For years, Sister Pat and other environmentalists had been urging ExxonMobil to take important steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its operations and products. In 2007, she proposed a resolution calling on that energy giant to set a firm date to report on progress.
“We are the most profitable company in the history of the planet,” she told Rex Tillerson, then-company CEO (and later Secretary of State in the Trump administration), at the company’s annual meeting, “but what will our health be like? in the long run as we really face the regulatory and other challenges surrounding global warming?”
She added: “We are now, this company and each of us, being challenged by one of the most profound moral concerns. And we have the resources to respond to that.”
The proposal won 31 percent of the vote, or about 1.4 billion shares, the most for an ExxonMobil resolution on climate change. If not an outright win, it was a page in a decades-long story that led ExxonMobil to put a climate scientist on its board of directors in 2017. Three executives who recognized the urgency to address climate change joined the company’s board of directors in 2021, nominated by a small activist hedge fund, the No. 1 engine.
“The arc of her work led us to those victories by working from the inside and the outside,” John Passacantando, the founder of Ozone Action, an anti-global warming group, and a former Greenpeace executive director, said in a telephone call. interview .
In 1999, Vanity Fair named her in its Hall of Fame, applauding her as someone who “translates faith into dedication and never backs down from a fight.”
Mary Beth Gallagher, who succeeded Sister Pat as executive director of the Tri-State Coalition in 2017, said Sister Pat was not frustrated when her resolutions were routinely voted down.
“She lived in hope,” Ms Gallagher said. “We never talked about winning or losing. It was about awareness and education. If we don’t ask these questions, who will?”
