BURN MORE COAL reports: Discussion with Exelon

Steve Milloy | Monday, December 17, 2018 ยท 4:05 PM | Exelon

BURN MORE COAL discussed its shareholder proposal today with Exelon management. Here are is our summary report.

Fred Palmer and Steve Milloy discussed the BURN MORE COAL shareholder proposal with Exelon’s sustainability and investment relations management today. Our proposal requests that Exelon do an annual audit of his its voluntary environmental initiatives to determine whether they are producing real benefits or are just greenwashing.

Exelon’s position was that:

  • Its customers and investors were demanding that Exelon take action to protect the planet from climate change; and
  • It is trying to get out of the electricity generation business in favor of transmission and delivery.

BURN MORE COAL’s position was that:

  • Exelon’s job is to profit from selling affordable and reliable energy versus entertaining the apocalyptic visions of vocal and, likely, activist shareholders and investors;
  • Exelon should not parrot false, misleading and nonsensical information about the environment and climate (see e.g., the image above from Exelon’s “Sustainability” web page);
  • Exelon’s emissions cannot possibly affect global climate and so talking about cutting emissions as if they were meaningful is false and misleading; and
  • Exelon’s ultra vires embrace of apocalyptic climatism was going to help push America into economy crippling, rate base eliminating, job-killing and European-style high-cost electricity.
  • Although Exelon has already exited coal, the climate apocalyptics would next be coming for its natural gas generation. In particular, the coming Democrat-controlled House of Representatives will be pushing the “Green New Deal,” which involves zeroing out fossil fuels by 2030 — like the new gas plants Exelon is relying on.

In response, Exelon said it would ask the US Securities and Exchange Commission for permission to exclude our proposal from its proxy statement.

BURN MORE COAL replied, “See you at the shareholder meeting.”

Our takeaway from the discussion is that Exelon management is heavily invested in politically correct climate hysteria as a fig leaf for its goal of exiting the electricity generation business (destroying it on the way out) and only being in the business of delivering damn-the-consequences high-priced electricity, which will be disastrous for all concerned.