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What You Care About · Dependency ReportBeta

How far does reducing climate change depend on shareholder democracy?

Written September 22, 2026 by claude-opus-5 · method 1.4

Pivotal

Owners voting their values can deliver most of this outcome.

Emissions are concentrated in a small number of companies. The Carbon Majors database traced 34.7 gigatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in 2024 to 166 oil, gas, coal and cement producers, and found 32 companies behind more than half of global fossil carbon dioxide that year. Seventy percent of fossil carbon dioxide since the industrial revolution traces to 178 producers. Concentration of that kind is what makes a vote worth casting: there is a room where the decision is taken, and owners are entitled to be in it.

The hardest fact for this rating is that most of that production is state-owned: 54 percent of 2024 emissions against 23.7 percent for the 93 investor-owned companies, and seventeen of the twenty largest emitters are controlled by governments that opposed the fossil fuel phase-out at COP30. This report states that at full strength rather than around it. What it does not show is that those emissions are beyond a shareholder vote. That oil is financed, insured, shipped, refined and sold by listed companies, the world's 65 largest banks put $906 billion into fossil fuel companies in 2025 and $8.7 trillion since the Paris Agreement, and the American trade associations lobbying against the transition are funded by listed members.

Owners have already moved this once. Three directors nominated by Engine No. 1 took seats on ExxonMobil's board in 2021 on the strength of votes cast against the board's own slate. Climate proposals since have lost ground, drawing 10.5 percent at ExxonMobil in 2023 and 9.6 percent at Chevron, which is the state of a campaign rather than the shape of the dependency. And the clearest evidence of what the vote is worth comes from the company that tried to stop it: in January 2024 ExxonMobil sued two of its own shareholders to keep a climate resolution off the ballot, pursued the case after they withdrew the proposal, and was dismissed only when one of them promised never to file such a resolution again.

No person has reviewed this report. Every claim was checked against the page it cites. If we got something wrong, tell us. How we score dependency.

What owners can do

Vote against directors at ExxonMobil and Chevron where the board has resisted emissions targets, which is the lever that worked in 2021 when three Engine No. 1 nominees took seats
Vote for climate lobbying disclosure, so the company has to say what the American Petroleum Institute and the Chamber of Commerce are asking for in its name
Vote for underwriting and financed-emissions targets at banks and insurers, which is where a vote reaches the barrels a vote cannot reach directly
Vote alongside Follow This, Arjuna Capital, Majority Action and As You Sow, the organizations with climate resolutions on the record at these companies

Where this sits on our maps

Organizations to know

Follow This Association (shareholder advocacy on record) Files the Scope 3 resolutions at the oil majors
Arjuna Capital (shareholder advocacy on record) The shareholder ExxonMobil sued over a climate proposal in 2024☆ Follow
Majority Action (shareholder advocacy on record) Runs director accountability campaigns at ExxonMobil on climate oversight☆ Follow
As You Sow (shareholder advocacy on record) Files underwriting and financed-emissions resolutions at insurers and banks☆ Follow
InfluenceMap (shareholder advocacy on record) Assesses corporate climate lobbying and maintains the Carbon Majors database
Rainforest Action Network (shareholder advocacy on record) Leads the annual accounting of bank fossil fuel financing
Exxon Mobil Corporation (publicly listed) Where the board election of 2021 and the lawsuit of 2024 both happened
Chevron Corporation (publicly listed) One of the three largest emitting producers not under state control☆ Follow
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (publicly listed) The largest bank financier of fossil fuel companies

Sources

Carbon Majors: 2024 Data Update (Carbon Majors)
Carbon Majors: 17 of the Top 20 Emitters in 2024 Controlled by Countries that Opposed the COP30 Fossil Fuel Phase-Out (InfluenceMap)
US Corporate Climate Advocacy Going Into 2025 (InfluenceMap)
Big Oil's Real Agenda on Climate Change (InfluenceMap)
Global Greenhouse Gas Overview (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)
Sources of Greenhouse Gas Emissions (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)
Global banks financed fossil fuels with $8.7 trillion since the Paris Agreement (Rainforest Action Network)
Exxon Mobil Corporation 8-K/A, Item 5.07, 2021 annual meeting voting results (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission)
Exxon Mobil Corporation 8-K, Item 5.07, 2023 annual meeting voting results (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission)
Exxon Mobil Corporation 8-K, Item 5.07, 2024 annual meeting voting results (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission)
Chevron Corporation 8-K, Item 5.07, 2023 annual meeting voting results (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission)
Notice of Exempt Solicitation: Majority Action on ExxonMobil director accountability, 2024 (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission)
Notice of Exempt Solicitation: Follow This on ExxonMobil, 2023 (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission)
Notice of Exempt Solicitation: As You Sow on Chubb Paris aligned goals, 2023 (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission)
Judge tosses Exxon Mobil lawsuit against activist shareholder Arjuna over climate proposal (CNBC)
Federal court dismisses ExxonMobil lawsuit against activist shareholder (ESG Dive)

About this report

The rating answers two questions: how far the outcome depends on companies changing what they make, how they make it and what they sell, and how far it depends on companies dropping their political influence against it. The higher answer sets the rating: Independent, Helpful, Necessary or Pivotal.

This is the deep report. A frontier model researched it against documents captured as it read them, and every fact it recorded carries an excerpt from one of those documents. Each excerpt was matched to its document twice: on the machine that did the work, and again here. The ratings are analytical judgments under our method, not findings of any organization named here.

36 claims were checked against the document each cites: 36 held and 0 did not.

What we read. 20 documents were held for this report and every quotation was checked against them.

