Remember George David Banks? He’s the guy who led Trump’s pro-coal event at COP 23. He’s also the energy advisor who had to resign because past pot use supposedly prevented him from getting security clearance (though he apparently never got high…)
Prior Banks’s stint in the administration, he worked for Senator Inhofe and lobbied for Kochy orgs, so it was no surprise that after his less-than-gracious exit from the White House, Banks landed on his feet at a new industry group dedicated to fighting the movement of investors trying to use their financial stake in corporations to address climate change (and lumping this suit-and-tie crowd together with the more fiery divestment movement).
The campaign, Main Street Investors Coalition, is a product of some decidedly non-Main Street institutions: the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Council for Capital Formation and Savings & Retirement Foundation. NAM is one of the most effective anti-climate lobbying organizations, while the other is also a Koch-funded big business lobby.
An op-ed by Banks in The Hill last month gives a glossy overview of the project, but yesterday the Washington Examiner ran a new piece by Banks that makes it clear exactly what the new group is trying to do: pretend to argue in good faith that the divestment movement is counter-productive.
It’s an interesting strategy, sort of, in that Banks admits in the Examiner that “climate change is real and that it poses a serious threat to our world.” The Main Street Investors group, he writes, “has no position on the issue” and “are not opposed to climate action, financial or otherwise.” But what the organization does oppose is shareholder resolutions that threaten the long-term profitability and social license of the fossil fuel industry.
In other words, Banks and his new crew are trying to convince investors to ignore the carbon bubble, but without the sort of baldly stupid denial rhetoric that’s been going around for years.
Shareholder resolutions, like the one requiring Exxon to chart a business path in line with the Paris 2°C goal, allow people who own stocks of publicly traded companies to submit to a vote of all shareholders certain guidelines. It’s key that shareholders bring up the resolutions, then get to vote in these decisions.
Particularly relevant here are resolutions requiring fossil fuel companies to figure out how global climate action would impact their bottom line. If the world takes Paris seriously, the resolutions ask, what would that mean for fossil fuels? (As some have pointed out, even when they do this, it’s hardly sufficient.)
With the bankruptcy of coal companies as a backdrop, these efforts to force oil companies to tell investors how their business would survive a carbon-constrained economy and requires nothing more than companies to inform their shareholders about risks they face.
But Banks and his new group argue that analyzing business plans and providing that information to investors is somehow bad for investors.
That makes about as much sense as a partnership between one of the biggest industry lobbies and a Koched-up group naming itself Main Street Investors.
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