#Chevron was previously on the divestment list

[butchspace]

BDS has updated their calls for consumer boycotts to include: Chevron (and Texaco and Caltex by extension). Here is their most current boycott list.

They have also officially called for a boycott of McDonald’s. Here is their Instagram post on McDonald’s.

[phoenixyfriend]

It would be great if people stopped using real atrocities as an excuse to hate on a White Girl Brand.

Even BDS does not focus on Starbucks. They haven't mentioned it since 2014.

"I'm boycotting Starbucks in support of Palestine!" No, chance are you saw a chance to talk shit about a brand that's popular and it makes you feel like you're better than everyone else. It gets notes. Why talk about actual boycotts like Chevron and HP and Sodastream and Puma when you can give people an excuse to hate That Popular Thing That Girls Like?

"But they shut down that one group for being pro-Palestine!" They shut it down with political speech as the EXCUSE. That was not about Palestine. It was about unions. That was a union-busting action. Not a political one. It was a stupid union-busting action because of the bad press it got them for supposedly being pro-Israel, but it was about the union. From the corporate perspective, it was about the union. It was a chance to take down one of the unions.

EDIT: Other claims of explicit zionism by the company as a whole have been debunked. The matter of Howard Schultz is more complicated. See below.

Boycott the company for its union-busting. A boycott without a clear message doesn't do shit, and you are wasting your time and energy, and spreading misinformation besides.

You are NOT HELPING PALESTINE by spreading misinformation. Sure, the opportunity to hate on Starbucks is going to mean more people share your past and it goes farther, but it's also going to make them think that boycotting a company that has nothing to do with Israel is going to help, rather than, say, paying attention to the gas pumps they use or the food they eat.

The above image is from the BDS page on economic boycotts. It's official as of early January. This is on the same page:

We must strategically focus on a relatively smaller number of carefully selected companies and products for maximum impact. We need to target companies that play a clear and direct role in Israel’s crimes and where there is real potential for winning, as was the case with, among others, G4S, Veolia, Orange, Ben & Jerry’s and Pillsbury. Compelling large, complicit companies, through strategic and context-sensitive boycott and divestment campaigns, to end their complicity in Israeli apartheid and war crimes against Palestinians sends a very powerful message to hundreds of other complicit companies that “your time will come, so get out before it’s too late!”

Many of the prohibitively long lists going viral on social media do the exact opposite of this strategic and impactful approach. They include hundreds of companies, many without credible evidence of their connection to Israel’s regime of oppression against Palestinians. Many do not have clear demands to the companies as to what we expect them to do to end the boycott, making them ineffective.

I'm not saying that Starbucks SHOULDN'T be held accountable for using the Gaza war as a point of contention in their unrelated union situation. It was a shitty thing to do, and incidentally and indirectly supported Israel.

EDIT: I've been given some information on how Howard Schultz, the CEO, has investment ties to Wiz and other Israeli companies that are actually involved with current events. This is significantly more than I was previously finding. If you choose to boycott for this reason, have at ye.

However, I do still hold to my stance that companies ACTUALLY BEING TARGETED by BDS should be the ones name-dropped in posts that feature calls to action. It's a matter of efficiency and effectiveness. The more people that are led to believe that Starbucks is the biggest bad in the room, the less people will join in boycotts and divestment of McDonald's, Papa John's, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Wiz, Airbnb, Caterpillar, Chevron, and all the other companies that BDS is saying are actually important to stop giving money to.

Back to the original post.

But.

BUT

The proliferation of specifically anti-Starbucks rhetoric as a supposed form of pro-Palestine Action is overshadowing ACTUAL ACTION. If every single post about boycotting to support Palestine mentions Starbucks, and maybe Puma or Sodastream, but doesn't mention any of the two dozen other companies that BDS states are actually crucial to making a change, including other American food franchises (that just do happen to be more stereotypically boy-popular, like pizza and burger chains), then you are ACTIVELY taking away support from the boycotts that matter.

