For our 2008 advocacy efforts, we’re pleased to report a fair amount of progress — never as much as we’d like (we’d like superhero powers), but enough to confirm that shareholder activism remains a potent tool for change.
Climate change. Our shareholder resolution at ConocoPhillips requesting a report on the environmental and social impacts of tar […]

You’ve heard about conflict diamonds. Now get ready for “conflict coltan.” Coltan is an ore mined in several countries including the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Processed coltan yields valuable tantalum, a component in electric capacitors found in cell phones, laptops, DVD players and game consoles.
But tantalum doesn’t come cheap. The U.N. Security Council […]

Poor coal. For so long, it has gotten away with being the largest contributor (41 percent) to global CO2 emissions from energy use, a widespread public health hazard by virtue of lead, mercury and other pollutants, the source of black lung disease, and now we can add deforestation to its achievements. “Coal will be coal,” […]

With all the talk out there about energy efficiency and re­duced use, I can’t help but think of my mom, telling us kids to put on a sweater, the heat would not go up. I laugh at the per­son I’ve become, as I tell my own kids the same thing, adding the environmental commentary that […]

Thanks (presumably) to 34,000 emails vehemently opposing the repeal of shareholders’ right to file non-binding ballot proposals, social investors dodged a bullet this fall. On November 28, the Securities and Exchange Commission failed to follow through on its earlier hints that the rules governing shareholder proposals might be significantly tightened, even to the point of […]

How far up a supply chain should a company be held accountable?
In Carajas in Brazil’s eastern Amazon region, work is scarce and poverty and lawlessness are widespread. Opportunistic hacienda owners lure the desperate and unemployed to distant charcoal camps with promises of work, wages and shelter. Once at the camp, the owners levy illegal […]

Trillium Asset Management Corporation (”Trillium”) will be working with two nonprofit organizations this fall to keep up the economic pressure on the Government of Sudan (GoS).
The “selective divestment” model - developed by the Sudan Divestment Task Force adopted by Trillium - focuses on companies in strategic sectors, whose tax payments or royalties provide major revenue […]

Is AT&T’s Censorship of Pearl Jam a Harbinger of a Less Free Internet?

The competition among banks this year to announce ever larger investments to fight climate change brings to my mind the famous reply given by legendary criminal Willie Sutton when asked why he robbed banks: “That’s where the money is.” That’s one of the prime reasons Trillium Asset Management Corporate teamed up with Friends of the […]

Roughly 15 years ago it became very clear that sweatshop labor was a widespread problem in U.S. corporations’ supply chains. In 1992, Dateline News found nine-year-old children making private label clothing for Wal-Mart. The National Labor Committee exposed unsafe working conditions and child labor at Gap suppliers in Central American plants. A succession […]