Following Setbacks, Climate Activists Rethink Their Approach
Summary
That string of disappointing results is forcing a reckoning at some of the sector’s biggest players: “In June, we’re going to revisit our strategy, and think about what’s next for the coming years,” Mark van Baal, the founder of the shareholder activist group Follow This, told DealBook. And it comes despite major investors backing shareholder activists’ efforts: Norway’s $1.4 trillion sovereign wealth fund, for instance, has pledged to side with them on climate issues on the ballot at Exxon and Chevron. The private has become a reliable moneymaker for both chart-toppers and performers well past their prime, Evan Osnos writes in an entertaining, f-bomb-filled article in The New Yorker that opens with Flo Rida, the rapper, playing a bar mitzvah in Lincolnshire, an affluent Chicago suburb. For years, the world of privates was dominated by aging crooners, a category known delicately as “nostalgia performers.” Jacqueline Sabec, an entertainment lawyer in San Francisco, who has negotiated many private-gig contracts, told me, “Artists used to say no to these all the time, because they just weren’t cool.” But misgivings have receded dramatically. Even younger artists don’t fear any stigma from what one agent said is ultimately a situation where “it’s a convention or a party, and you just happen to be making noise at one end of it.” But some continue to resist, Mr. Osnos writes, including Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift and, “for reasons that nobody can quite clarify,” AC/DC.