And the reason this happens is because "Starbucks bad" feeds into the confirmation bias for people that already dislike it for being popular or overpriced or not to their taste.

So take a step back. Ask yourself, "am I boycotting Starbucks because I actually believe it will help and am listening to groups like BDS, or am I just using this as an excuse to badger people into avoiding a franchise I already dislike?"

Okay? We on the same page?

Great. Now check if your local Starbucks is unionized, if their union is asking customers to boycott THEM, and then maybe boycott anyway.

But check if it's actually doing something or just distracting you from real activism, first.

[xtruss]

Sly As A Fox: How Wilbur Ross Slipped Out Of Scandal And Back Into Business

— Dan Alexander, Senior editor at Forbes, covering Donald Trump's business | April 21, 2021

Fresh off a years-long ethics investigation, Trump’s commerce secretary is back in business with a new SPAC—which he created while still in office.

ON JANUARY 19, 2021, while still serving as the U.S. secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross set up a new company in the Cayman Islands. The business had no operations, but it did have big plans. It was a special purpose acquisition company, or a SPAC, which would allow Ross to raise more than $300 million from investors.

If you are surprised that a cabinet member might set up such a company while still technically in office—Ross’ term didn’t end until the next day, January 20—then you might need an introduction to the former commerce secretary. Three former colleagues have accused Wilbur Ross of taking or stealing their private equity interests. In 2016, the Securities and Exchange Commission fined his firm, WL Ross & Co., for allegedly breaking laws that prohibit misleading investors and defrauding clients. While in office, he issued false statements, held ethically dubious meetings and engaged in suspiciously timed trading.

But Ross has a knack for slipping out of scandals. He settled the cases with his former colleagues, signing confidentiality clauses to keep the troubles under wraps. Six months after his firm settled with the SEC, he abandoned it for Washington. He managed to operate in government for years, even as his office apparently lied about the existence of a commerce department investigation, then brushed aside its findings when they finally came out in December 2020.

Ross is now back in business, having found a new set of people willing to trust him—just as he always has. “Wilbur, to me, was the master negotiator,” Ross’ former right-hand man, David Storper, explained in a 2019 interview. “Because he could end up picking somebody’s pocket across the table, but they would also end up thanking him for it.”

LIKE DONALD TRUMP, Ross is not just a ruthless negotiator but also a relentless self-promoter. For years, Ross apparently fibbed about the size of his fortune, fooling the world—and some of his own investors—into thinking he had more money than he really did. The ruse unraveled in 2017 after Ross joined the government and filed a financial disclosure report, showing fewer assets than he had previously claimed to own. Rather than fess up to being a mere centimillionaire, Ross doubled down on the myth that he was a billionaire, describing a major asset transfer to family members that did not happen. Those comments sparked additional concerns about whether Ross had disclosed all his assets to federal authorities. On November 13, 2017, a half dozen Senate Democrats wrote a letter to the inspector general of the commerce department, requesting an investigation.

A week later, the investigation began. According to internal notes kept by the inspector general’s team, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, “the Secretary” received a verbal “courtesy notice” just days later. In public, Ross’ team played it cool, acting oblivious to the probe. “We have not been notified, nor are we aware, of a formal investigation by the inspector general,” a spokesperson for the commerce secretary told Forbes in December 2017, nearly a month after the probe began. The inspector general’s office did not refute that statement, sticking to its internal practice of neither confirming nor denying the existence of an ongoing investigation.

President-elect Donald Trump and investor Wilbur Ross shake hands following their meeting at Trump International Golf Club, November 20, 2016 in Bedminster Township, New Jersey. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Other standard practices inside the inspector general’s office fell by the wayside. Inspectors general often take a hands-off approach to investigations, delegating staffing and regular oversight duties to professional bureaucrats in their office. In this case, President Trump had recently nominated the head of the investigative division, Mark Greenblatt, to serve as inspector general of another agency. In an unusual move, Greenblatt, whose nomination was still pending, recused himself from the politically charged Ross investigation. In a second unusual move, Inspector General Peggy Gustafson then inserted herself into his role. “That is what, to me, made the hair on the back of my neck stand up,” says someone inside Gustafson’s office at the time. “I think she wanted to slow-roll it. I think she wanted control of it at all times so she could manipulate the outcome.”

