An investor with a very small minority stake in Exxon Mobil won two seats on the oil giant’s board of directors and achieved a historic climate victory.

The first activist investor with a small stake in Exxon Mobil Corp. has achieved a historic victory in the battle for proxy rights with the oil giants, marking the growing importance of climate change for investors.

Engine One, a little-known company, attracted much attention when it began to propose a better plan for global warming to Exxon Mobil in December. The company won the company at its annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday. Two seats on the board of directors. Preliminary statistics.

The result embarrassed Exxon, which is unprecedented in a world where oil is scarce. It shows that institutional investors are increasingly willing to force US companies to deal with climate change. The No. 1 engine, which owns only 0.02% of the shares and has no history of oil and gas activities, can even partly defeat Titan giants like ExxonMobil, the largest crude oil producer in the Western world. This shows how much attention is being paid to environmental issues. In the board of directors of the country’s largest company.

As Exxon Mobil struggled with activists, the vote was also shocking, and the company also criticized the company’s poor financial performance. Exxon Mobil declined to meet with the nominee, and CEO Darren Woods told shareholders earlier this month that voting on them would “damage our progress and endanger your dividends.” The meeting was held. In the first 48 hours, the company even promised to add two new directors, one of whom has “climate experience.”

In other corners of the commodity sector, shareholders this year have been frustrated by the reluctance of executives to implement strict environmental goals. DuPont de Nemours Inc. (DuPont de Nemours Inc.) faced 81% opposition to plastic pollution disclosure, while ConocoPhillips failed to adopt stricter emission targets.

ExxonMobil’s voting results showed clear dissatisfaction with Woods’ strategy, although due to soaring oil prices, the stock’s all-around rebound this year still rose by more than 40%.

With the recovery of cash flow, Woods should be able to continue to improve ExxonMobil’s financial performance, ensure that the S&P 500 Index receives the third largest dividend and maintains the highest loss record set in 2020 in a decade. But the bigger problem is related to ExxonMobil’s energy transition strategy, which is considered by many shareholders to be far behind its European counterparts.

ExxonMobil’s environmental record and unwillingness to accept the transition to clean energy quickly enough were the main criticisms of the six-month agency activity. The San Francisco-based First Engine severely criticized ExxonMobil’s long-term financial performance when it evaluated it, calling it “a decade of value destruction.”

ExxonMobil did not turn to low-carbon fuels and sales power like some other competitors, but bet a lot on carbon capture and storage, this technology is said to require strong government support to achieve.

Engine One said that ExxonMobil’s large-scale CCS hub in Houston “has no substance” and only produced an “advertising blitz”. The fund also stated that ExxonMobil’s climate targets “distorted its long-term emissions trajectory,” and claims that it was consistent with the Paris Agreement “failed the basic test of logic.”

How Exxon pivots remains to be seen, but the message from shareholders is clear: The status quo cannot be sustained.