Shareholder Opposition More Than Doubles Against Directors At Duke Energy Annual Meeting

BlackRock and Vanguard Fail to Disclose How They Voted

Charlotte, NC -- Today, Duke Energy, the second largest emitter of climate-polluting carbon dioxide in the United States, faced questions from shareholders about its failure to act on the climate crisis and racial injustice. In the lead-up to the meeting, advocates and major investors called for Duke shareholders to vote against the company’s top leadership, Chair and CEO Lynn Good and Lead Director Michael Browning. Neither Vanguard nor BlackRock—Duke’s top two shareholders—have announced publicly how they voted, but the preliminary results indicate that shareholder opposition more than doubled against at least one Duke director since last year. Shareholders also passed a resolution which requires the company to disclose its corporate political and lobbying contributions twice a year, a critical step in increasing transparency on political influence.

Duke, which includes five investor-owned utilities, received an “F” grade in a recent Sierra Club analysis of its coal and gas fleet and plans for clean energy. Duke currently operates the largest coal fleet in the country and has plans to build the most fracked gas plants of any utility, despite abundant evidence underscoring the extreme danger posed to the climate by the fossil fuel.

Advocates and investors have argued that shareholders should vote against corporate boards when a company doesn’t set ambitious decarbonization targets in line with a credible 1.5°C pathway and align their companies’ business plans and near-term actions with those targets. Last month, the Sierra Club joined with the NAACP and Majority Action in calling for Duke shareholders to vote against Good and Browning. This week, the state treasurers of Illinois, Connecticut, and Vermont announced they were voting against them. In the past two weeks, nearly 7,000 Sierra Club activists have sent messages to top executives at Vanguard and BlackRock to vote against Good and Browning.

The Sierra Club and partners have highlighted a slate of key votes on shareholder resolutions and corporate boards that would demonstrate whether BlackRock, Vanguard and other big investors are serious in their commitments to climate action. Last week, Vanguard and BlackRock voted to re-elect Wells Fargo Board Chairman Charles Noski, who has failed to lead the bank in a direction that matches the scale and urgency of the climate crisis. The Sierra Club criticized the votes, characterizing the asset managers’ votes as failures “to live up to their rhetoric on climate action.”

In response, Sierra Club financial advocacy campaign manager Ben Cushing issued the following statement:

“The more than doubling of investor opposition to Duke Energy’s top leadership speaks volumes, demonstrating that shareholders are tuned in to Lynn Good and Michael Browning’s failure to meet the moment on the climate crisis and racial injustice. Vanguard and BlackRock together own approximately 15% of the company, yet they have been unwilling to publicly articulate where they stand on Duke’s incompetent leadership. The asset managers have paid lip service to the climate crisis and racial injustice in the past, but their lack of transparency today means they’ve failed to back that rhetoric with measurable action.”