But the allegations against Ross kept mounting. Investigative reporting revealed that Ross had meetings with the CEOs of Chevron, Boeing and railcar manufacturer Greenbrier at the same time he or his wife held interests in those companies. He told federal officials that he divested investments in Air Lease, Invesco and BankUnited, even though he still had stakes in those firms. He worked on trade deals with China, while remaining in business alongside the Chinese government. He even opened a short interest in a gas company tied to Vladimir Putin, after a New York Times reporter contacted him about an upcoming story on Ross’ connections to the business.

It wasn’t until March 2019, nearly 16 months after the investigation began, that the inspector general issued her first subpoena. In October that year, her team finally interviewed Ross. The investigators had a partial draft of their final report in December 2019 and predicted it would be ready for the inspector general to review by February 2020. But it remained buried inside the office until December 2020. When it finally became public, three years after the start of the investigation and a month after the election, few people paid attention. By that point, Biden had been elected, Ross would soon be out of his government job—and the country was more focused on President Trump’s potential power grab than Wilbur Ross’ ethics issues.

“Three years is a very long time, particularly if the investigative interviews were basically concluded after two years,” says Walter Shaub, who once served as the top ethics official in the executive branch. “It certainly creates the appearance of an inspector general delaying an investigation out of fear of retaliation in a year when the president went after other inspectors general.”

First contacted about these concerns in January, Gustafson’s office initially told Forbes it would make a member of the investigative team available for an interview. When the time for the interview came, though, the inspector general’s office rescinded the offer, saying the agent had changed his mind. Gustafson instead responded in writing, confirming that she oversaw the Ross investigation but saying she did not slow-roll it. The Ross probe eventually concluded that the commerce secretary broke federal rules by failing to avoid the appearance of ethical and legal breaches but cleared him of more serious charges.

Ross took a victory lap. “I am pleased that the inspector general’s report puts to rest any notion that I violated the conflict-of-interest statutes,” he said in a statement, later adding that “I have always been and will remain committed to adhering to the highest standard of ethics in the discharge of my duties.”

His actions indicated otherwise. A month later, Ross incorporated the SPAC while still in office—a parting shot at ethics norms on his way out the door. In another statement, his office acted like that was no big deal either: “Mr. Ross took 20 minutes to create this SPAC one day before he resigned.”

IT WAS NOT a forgone conclusion that Ross would dive back into business after leaving the government. At 83 years old, with an estimated fortune of $600 million, other people in his position would have called it a career and spent their final years relaxing by the water in Palm Beach. But the former commerce secretary wanted to get back in the hunt.

He understood the concept of Wall Street’s buzziest trend, SPACs, having launched one in 2014, years before they became ubiquitous in the finance world. SPACs work like this: Managers list a shell entity in an initial public offering, raising a big pile of money that trades like a stock. Generally the managers grab a 20% stake in the entity at the outset, then spend up to two years looking for a private company with which they can merge their publicly traded pile of money. When they find a business, they tell the original investors. Those investors can then ask for their money back or stick around to get a stake in the target company. The two entities merge, allowing the target company to begin trading publicly, with its stock going up or down depending on how well it performs.

Wilbur Ross, Hilary Geary Ross, Melania Trump, Donald Trump, Judith Giuliani and Rudy Giuliani attend the Andrea Bocelli concert at The Mar-a-Lago Club on February 28, 2010 in Palm Beach, Florida. Lucien Capehart/Getty Images

Ross’ earlier SPAC raised about $500 million in 2014 but almost didn’t complete a merger, which would have forced Ross and his partners to swallow the costs of searching for a company to buy. With just a couple of days left in his two-year-long search period, Ross pounced on a chemicals distributor named Nexeo Solutions Holdings. Many of the investors didn’t want anything to do with it, so they elected to redeem their original investment. That sucked about $300 million out of the entity, most of the $500 million it raised at the start.

