| Shareholder activism rests on shaky legal ground, which is actively being eroded by the current administration. Generally speaking, shareholders are not considered legal owners of the companies in which they invest and they have little legal right to influence those companies. Shareholder powers, as enshrined in court decisions, basically come down to the decision to buy/sell the security, and voting for directors. But even directors have little legal authority to direct the operations of a corporation--that's the job of management. The job of directors is to hire the CEO and provide oversight, which is itself a limited role. Fundamentally, securitization of the public corporation is not constructed to enable democratic control of corporate operations. Corporations are set up to respond to democratic action (i.e. the collective will of the populace) in two ways: purchase decisions from their customers, and the legal duties placed upon them by governments. Therefore, IMO public activism is best pointed at boycotts and government policy, to affect the decisions of corporations. EDIT to add: divestment is a form of boycott. If human society is going to reduce its production of greenhouse gases, clean technologies will have to displace greenhouse-gas-producing technologies in the economy. That takes innovation and investment. I slightly disagree with Gates in that every dollar that is divested from fossil fuel companies has to go somewhere else. Even if it is not specifically redirected at cleaner technologies, money is fungible and it will result in the relative growth of the overall pool of investment that is available for cleaner technologies. |