Malcolm Moore

Because if you look at BP's performance this year, the shares are up 30%.

You know, you've got a new chair who's clearly very active.

You've got a new chief executive, Meg O'Neill, who just started on the 1st of April.

And they're promising that they're going to pay a lot more attention to shareholder value after years of destroying billions of dollars of shareholder value.

Everyone should be happy.

Instead, they kind of shot themselves in the foot by putting these resolutions out there and also by refusing to allow the climate activists follow this to lodge their own resolution, which basically said, what happens BP to your business if oil and gas collapse?

goes down and you can't sell as much, they basically said, oh, that had been incorrectly filed and therefore they were legally banned not to accept it.

But again, by quashing that resolution and not allowing them to table it, they raised more sort of heckles amongst the people who really care about corporate governance.

And so you had one of their top 10 shareholders coming out and saying they were going to vote against the re-election of the chair, who's only been there since last October.

It's classic BP, basically.

If you rewind a few years, you had climate activists protesting loudly and basically saying, look, if you guys stop supplying oil and gas, then the world will use less oil and gas.

They said it was the moral duty of oil companies to take a stand and to do something.

Now, that didn't work.

And what they're doing now is taking an approach where they're saying BP is failing in its financial duty to its shareholders by not preparing for scenarios where actually the world uses less oil and gas.

What happens if actually electric vehicle take-up is faster than expected?

That's the kind of argument they're making.

Now, whether that works or not remains to be seen.

I wouldn't go that far, Mark, because BP is not going to reverse, right?

They wouldn't have hired Meg O'Neill, who is a former Exxon executive, who faced down years of climate protests at Woodside, the Australian oil and gas company, when she was the boss there, if they were going to go back to renewables.

Meg O'Neill is all oil and gas.