ExxonMobil’s projections are based on studies from reputable sources (the International Energy Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy), and the company has factored in slightly higher automotive efficiency standards — 30 miles to the gallon, rather than the current 27.5. But it’s clear that when ExxonMobil executives look ahead to the next quarter century, they see a world that operates much as it did in the previous quarter century. Given ExxonMobil’s profits over the past few years, that’s a pretty comforting view, and one that doesn’t encourage any radical change of course, no matter what people like Patricia Daly say. Climate change “is just another risk that we have to understand as best we can and respond to in a way that protects the shareholder value,” Tillerson would explain at the annual meeting. “So I don’t think it introduces any greater or lesser threat than a whole host of other risks that we manage day to day and that have been part of this business for decades.”

The fact that a corporation can preoccupy itself with quantifying the financial risks of a global catastrophe while ignoring the human and environmental ones is what inspired a tall, courtly Boston Brahmin named Robert A. G. Monks to begin advancing the notion that shareholders use the power of their proxies to influence corporate behavior. Monks, who was a founding trustee of the Federal Employees Retirement System during Ronald Reagan’s administration, responds to Tillerson like this: “The notion that a company that creates a problem is exempted from trying to find a solution to that problem is like being in the elephant business but not having anyone in charge of going behind the elephant and cleaning up after it.”

The son of an Episcopal clergyman, Monks has been a partner in a corporate law firm, a venture capitalist, a oil-and-gas-company executive and a director of 10 publicly held companies. He is, in other words, a consummate insider, or would be one, had he not happened to stop by the Androscoggin River in 1972 while campaigning — unsuccessfully, as it turned out — as a Republican candidate for a United States Senate seat in Maine. The surface of the river glistened with a six-foot layer of foam, the effluent of the nearby International Paper Company.

For Monks, the foam came to symbolize all that was wrong with the way the modern corporation functions in society: none of its owners feel responsible for its actions. The dispersal of ownership through millions of shares, he argues, is the institutional equivalent of the tragedy of the commons: each shareholder is happy to reap his share of the profits, but no one feels responsible for the behavior of the company as a whole. His solution has been to try to make corporate boards more accountable by encouraging them to have directors who are truly independent, rather than being the friends and associates of management. He has done this in a variety of ways — by writing books, by pressuring companies from within and by founding various corporate governance institutions, among them Institutional Shareholder Services and the Corporate Library. In 1991, he went so far as to run for the Sears board himself, a move that inspired Sears to spend $5.5 million to defeat him.

Sears wasn’t the first company whose board Monks nominated himself for — he also tried nominating himself for the Exxon board in 1987. The company didn’t respond to his letter, and he chose not to pursue the matter. Yet as time went on, Monks came to believe that Exxon was “the symbol of a reality that nobody in the reformist area wanted to deal with” — a company that performed exceptionally well as a business and an investment yet failed to take responsibility for its greenhouse-gas emissions, which Monks sees as the 21st-century equivalent of foam on the river.

Monks’s solution was to submit a resolution that would separate the positions of chairman and C.E.O., something that has been done at BP and Royal Dutch/Shell. Monks argues that an independent chairman would be able to raise questions about ExxonMobil’s position in the world that will never otherwise be asked, much less answered, questions like, “Why is our company the one with the bull’s-eye on its chest?” As it stands, he says: “The board is just there as the parsley on the fish. You’re really talking about, when you have a combined chairman and C.E.O., a dictatorship.”

Monks has submitted his proposal six times, but it has gone before the shareholders only four times, having been thrown out the other two by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Nonetheless, it has gotten a greater percentage of the vote each time it has been on the proxy ballot, he says, up to about 35 percent last year.