Flash from InsideClimate News:

ExxonMobil shareholders voted Wednesday to require the world’s largest oil and gas company to report on the impacts of climate change to its business—defying management, and marking a milestone in a 28-year effort by activist investors.

Sixty-two percent of shareholders voted for Exxon to begin producing an annual report that explains how the company will be affected by global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris climate agreement. The analysis should address the financial risks the company faces as nations slash fossil fuel use in an effort to prevent worldwide temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius.
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… [I]nstitutional investors argue that climate risk is a long-term financial risk that should be integrated into financial reporting.

BlackRock, the world’s largest investment firm, with $5.1 trillion in assets under management, and several major global investors—including State Street, Aviva, and Legal & General—have signaled that they want more transparency on climate change risk. BlackRock’s first vote against corporate management on climate came this year against Occidental, where it was the largest institutional investor.
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Patrick Doherty, director of corporate governance for the New York State Office of the State Comptroller, which spearheaded the Exxon resolution along with the Church of England, said that climate is a very real financial concern for the employees paying into state pension funds and looking to payouts decades into the future. The New York State Common Retirement Fund, one of the world’s largest public employees investment funds, holds more than $1 billion in Exxon stock.

“We have a very, very strong financial interest in the long-term health of the company,” Doherty said.

“The average CEO has a tenure of five years, and hedge funds are looking to maybe the next quarter,” he said. “Only institutional investors have this longer view. And one of the reasons that support for climate disclosure has been increasing over the years is more and more institutional shareholders are saying, hey, there can be large long-term risk and long-term damage.”

(The above is the Carbon Tracker 2014 Unburnable Carbon report.)

And regarding the claim that

Oil companies cannot predict the long-term impact of climate and climate policy with enough precision to provide the kind of risk analysis that shareholders are seeking, IHS Markit said. Financial disclosure under securities regulation looks ahead over a much shorter time frame.

what Markit is saying is that the management of fossil fuel companies does not know how to do their job. If that is correct, which I doubt, they should step aside and allow someone who knows how to do it, do it.

See the following links for additional news on this development:

• https://www.reuters.com/article/us-exxonmobil-climate-idUSKBN18R0DC
• http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/31/investing/exxon-climate-change-paris-agreement/
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/05/31/exxonmobil-is-trying-to-fend-off-a-shareholder-rebellion-over-climate-change/
• http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/erin_arvedlund/exxonmobil-shareholders-vote-yes-on-climate-change-analysis-did-vanguard-help-sway-result-20170531.html