VOICE FOR ALL
For friar, win vs. ExxonMobil is biggest since ‘Joe Camel’
In his long battle against corporate America, the Rev. Michael Crosby of Milwaukee just won his biggest victory since Joe Camel ads stopped running 20 years ago. The world’s largest publicly traded oil company has agreed to appoint a climate change expert to its board of directors.
The move follows ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson’s move to the Trump administration as secretary of state, chosen by a president who has labeled global warming a hoax.
And it comes after decades of fighting by Crosby, a Capuchin Franciscan friar who lives and works at St. Ben the Moor — the church perhaps best known for its meals feeding Milwaukee’s hungry and homeless — at the corner of W. State and N. 10th streets near the Milwaukee County Jail.
Crosby has written 18 books on spirituality and theology, but he’s perhaps best known for the pilgrimages he makes each year to annual shareholders meetings of large U.S. corporations.
He’s been doing this since the early 1970s. Over his decades in this business, he’s tried to convince corporations and their shareholders to make change for the good.
Investors should want their companies to do just that, he said.
“By owning shares, people can challenge the companies to convert — to bring about good news for the poor and the planet. That’s what we try to do with socially responsible investing.”
Over the years, he’s had a string of victories, along with coalitions of do-gooder shareholders
who fought Big Tobacco for years.
In the late 1990s, Crosby shifted his focus to climate change when Exxon’s CEO was denying the scientific evidence linking fossil fuels and rising carbon dioxide emissions.
He had a rocky, at times too personal, feud with Exxon CEO Lee Raymond, who during shareholder meetings belittled those with whom he disagreed, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2001.
But change has come to the oil company. The company stopped denying the scientific evidence linking human activities to climate change at a meeting attended by Crosby at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006.
But the company continued to rebuff a series of climate issues and activist shareholders, including Crosby, who has attended ExxonMobil shareholder meetings nearly every year for a generation.
For the past few years, Crosby — who leads the Seventh Generation Interfaith Coalition for Responsible Investment — has pushed a shareholder resolution seeking the appointment of a climate change expert to the board of directors. He’s been joined at the shareholder meetings by other outspoken advocates, including Sister Patricia Daly of New Jersey, representing the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, and the sustainability-focused shareholder advocates from Boston-based Ceres.
The company has argued that a board of directors needs people with a range of views and not someone knowledgeable in just one area.
“Not one person has any expertise on climate,” Crosby told shareholders at the 2016 shareholders meeting in May. “ExxonMobil has a chance to restore the public’s trust; it’s a time for conversion.”
But Crosby won’t have to present the resolution again this year.
On Feb. 1, ExxonMobil appointed a climate change expert, Susan Avery, to its board of directors. An atmospheric scientist, she’s the former president of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
“We’ve been at it for almost 20 years, and with ExxonMobil on this issue we really did have a breakthrough,” Crosby said.
A change in tone
The changing of the guard to Tillerson, now the secretary of state, brought a change in tone — and a change in the stance toward climate change.
To be sure, Tillerson was still all about the fossil fuel business that ExxonMobil derives its revenue and profit from. As Tillerson has said, “We choose not to lose money on purpose.”
But Tillerson’s leadership was accompanied by growing acceptance that climate change poses risks to companies and nations — as well as investigations by news outlets showing that Exxon’s own scientists were doing scenario-planning for a warming world.
The appointment of Avery to the board “is really significant,” Daly said. “It’s big.”
“Many board members have been or are CEOs of companies and financial management firms who have long acknowledged climate risk, and have adjusted their business models because of it,” said Daly. “Adding a board member with climate expertise is just a good business move for this company.”
But clearly ExxonMobil’s business model is focused on fossil fuels and remains so.
Other 2017 shareholder resolutions will continue to push the oil company to assess climate risk and begin planning to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Crosby remains concerned about organizations that receive the company’s support and advocate against policies that would address global warming.