To plug the hole, Ross and his partners then had to give part of their 20% stake to other investors who, in exchange, promised to hang onto their shares and buy new ones.

When the dust cleared, Ross and his team walked away with nearly 7.1 million shares of the merged company, for which they had paid an average of $3.01 apiece. Not bad considering that Ross’ initial investors had paid $10 to get one share and one warrant.

In February 2017, Ross resigned his position as chairman of Nexeo to become secretary of commerce. Those who got in at $10 couldn’t have been happy a month and a half later when, with the shares trading at $8.84 and the warrants priced at 69 cents, Ross dumped his personal stake for an estimated $44 million. A nice payday, especially for a guy whose remaining original investors had lost 5% of their money over three years (while the S&P 500 had climbed 20%).

Ross is now in position to repeat the trick, following the same cynical playbook that he—and plenty of others like him on Wall Street—have used to pad their wallets. Ross’ team has already grabbed a 20% interest in the new SPAC, paying next to nothing for it. Ross seems to have set himself up to skim smaller, almost trivial sums on top of that. A March prospectus showed that the SPAC would be paying “an affiliate” of the sponsor $10,000 a month for office space, secretarial and administrative services. The document specifically states that the payments include the cost for maintaining headquarters at 1 Pelican Way in Palm Beach, which appears to be Ross’ personal home. When asked about this, Ross said the SPAC would not pay rent but would cover incremental costs.

Given that the SPAC has no real business yet, it’s mostly just a bet on the team, which includes Ross, two of his old private equity colleagues, a couple of former underlings at the commerce department, a British lord who served on the board of Ross’ previous SPAC and Larry Kudlow, the TV talking head that Trump tapped to be director of the National Economic Council. Ross serves as chairman and, lest there be any confusion of who is in charge, the SPAC’s ticker symbol is “ROSS.”

That branding might help draw some Trump fans, but it probably won’t appeal to those who know Ross’ recent track record. After a well-timed rollup of the steel industry in the early 2000s, which propelled his first two funds to amazing returns, Ross hasn’t fared so well. His third major fund, which dates to 2005, lost investors an average of 5.3% of their money annually. His firm’s fourth significant fund, which started in 2007, returned a decent 7.3%. Its fifth, which began in 2011, returned just 1.6% despite operating through the longest bull market in American history.

“When you think about that type of a guy coming to market and then still trading on his name to get this done, it just kind of blows your mind that it’s even possible,” says one former WL Ross investor. “It’s a total joke. I’ve never trusted the guy. I don’t have any faith that that guy can generate any sort of outsized performance.”

The recent popularity of SPACs could make it even harder for Ross to generate high returns, since he’ll now be competing with a crowd of others looking for similarly structured deals.

IPO investors may be having second thoughts about putting their money with an ethically challenged, recently struggling manager. But they do have a way out. Ross’ original investors can redeem their shares at the time of the merger, just as so many did in his previous SPAC. The more people who demand their money back this time, the more Ross will presumably have to replace to complete the merger. The more money he needs, the more deals he might have to strike to entice new investors. He and his partners could theoretically end up having to forfeit most of the 20% stake they grabbed at the outset.

Or put it another way, if everyone flees, then the fox—who has always seemed to find more prey—will finally be left without a feast.

[olko71]

New Post has been published on All about business online

New Post has been published on http://yaroreviews.info/2019/10/investors-get-lost-in-big-oils-carbon-accounting-maze

Investors get lost in Big Oil's carbon accounting maze

Your ads will be inserted here by

Easy Ads.

Please go to the plugin admin page to set up your ad code.

LONDON (Reuters) – Wide variations in the way oil companies report their efforts to reduce carbon emissions make it difficult to assess the risk of holding their shares as the world shifts absent from fossil fuels, senior fund managers say.

