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Rebuffing The Rockefellers
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Yet Goodwin's resolution proposing that the company establish a task force to study climate change and opportunities for Exxon to develop sustainable energy technologies won only 10.4 percent of the votes cast.
The polite but pointed Rockefeller rebellion was an odd historical twist. After John D. Rockefeller Sr. founded Standard Oil in 1870, people in the business disregarded his views at their peril. The Standard Oil Trust either bought up competitors or drove them out of business and ultimately controlled the vast majority of the U.S. oil industry.
In 1911, the Supreme Court broke up Standard Oil. The pieces included Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey (now Exxon), Standard Oil Co. of New York (now Mobil), Standard Oil Co. of Indiana (later Amoco and now part of BP), Standard Oil Co. of California (now Chevron) and Standard Oil Co. (Ohio), later Sohio and now part of BP.
The Rockefeller family holdings have dwindled. Kenneth Cohen, an Exxon vice president, said this year that the family owns only 0.006 percent of the company, but an outside representative of the family asserted that family holdings may be as high as 1 percent when all of its trusts are taken into account.
The largest shareholders of Exxon are institutions, especially those managing pension funds or index funds. Barclays Global Investors owns 4.41 percent, State Street owns 3.56 percent and Vanguard Group owns 3.15 percent. Many of them routinely abstain on shareholder resolutions.
Exxon management lobbied hard in advance of yesterday's meeting to defeat the most popular resolutions.
"If they only spent as much time saying, 'We'll sit down and talk to you' . . . they could have avoided a lot of this," said Sister Patricia Daly, a Dominican nun and shareholder activist based in New Jersey who attended yesterday's meeting.
Though the resolutions were defeated, O'Neill said the Rockefeller clan would continue to press Exxon directors and executives. "They have to get out of their comfort zone and be open-minded and truly look at solving some of these problems," he said. "They're very cautious when drilling a well and that's great. . . . But I personally would still like to see them use some of their brilliance to solve some of these problems. And they'll make more money."
