Just buy one share and attend as a shareholder
As per the 1st sentence of the article, it’s less about being there but about asking questions:
Shell will no longer give press conferences when presenting its annual and quarterly results.
Journalists will be allowed to call in and listen but not ask questions
So even when supporting Shell and buying shares to attend, there won’t be a press conference with questions and answers.
Translation: We’re making sooo much money off the backs of the suckers we employ that we’re concerned of the backlash if they found out just how bad we’re screwing them.
Shell’s kind of got a point that the purpose of the shareholder meetings isn’t to create a forum for political activists, but to report to shareholders how the company is doing. I mean, it’s going to be disruptive to them doing that, because they’ve got a finite amount of time for that.
If you buy a share of an oil company specifically because you don’t like oil companies and want to show up at the shareholder meeting and complain about oil companies, the shareholders who are interested in the thing as a business probably aren’t going to appreciate it much.
If shareholders were saying “I don’t agree with the CEO pay package” or something, okay, that’s within the realm of the company’s operations.
I’d also add that if you don’t want oil extraction, Shell isn’t the party to talk to, even via another route than shareholder’s meetings. Shell is gonna do what regulators permit if it makes financial sense for Shell. You aren’t gonna convince Shell otherwise. If you want to say “no crude oil extraction”, then you want to talk to regulators and lawmakers, not to the companies operating within the bounds that they set. Hell, even if you did convince Shell, it’d just mean that another oil company would step in to do the same.
If crude oil extraction causes problems to people other than Shell or Shell customers, then that’s an externality, and internalizing that is what regulators are there for. That’s not the job of companies.
When Shell stops donations to political parties, candidates and all of its lobbying I’ll agree with you.
Again though, Shell aren’t going to push for that. Their beneficiaries aren’t either, unless the rest of us make it untenable for legislators to fail to ban such donations.
