by Steve Milloy, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow and Junkscience.com Founder
As appearing in the Washington Examiner
It’s called “global warming,” but the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission seems to believe that it’s really “corporate warming.” Toward that end, the SEC just proposed new rules to compel publicly traded companies to disclose climate-related information to shareholders.
This proposal is so half-cocked that the SEC’s lone Republican commissioner, Hester Peirce, mocked the agency as aspiring to become the “Securities and Environment Commission.”
Established by Congress in 1934 amid the Great Depression to rein in some of the Wild West-like corporate practices that contributed to the 1929 stock market crash, the SEC was originally chartered to regulate corporate financial disclosures and trading markets so as to prevent securities fraud. And that’s it.
But that changed during the climate activist Obama administration, which tried to use the SEC pressure companies into supporting its climate agenda. In 2010, the SEC expanded without congressional authorization the existing disclosure framework to force companies into make special, albeit relatively easy to satisfy, climate-related disclosures.
