10 questions with Mark van Baal, founder of Follow This
For a decade, Mark van Baal and Follow This have been doing something deceptively simple: asking oil majors to answer for their climate strategy in public, on the record, in front of their own shareholders.
It’s worked better than almost anyone expected. Here, van Baal explains where Follow This goes next — and why the oil majors are fighting back harder than ever.
What is Follow This, and what do you do?
We are activist shareholders. We unite shareholders in voting for climate resolutions to compel oil and gas companies to fully commit to the energy transition, and align with the Paris climate goals.
We have over 4,000 green shareholders and we engage with the major oil and gas companies — Shell, Equinor, BP, Chevron, Total Energy.
We file resolutions. We activate investors to vote. And we hold oil majors accountable — publicly, where it counts.
Five oil majors have now set targets for the emissions from burning their products. Shell first called that resolution ‘unreasonable.’ A year later, they had a target.
Voting is the only power shareholders have. Once a year they can vote, for or against board members, for or against strategy, for or against shareholder proposals like ours. That’s it. That’s the lever. And for decades, no one was pulling it.
2. Why did you decide to focus on getting oil and gas companies to change, rather than regulation or consumer behavior?
The climate crisis is such a huge crisis, and we are almost too late. We need forces from all sides. This is the leverage point I stumbled upon, and we’ve proven it’s a crucial part of the puzzle.
We do, of course, need governments to pass regulation: specifically, laws to stop them drilling for more oil and gas. But we’re dealing with the biggest PR machine in world history.
And as long as these companies can say “our shareholders support us,” they have cover. They don’t care about their public image when they can point to shareholder backing. So removing that cover matters.
3. What are your proudest achievements?
Firstly: we have pushed investors to act. They started by voting for our resolutions, and now they co-file. They even sent an open letter to BP this year calling on other investors to vote against BP’s board. That was unthinkable years ago.
We activated a sleeping giant. That means we now have 1 in 5 votes at the major oil companies. Five oil majors have set concrete targets for emissions from burning their products. The total CO2 emissions the big four have promised to reduce — Shell, BP, Equinor, and Total Energies — is 400 megatons, equivalent to Germany’s entire annual emissions. We still have to hold them to those promises, but the fact they’ve made them is immense.
4. You’ve been at this for over a decade. Where are you right now — and is the momentum with you or against you? What’s your biggest constraint?
There’s momentum in the shift in how investors see us. In the beginning, they thought: these people are coming to ruin my comfortable life. Now they really see us as a partner in addressing the climate crisis. They co-file, they meet with us, they see us as a kind of vanguard they can follow. The ones we have on board know that the climate crisis is going to cost so much money they have to act.
There’s also huge counter-momentum. In the early days, the industry underestimated us. But now we’ve made massive inroads, it’s the Empire Strikes Back. They’re fighting very hard.
Now BP has blocked our resolution outright, and we may go to court to fight that. It’s another sign that we — and the entire climate movement — are effective, and that they are afraid. Which they shouldn’t be, because I believe you can make money with clean energy, maybe even more than with oil and gas.
They’re afraid of the specific thing we’re putting on the agenda: ‘Show how you can create shareholder value in a declining oil and gas market.’ They don’t want to answer that question.
It also confirms that changing our strategy is working.
5. You’ve just made a significant pivot — from demanding Paris-aligned emissions targets to framing this as a financial risk question. What convinced you that was necessary, and what does it tell us about where the broader climate movement is right now?
For ten years our leverage point was essentially shareholder pressure framed as a moral and systemic risk argument — we convinced shareholders by saying “the climate crisis is going to cost you a lot of money, so you have to act regardless of whether it’s good or bad for these companies.” That got us to around 20% of the vote at Shell.
But now we’ve put a new elephant in the room: the future profitability of the oil and gas business model itself.
We just filed new shareholder resolutions for the 2026 AGMs of Shell and BP, co-filed by 23 institutional investors, asking them to explain how they will create profits and shareholder value in a world with declining oil and gas demand.