ExxonMobil wouldn’t acknowledge the shareholder resolution when it announced Avery’s appointment to its board, but Crosby took heart that a representative of the company called him the very next morning after she was named and asked him to withdraw the resolution.
Alan Jeffers, an ExxonMobil spokesman, said the company wouldn’t comment on matters involving the shareholder meeting because the proxy statement for this year’s meeting hasn’t been finalized.
“We are committed to effective communications and engagement with shareholders and meet regularly with many shareholders to inform them of the company’s position on various matters and to hear issues of importance to them,” Jeffers said. Tough, not cantankerous
Crosby’s gone head to head with CEOs for years but he’s not cantankerous. A gentle force for good, he brings to his role a combination of a dry sense of humor and a deeply felt passion that companies need to be doing right by the planet and its people.
“He’s creative, he’s stalwart, he’s so insightful. Of course he’s a lot of fun to work with. And he’s a dear, dear friend after many years,” said Daly.
He blends his training in theology with a master’s in economics to meet the business people using their own jargon.
“He tries to understand their business positions and tries to put it in business terms and create a business case for them to justify a difference in behavior,” said Frank Sherman, a retired chief executive who now works alongside Crosby on shareholder advocacy.
“He’s gained credibility because of his persistence over the years,” said Sherman. “His persistence and his faithbased lens that he comes at it with is authentic. That’s recognized by the company and by other companies. He’s been an advocate trying to get the tobacco companies to operate more ethically for longer than the Exxon engagement.”
“He’s put it in their terms but his motivation is for the common good. The common good in addressing all stakeholders is in the company’s financial best interest long term. Maybe not short term, but long term.” Fighting personal battle
Crosby’s friends are hoping the ExxonMobil win isn’t his final victory. He was diagnosed with cancer in the esophagus and abdomen during the last week of Advent.
So instead of joining his colleagues at shareholder conferences last week to discuss the 2017 proxy battles, he’s been heading to Columbia-St. Mary’s for daily treatment.
It’s possible he may not see 2018. Sitting in his office at St. Ben’s, Crosby says that while he’s not rooting for death, he’s fine with it.
Blood clots he sustained after a car crash years ago left him ready for death, a message he reaffirmed when he announced his diagnosis to friends and colleagues through the caringbridge
.com site last month. “When the doctor (following the car crash) told me I might die, my first reaction surprised me: ‘That wouldn’t be too bad.’ This led me to try to maintain the same attitude if I lived and if something like this would ever happen again,” Crosby wrote. “A key element of this involved having no hard feelings in my heart against anyone. It seems this time has now arrived. So, while I am prepared for that day and hour (for which I’m not volunteering) I have no especial desire to postpone it. This gives me great peace.”
Crosby’s gotten plenty of prayers and well wishes, some of them from the tobacco and fossil fuel CEOs he’s sparred with over the years.
“He’s got a huge group praying for him,” said Sherman.
Crosby, who’s about to turn 76 this week, isn’t fading away or giving up. He’s got plenty of energy and has responded well to treatment.
The side effects from chemotherapy aren’t setting him back. So he’s been back on his laptop, firing off ideas for new proxy resolutions.
Feeling stronger than he expected, Crosby’s cogitating about opening a new front in his ongoing quest to get corporations to do the right thing.
This time he’s thinking about ensuring that broadcast media companies show strength in their commitment to accuracy and truth in an era of spin, “fake news” and media bullying.
He hopes to call on broadcast news outlets to create a board of ethicists to ensure that policies are in place to assure their reporting is accurate. And he’d like policies adopted to create on-air disclaimers for pundits and talk show hosts to “make sure that it is clear to the viewer that those are opinions and not necessarily facts.”
“We’ve got to make sure the big media companies don’t cave to intimidation,” Crosby said. “They’ve got to show strength in the face of bullying.”
The Rev. Michael Crosby’s gone head to head with CEOs for years but he’s not cantankerous. A gentle force for good, he brings to his role a combination of a dry sense of humor and a deeply felt passion that companies need to be doing right by the planet and its people.