Malcolm Moore

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.

But what I would say is that it's unclear whether that strategy is going to transform BP's fortunes.

And somebody said this at the AGM.

They said, how could you pick Meg O'Neill when she was boss of Woodside?

The shareholder returned to that company, underperformed peers, and BP didn't really have an answer.

They just simply said, we took everything into consideration and she's the right person.