Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment

New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey

Increasingly secular and religious groups alike are using shareholder resolutions as a tactic to address large scale environmental problems like climate change. This tactic has been employed by the Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment since 1975, when Roman Catholic officials brought together congregations from New York, Connecticut and New Jersey with the simple but daunting mission to find a way to collectively bring a sense of responsibility and conscience to corporate behavior. Today, Tri-State is an organization of 35 Roman Catholic dioceses and congregations.

The organization ultimately gets its leverage from the fact that the Church is a significant stockholder in many of the country’s largest corporations. As shareholders, the coalition members can petition the companies to provide certain services -- particularly information -- on behalf of all the stockholders. Over the years Tri-State has negotiated with companies on issues of human rights, labor, ecological concerns, militarism, equality, health and tobacco and international debt and capital flows. Working in coalition with other organizations such as Religious Orders Along the River, Tri-State has been instrumental in forcing General Electric to pay for a clean-up the Hudson River. Over the past couple of years, Tri-State has expanded its focus to include corporate accountability for climate change, successfully targeting large corporations such as ExxonMobil and Ford Motor Company, the country’s second largest automaker.

In 2002, the Tri-State campaign helped bring about a resolution urging ExxonMobil to adopt a plan for investment in renewable energy resources, which garnered the support of 20.3 percent of the shareholder vote at the company’s annual meeting in Dallas -- more than double the 8.9 percent the same resolution achieved the previous year. This success positioned Tri-State to continue to bring pressure on ExxonMobil to face the facts about climate change. “Global warming,” Tri-State Executive Director, Sr. Patricia Daly, OP, says, “represents a grave injustice in that poor people around the planet will suffer the greatest.”

As a result of a shareholder resolution filed with Ford Motor Company in March 2005, Ford announced it will issue a comprehensive report later this year examining the business implications of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, including impacts from possible policy and regulatory changes. Building on previous studies to measure greenhouse emissions from its manufacturing facilities, Ford agreed to examine the strategic and financial implications on the company’s business over the next 5 to 10 years of various policy and regulatory scenarios addressing the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks. The report will focus primarily on the company’s core North American market that accounts for nearly two-thirds of its annual sales. The report also will assess the evolving role of new technologies such as hybrid and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles in light of the climate change issue. It will be the first such report in the auto industry.