By Jerome Corsi, AM THINKER 26.4.23
Working through the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Biden administration is quietly but persistently implementing global warming (aka “climate change”) regulations that will force U.S. corporations to implement costly audit and control procedures for a wide range of CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions that result from their company’s operations.
We are witnessing a bureaucratically imposed restructuring of capitalism to comply with an ideologically driven Net Zero Emissions (NZE) policy. The restructuring aims to impose neo-Marxist “public good” restraints on private corporations through White House-issued executive orders and federal agency rulemaking, not congressional legislation. Suppose the SEC is successful in this effort. In that case, the U.S. will join the European Union (EU) in hamstringing U.S.-based corporations with profit-inhibiting accounting requirements certain to constrain profitability—all in pursuit of a demonization of CO2 that fact-based climate science fails to support. The impact on the Earth’s climate will be minimal, but the effects on the U.S. economy could be devastating.
On March 21, 2022, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed rule changes requiring U.S. corporations to disclose an exhausting amount of climate-related information detailing CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions. While the SEC expects to issue the final rule this spring, a draft filed in the Federal Register last summer drew nearly a nearly unprecedented 15,000 comments. According to a survey taken by Workíva (an internet platform for financial reporting, ESG [Environmental, Social, and Governance], audit, and risk) and PwC (accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers) of 300 executives at U.S.-public companies with at least $500 million in annual revenue, four in ten executives reported their companies are not ready to comply with the SEC’s complicated and costly proposed climate accounting rule changes.
Image: Paperwork by pressfoto.
The SEC’s proposed climate regulations trace back to a complex set of globalist arrangements that arose from the Financial Stability Forum (FSF) that the G7 finance ministers and central bank governors created in April 1999 at a meeting in Bonn, Germany, “to promote international financial stability,” as recommended by Hans Tietmeyer, then President of the Deutsche Bundesbank. At the 2009 G20 Pittsburg Climate Summit, the Financial Services Bureau (FSB) was established as the successor organization to the FSF. On January 28, the FSB established itself as a not-for-profit organization under Swiss law, with its headquarters in Basel, Switzerland. In 2015, the FSB created the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) to develop consistent international rules for private corporations to report climate-related financial information “to support investors, lenders, and insurance underwriters in appropriately assessing and pricing a specific set of risks—risks related to climate change.” Chaired by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, the TCFD has developed a voluntary set of recommendations that the EU has incorporated into its regulatory framework demanding TCFD-compliant NZE climate-sensitive financial reporting from all EU corporations.
@chocopot
Part of their mandate is the disclosure of important market information which I am sure is how they would excuse this altogether new extension of their authority.
The crippling burden created by forcing US companies to determine and disclose the ’emissions’ associated with its operation, its indirect operations and with its entire supply line, is the height of insanity. The minutia detailed in such silly-song reporting would devastate all but the largest of companies, and would do so unilaterally such that it would shackle only US industry with this ever growing yoke of devious regulations, targeting an economy which is already cracking under the economic mismanagement of the current regime.
Yet one more step by China Joe’s efforts to make China ever greater and America ever weaker. I suspect that this new policy will be devastatingly effective towards achieving this goal.
I should think that companies so affected could make use of the AI programme used by college students to produce tons of graphs, mathematical equations, trend lines and pages of analysis — in many colours–to keep bureaucrats happy. It’s tonnage and poundage that counts, not content.
Pardon me for asking, but how does the SEC have authority to implement this policy? That is not their mission or their responsibility. Anyone?