Every claim, and what became of it (36)

Confirmed · The Carbon Majors database traced 34.7 gigatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in 2024 to 166 oil, gas, coal and cement producers, and found 32 companies linked to more than half of global fossil fuel
Confirmed · State-owned companies accounted for 54.0 percent of those emissions and 93 investor-owned companies for 23.7 percent.
Confirmed · Seventy percent of fossil carbon dioxide emissions since the start of the industrial revolution can be traced to the 178 corporate and state producers in the database, and 22 companies account for a t
Confirmed · Five oil majors were forecast to put 3 percent of their 2019 capital expenditure into low carbon technologies while $110.4 billion went into more oil and gas.
Confirmed · ExxonMobil shareholders elected three directors nominated by Engine No. 1 at the 2021 annual meeting, with Kaisa Hietala, Gregory Goff and Alexander Karsner taking seats against the board's own slate.
Confirmed · Two years later a proposal asking ExxonMobil to set a Scope 3 target and reduce hydrocarbon sales drew 10.5 percent of votes cast, while one asking for direct methane measurement drew 36.4 percent.
Confirmed · At Chevron in 2023 a proposal to set a medium-term Scope 3 emissions reduction target drew 9.6 percent, and a proposal to rescind the 2021 Scope 3 resolution drew 1.3 percent.
Confirmed · What a producer extracts and what it spends on extracting more is the outcome itself rather than a step towards it, and the 2021 board election at ExxonMobil settles whether owners can reach that deci
Confirmed · InfluenceMap links the advocacy of five industry associations, the American Exploration and Production Council, the US Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, the National Association o
Confirmed · As of December 2024, 39 percent of United States entities assessed by InfluenceMap advocated on climate in a way misaligned with the scientific recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climat
Confirmed · The American Petroleum Institute issued a five point plan calling for repeal of United States fuel economy and other automotive regulations.
Confirmed · Named associations, named rules and a measured consequence is what this method asks of a political obstacle, and it is on the record here. The associations are funded by listed members, which is the r
Confirmed · On 21 January 2024 ExxonMobil sued its own shareholders, Arjuna Capital and Follow This, seeking a ruling that it could exclude a resolution asking it to accelerate medium-term greenhouse gas reductio
Confirmed · The company pursued the suit after the proponents had withdrawn the proposal and pledged not to resubmit it, and in filing it bypassed the Securities and Exchange Commission's no-action process that a
Confirmed · A federal judge in Texas dismissed the case in June 2024 as moot, after Arjuna Capital gave an unconditional and irrevocable pledge not to file a similar proposal again.
Confirmed · This obstacle is corporate conduct in its purest form: the thing being obstructed is the vote itself. A company that takes its owners to court to keep a resolution off the ballot has made the cost of
Confirmed · Burning coal, gas and oil for electricity and heat is the largest single source of global greenhouse gas emissions, at 34 percent of the 2019 total.
Confirmed · In 2022, 60 percent of United States electricity came from burning fossil fuels, mostly coal and natural gas.
Confirmed · A utility's resource plan, the decision to run a coal unit another decade or to close it, is taken by a company and approved by a state commission. Both have to move, which is what Necessary means, an
Confirmed · Industry accounts for 24 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, covering fuels burned on site and the chemical, metallurgical and mineral processes that emit without combustion.
Confirmed · Cement and steel emit from chemistry as well as from fuel, so the changes needed are new processes and new plant rather than a switch of supplier. Companies decide what to build and when, and a carbon
Confirmed · The world's 65 largest banks put $906 billion into fossil fuel companies in 2025 and $8.7 trillion since the Paris Agreement, with JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and MUFG the three largest funders.
Confirmed · As You Sow asked Chubb shareholders in 2023 to vote for Item 14, a report disclosing greenhouse gas targets aligned with 1.5 degrees for the company's underwriting, insuring and investment activities.
Confirmed · A field that cannot be drilled without capital and cannot be shipped without cover is reached by whoever supplies the capital and the cover. Banks and insurers are listed almost without exception, the
Confirmed · Agriculture, forestry and other land use account for 22 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from cultivation, livestock and deforestation.
Confirmed · The soy, palm oil, beef and timber that clear forests are bought by listed traders, processors and retailers, and what they will buy sets what is worth clearing. Producing-country enforcement and land
Confirmed · Seventeen of the twenty largest emitting Carbon Majors are controlled by governments that opposed the fossil fuel transition roadmap at COP30, and those seventeen produced 38 percent of fossil fuel an
Confirmed · This is the strongest argument against the rating on this page and it deserves stating at full strength: most of the world's fossil production is state-owned, and no shareholder vote reaches a soverei
Confirmed · Carbon Brief's estimate of those rollbacks is 4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030, which the briefing compares to the annual emissions of the European Union and Japan combined.
Confirmed · The three largest emitters not controlled by those governments are Shell, Chevron and ExxonMobil.
Confirmed · The proxy card at that meeting carried the board's nominees and Engine No. 1's, and the results distinguish them.
Confirmed · Follow This was the organization soliciting ExxonMobil shareholders on the 2023 climate resolution.
Confirmed · Follow This solicited Chevron shareholders on the same question in the same season.
Confirmed · Majority Action solicited ExxonMobil shareholders in 2024 on the board's oversight, with the lawsuit against shareholders as its case.
Confirmed · As You Sow was the organization soliciting Chubb shareholders on Item 14.
Confirmed · The Chevron results come from the company's own report of its 2023 annual meeting.

First drafted September 22, 2026, reviewed and republished September 22, 2026. Scoring method revision 1.4.

Which passes have run, and what ran them

The passes can run on different models, so each one records its own. Where a model was asked for by a name that moves, the exact build that answered is shown.

The deep run · September 22, 2026 · Read 20 documents and wrote 36 claims, each with an excerpt from one of them. The run's own verifier repaired 3 and dropped 0 over 1 pass.local runner · claude-opus-5

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