Even under moderate IEA scenarios, demand declines in the 2030s — but the oil majors produce forecasts of endless growth. That’s not credible.
This new resolution serves two goals: increase shareholder pressure — we hope more shareholders will vote for this framing — and force the companies themselves to start thinking seriously about their own long-term future. It’s not only for the sake of the climate. It’s for their own sake.
6. Do you have any other new strategies up your sleeve?
Next year we want to add what we call the “licence lever” and start a debate about the disappearing licence to operate. Governments and courts are starting to tell companies that they can’t drill for oil and gas any more.
We want to push three leverage points: one, if we get 51% of the vote in coming years on the Paris agreement goals, they have to act. If the licence to operate disappears, they have to act. If profitability declines, they have to change. All three can work on their own. But because we have so little time, we think we can also achieve the result if all three grow together and push simultaneously.
Our resolutions also feed into litigation. In the Netherlands, Milieudefensie used Shell’s own response to our resolution as evidence in court that they were not Paris-aligned. That response became hard, formal evidence that Shell did not want to act on the Paris climate agreement. That will be used in more court cases around the world.
What we’re doing this year will also help future lawsuits. When oil and gas demand declines, there will be formal evidence that they were warned — and that they deliberately chose not to act on it.
7. Are there any misconceptions about shareholder activism you’d like to correct?
That behind-closed-doors engagement is enough. For years, the oil companies and institutional investors pointed to quiet private conversations as proof of action. The companies said, “We engage with our shareholders and they’re very happy with our strategy.” The investors would say, “We steer them slowly in the right direction.” Everyone could tick off their boxes and collect their bonuses.
But that’s not accountability. Accountability means having to formally answer — on the ballot, in front of all your shareholders, on the record. That’s the only time a year these companies have to formally respond to a question. And that public answer becomes hard evidence. It’s used in lawsuits. It can’t be buried in a private meeting.
The second misconception I’d push back on is the idea that shareholders are just passive capital providers. They’re the owners. They have real power — specifically the power of the vote. The reason that power had never been used on climate was simply that no one had built the infrastructure to exercise it. That’s what Follow This did.
8. You’ve been in rooms with oil company CEOs, institutional investors, regulators, and now philanthropists. What do people outside the climate finance world fundamentally misunderstand about why change in this sector is so hard?
People misunderstand that this is a comfort-zone problem, not a technical or financial one. We have the technology. Clean energy is already cheaper than fossil fuels in most markets. Storage is the main remaining challenge, and I trust engineers to solve that. The real barrier is that the people who would need to change — the CEOs, the investors — have built their entire identities around a model that still works for them personally, even if it’s destroying everything else.
Also: the climate should not be a political issue. The climate crisis is going to be very costly regardless of your political views. There’s a Greenpeace slogan: “Put people over profits.” That’s the same binary logic the oil industry uses — that we have to choose between climate and economic wellbeing. We don’t. They go hand in hand.
9. What will CarbonFix’s support make possible that you couldn’t otherwise do?
CarbonFix’s grant will go towards growing our membership programme. We currently have over 4,000 people who pay €50 a year or more to become a “green shareholder.” There should be more of us — for three reasons.
One, we can use our membership base as leverage on pension funds and investors — via open letters signed by thousands of members, for example, putting funds under public pressure to vote for resolutions that take the long term into account.
Two, we empower ordinary citizens to have a voice in oil companies’ policies. We go to AGMs on behalf of our members, giving them an opportunity to scrutinize companies that often feel untouchable.
Three, every new member is a signal to investors and pension funds that public opinion is moving: that ordinary people understand the climate crisis is an economic crisis, and that oil majors are endangering shareholder value — not protecting it.
10. What does success look like?
One of the oil majors breaking ranks and saying: We’re going to take profits from fossil fuels and invest them in new business models and will make the transition over the next 15-20 years. I think it would be great for shareholder value, but also for brand value.
If one shows it’s possible, the others will follow.
