Shale baron Harold Hamm has hardly hidden his disdain for Wall Street’s environmental, social and governance movement, considering it a leash on companies such as Continental Resources as they try to get on with the job of producing more fossil fuels.
A climate change “religion” had gripped investors, he argued in an interview with the Financial Times last year, and companies like European supermajor BP were about to “cut their [own] throat” by winding down oil operations under pressure to decarbonise.
Now Hamm, who first took Continental public in 2007, has a chance to break free of Wall Street’s restraint, with a bid to buy the rest of the shares his family does not already own and return the company to private hands.