesn't get any capital. You are just trading ownership for cash with the current owners.

There's a somewhat subtle and pervasive assumption that all owners will seek only to maximize returns (or similar) but that notion really needs to go.

Even with that assumption, it doesn't matter if you own shares in fossil fuel companies since all investors are equivalent.

[scoot_718]

Other than actual share rounds and shareholder meetings, the company doesn't actually see any result from investments.