General Motors shareholders on Tuesday voted on — but didn’t pass — a first-of-its-kind resolution that would have pushed the U.S. carmaker to divulge its position on deep-sea mining, or harvesting the planet’s oceans for raw materials.
Twelve percent of the GM shareholders at the meeting voted in support of a proxy proposal from As You Sow, a nonprofit shareholder representative.
Specifically, the proposal called on GM to “publicly disclose the Company’s policies on the use of deep-sea mined minerals in its production and supply chains,” as well as “the criteria it will use for decision making related to the use of deep-sea sourced minerals.”
“This is a first-of-its-kind vote, it’s a new issue area,” said Danielle Fugere, president and chief counsel of As You Sow. “We would have liked to have seen a higher vote, but this is enough to bring the vote back next year.”
