Today is the deadline for submitting comments to the Security and Exchange Commission about a proposed rule that would require companies to disclose their climate-related emissions and financial risks, and the climate-related emissions industry has been hard at work trying to make it look like there's real grassroots opposition to the measure. (The latest in their anti-ESG efforts.)
Over 75% of the 10,000+ comments have been supportive of the proposal that companies track how much they emit and how much climate impacts cost their bottom line, but what about the comments opposed to such basic due diligence and transparency? Those are coming from the fossil fuel industry lobby groups and its right-wing network, which has waged a coordinated campaign to skew the comments to exaggerate the support behind the 1% they represent.
A coalition of fossil fuel-heavy states' Republican Attorneys General submitted a comment to the SEC, while the (tobacco & fossil fuel funded) Heritage Foundation was proud to announce that its comment generator spammed the SEC with over 2,600 comments, essentially the entire pushback, though (tobacco & fossil fuel funded) FreedomWorks also ran a (now-defunct) comment submission generator, the CO2 Coalition managed to submit at least one comment, and even Big Ag got in on the disinformation!
And it is obvious disinformation, as the idea that just identifying potential climate risk is going to “destroy” the economy is just the latest version of (alarmist) industry claims against new disclosure rules that they have used since before the creation of the SEC.
The proposal doesn’t require anyone to do anything anti-fossil-fuel, except provide transparency on how much greenhouse gas they pollute and how climate change could impact their bottom line. But since fossil fuels cause climate change, the industry considers measuring the impact of its pollution to be something of a death blow for their ability to keep convincing finance institutions that they're a stable long-term investment.
For some reason though, their comments don't just say "we oppose this disclosure because then you'd know what a bad deal fossil fuels are."
Wonder why!
