Shareholders at Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. narrowly voted down resolutions calling for stress tests to determine the risk that efforts to curb climate change pose to their businesses.

Despite the defeat, the proposals drew more support than any contested climate-related votes in the history of the two biggest U.S. oil and gas companies. Preliminary results showed 41% support from Chevron investors that cast ballots and 38% support at Exxon, an indication that more mainstream investors are starting to take more seriously the threat of a global weaning from fossil fuels.

The number of shareholders supporting the climate-risk measures "is significant, and it will continue to grow," said Beth Richtman, investment manager at the California Public Employees' Retirement System, which manages about $290 billion.

"There's a groundswell of share owners who are going to keep pushing this forward," she said. "We need to see them rise to the realm of best practices in terms of climate risk reporting, and we're not there yet."

While the shareholder votes are not binding, supporters of the measures declared victory even in defeat after the oil companies' annual shareholder meetings Wednesday.

"You have to read this as a shot across the bow of the industry," said Andrew Logan, director of the oil and gas program at Ceres, a Boston-based nonprofit group that advocated for the proposals.

Exxon and Chevron had fought to keep the measures off the ballot, a push that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rebuffed.

Rex Tillerson, chief executive of Exxon, said Wednesday the company includes in its energy outlook a proxy cost on carbon.

"It's really the only way we know to accommodate in our financial decision-making the impacts of future policies that are yet to be formulated," he said, adding that most Exxon projects are either too short-term or too large to not be economical even when that cost of carbon is used for planning purposes.

Exxon has also noted it published a 2014 report on managing climate risks that said none of the company's oil and gas holdings are threatened by a global push to reduce carbon emissions.

Chevron told investors the proposed climate measure was flawed because efforts to limit warming could allow some energy producers, such as those who sell natural gas, to benefit while others fall out of favor, including coal mining companies. Chevron is a large producer of natural gas and factors in a theoretical future price of carbon when deciding which projects to sanction, making a stress test unnecessary, the company said.

Measures of this sort have been pushed in prior years by environmental groups and activist investors, but now more traditional shareholders are putting their muscle behind the proposals as concern spreads over the effect that policies to mitigate climate change could have on energy company financials.

Investors representing more than $10 trillion in assets pledged to support the climate proxy measures, which assert that Exxon, Chevron and other big oil companies should be transparent about how their drilling prospects would suffer if the world turned away from carbon-intensive fuels, including crude oil.

The New York State Common Retirement Fund, Norway's sovereign-wealth fund, the Church of England, Calpers and others actively campaigned for the proposals.

In December, nearly 200 countries pledged in Paris to hold the rise in average global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. This is the yardstick many shareholder resolutions have used to urge the companies to take greater action and show how such a goal will affect their business units.

Supporters of that effort say more investors want to see how companies are preparing for climate change impacts. A stress-test measure at Occidental Petroleum Corp. received 49% of votes, and similar proposals passed overwhelmingly last year at two other big oil companies, BP PLC and Royal Dutch Shell PLC.

"There's an awful lot of shareholder disquiet about how Exxon is approaching climate change," said Edward Mason, head of responsible investment for the Church Commissioners for England, which manages the assets of the Church of England.

Also on Wednesday, the White House said it plans to propose a new rule that companies with federal contracts must disclose whether they share information about the risks that a changing climate could pose to their operations, as well as their goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

That rule, expected to be completed this fall, would affect most federal contracts. The U.S. government is a major buyer of oil products, including jet fuel and diesel used by the military.

Amy Harder contributed to this article.

Write to Bradley Olson at Bradley.Olson@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 25, 2016 16:45 ET (20:45 GMT)

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