FILE PHOTO: Visitors walk through a maze at an amusement park at the “Ponomaryovo” farming enterprise in the settlement of Krasnoye in Stavropol region, Russia July 19, 2017. REUTERS/Eduard Korniyenko/File Photo

Investors have poured money into so-called sustainable funds, which take into account companies’ environmental, social, legal & other standards, & funds are under pressure from their customers & authorities to make those standards robust.

Fund managers are in addition applying environmental, social & governance (ESG) criteria more widely in traditional investments to assist them judge how companies will fare over the long term.

There is a growing realization that some companies’ profits will shrink faster than others as governments prioritize low-carbon energy to meet the U.N.-backed Paris agreement’s goal of cutting emissions to “net zero” by the end of the century.

But oil & gas companies are among the biggest dividend payers, & major funds are reluctant to divest from them, arguing that by staying in they are in a better position to pressure companies to improve.

“Do investors have the data that we need? No, I don’t think we have the data that we need at all,” said Nick Stansbury, investment strategist at British insurer Legal & General’s investment management unit, Britain’s biggest asset manager with around $1.3 trillion under management.

“Disclosure is not necessarily so we can seek to alter the numbers, yet so we can start understanding & pricing the risks,” Stansbury said.

“A THOUSAND WAYS TO PARIS”

There are many voluntary initiatives & frameworks to unify carbon accounting & target setting; some overlap yet none have been universally adopted. Further projects exist for other greenhouse gases such as methane.

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol is one such set of standards, established by non-governmental organizations & industrial groups in the 1990s.

Companies can report their progress in line with these standards through non-profit CDP, previously known as the Carbon Disclosure Project, which then ranks them. Norway’s Equinor comes first in its list of 24 oil major companies, yet not all of them report in every year.

(GRAPHIC: Big oil ranking by the CDP – here)

There is in addition the Task Force on Climate related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), created by the G20’s Financial Stability Board, as well as industry bodies, in-house models at oil firms & banks & third-party verifiers & consultants.

“There are a thousand ways to Paris,” London-based BP’s (BP.L) Chief Executive Bob Dudley said at a Chatham House event earlier this year referring to the 2015 accord aiming to keep global warming well below 2 degrees.

BP Finance Chief Brian Gilvary told Reuters BP would welcome more consistency within the sector to show what oil companies are doing approximately emissions & that an industry body, the Oil & Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), was discussing carbon accounting.

A plethora of third party ESG verifier companies were emerging with varying ways of measuring ESG metrics, he said, adding that some such firms would say to an oil company, “We believe your score is this, and, by the way, whether you spend $50,000 we’ll show you how you can improve that score.”

UBS, with $831 billion of invested assets, has $2 billion in its Climate Aware passive fairness strategy, which is in part based on a company’s emissions reporting.

In that strategy “we tilt towards companies that are better performing on a range of climate metrics & absent from companies that do not perform so well in this respect,” Francis Condon, executive director for sustainable investing, said.

“We don’t want to be accused of greenwashing or falling for it,” he said, adding that UBS regularly encouraged companies to prepare for the climate transition.

Using a broad measure, global sustainable investment reached $30.1 trillion across the world’s five major markets at the end of 2018, according to the Global Sustainable Investment Review. This equates to between a quarter & half of all assets under management, due to varying estimates of that figure.

Condon said most investors were still more focused on returns than wider sustainability criteria yet were fitting concerned that companies may expose them to possible future climate-related financial losses.

“There is a very limited appetite for giving up performance for higher ESG. The question is more: is management taking on risks it can’t manage?”

To try to reply that question, the world’s biggest financial service providers are investing in companies which provide ESG-related data.

Your ads will be inserted here by

Easy Ads.

Please go to the plugin admin page to set up your ad code.

This year alone, Moody’s bought Vigeo Eiris & Four Twenty Seven, MSCI bought Carbon Delta & the London Stock Exchange bought Beyond Ratings. S&P acquired Trucost in 2016.

Independent climate risk advisors Engaged Tracking say they attracted two-thirds of their clients in the past year. All six companies provide data, assessments & consulting on the climate exposure of companies or bonds.

HOW TO COUNT

A central issue, discussed at European oil majors’ shareholder meetings this year, is how they deal with the emissions caused by the products they sell, such as gasoline or kerosene, which are known as Scope 3 emissions.

(GRAPHIC: Oil Majors’ Carbon emissions – here)

Such emissions are typically around six times larger than the combined emissions from oil companies’ direct operations & power supply, in addition known as Scope 1 & 2 emissions, according to Reuters calculations.

Even whether a company publishes Scope 3 data, there are 15 different categories based on the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. These include use of sold products such as fuel alongside secondary factors such as commerce travel or employee commuting.

Constantine Pretenteris at Engaged Tracking said some companies achieved a high score for comprehensiveness by disclosing data for most of the Scope 3 categories, yet left out the key ones, such as emissions from use of their fuel.

“We would love to see a general standard which makes comparisons easy,” Sven Reinke of Moody’s said. “It doesn’t fully exist these days.”

RELATIVE OR ABSOLUTE

The majority of climate-related targets are based on intensity measures, which means absolute emissions can rise with growing production, even whether the headline intensity metric falls.

Total recorded Scope 3 emissions from the world’s top public oil companies are still rising, largely due to rising oil & gas output, according to Reuters calculations based on data carried on Refinitiv’s Eikon platform & company websites.

They showed combined Scope 3 emissions recorded by BP, Royal Dutch Shell(RDSa.L), Exxon Mobil (XOM.N), ConocoPhillips’ (COP.N), Chevron (CVX.N), Eni (ENI.MI), Total (TOTF.PA), Equinor (EQNR.OL) & Repsol (REP.MC) rose around 1.6% over 2018, after a 1% similar rise the preceding year.

Individual figures vary according to the metrics a company chooses to include. Conoco said its Scope 3 emissions had fallen 5%, while the other companies’ individual recorded Scope 3 emissions either rose or stayed roughly the same.

Asked for comment, BP & Chevron pointed to absolute targets related to their own operations. Total pointed to progress it had made towards lowering emissions intensity per unit produced. Shell & Repsol referred to their short-term intensity-based targets & Equinor said it could not take responsibility for emissions it does not control.

U.S. firm Exxon did not reply to a request for comment. Eni had no instant comment.

Top oil companies have boosted investment in renewable energy & low-carbon technology in recent years, particularly in Europe, yet much bigger sums are still going into developing oil & gas.

“We cannot alter the patterns of consumption around the world – we cannot make people fly less. We can reduce the carbon intensity of the products we sell,” Shell Chief Executive Ben van Beurden said in June.

Mark Lewis from BNP Paribas & a member of TCFD, said overall cuts were what would count in the end. Repsol is currently the only major oil company to have set absolute reduction targets for all its output.

“The Paris Agreement is all approximately a carbon budget & that’s an absolute number. It’s not an intensity number,” Lewis said. “The atmosphere works in terms of absolutes not intensity.”

In the meantime, some investors are avoiding oil companies which others say should be supported for going further than many of their peers.

London-based investment management firm Sarasin & Partners said in June it was selling down its stake in Shell because its spending plans were out of synch with international climate targets.

FILE PHOTO: Visitors are reflected in the installation Mirror Maze by artist Es Devlin, at the Copeland Park in Peckham, south London, Britain September 21, 2016. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth/File Photo

Asked for comment, Shell pointed to comments from representatives of the pension funds of the Church of England & Britain’s government Environment agency, which praised the company’s transparency & said others should follow its lead.

(GRAPHIC: European Carbon prices – here)

Editing by Philippa Fletcher

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Your ads will be inserted here by

Easy Ads.

Please go to the plugin admin page to set up your ad code.