30 Apr 2024 FEP/NCLA Bring New Challenges to SEC’s Benighted Corporate “Climate Disclosures” Rule

Washington, D.C. – The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) has filed a complaint in the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP), the leading representative of the vast majority of American investors who oppose the corporate “Environmental, Social and Governance” (ESG) fiasco.

In this fourth concurrent cause of action FEP has brought against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), FEP and NCLA have joined their complementary expertise to add brand new and wholly sufficient grounds on which the courts can and must reject the SEC’s recent “Enhancement and Standardization of Climate-Related Disclosures for Investors” rule.

According to SEC filings, the rule will “require registrants to provide certain climate-related information in their registration statements and annual reports. The final rules will require information about a registrant’s climate-related risks that have materially impacted or are reasonably likely to have a material impact on, its business strategy, results of operations, or financial condition. In addition, under the final rules, certain disclosures related to severe weather events and other natural conditions will be required in a registrant’s audited financial statements.”

Scott Shepard

“This rule, as with every other emission from Gary Gensler’s SEC, is based on lies, misrepresentations, power grabs, chutzpah and an overarching contempt for the rule of law,” said FEP Director Scott Shepard.

He continued:

The lies here start with the rule’s title. This rule isn’t an ‘enhancement,’ but an unprecedented and unlawful charge into yet another public policy arena over which it has no statutory authority nor honest reason to go. If Congress had granted any agency the power to destroy the American economy and U.S. standards of living to appease Gaia by forcibly ending our reliance on affordable, reliable energy, it sure the hell wasn’t the one called the Securities & Exchange Commission, as the authorizing statutes demonstrate.

And the rule is certainly not for the benefit of the main-street investors who are supposed to be the SEC’s special charge, but who Gensler’s SEC has abandoned in the pursuit of endless power. It’s to give cover to the giant banks and investment houses that work in lockstep with the SEC and others to throw up any possible method of evading the plain truth and its massive legal consequences: pushing left-wing ESG while pretending it’s nonpartisan and corporate-value raising violates their solemn fiduciary duties to the real investors with every single act they take and in the gravest possible way.

All of ESG is a contravention of the capitalism system to achieve hard left ends. That’s not surprising; the hard left has been babbling about overthrowing capitalism for a century. The new twist is that this overthrow is being enacted by the very parties that have the highest legal duties to preserve capitalism — the real kind. You want to find the real insurrection in modern America? Don’t look for goofballs in Viking hats. Look to the c-suites of BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, Bank of America, JP Morgan and the other modern malefactors of great wealth.

It’s an insurrection because the wealth isn’t theirs. They are only custodians, managing it for the investors, the real capitalists. But they joined with the SEC in getting this rule in place so that they can keep their jets, their mansions and their winter trips to Davos, while the carbon-reduction programs they support bring constrained lives to millions of American investors and potentially starvation for some of the world’s most unfortunate.

All this for a meaningless cause, given that non-western countries are increasing carbon emissions so fast that it doesn’t matter at all what the West does anymore. But these expensive disclosures will make it harder for small businesses, farms and mines to survive, further concentrating power in large corporations over which BlackRock, et al. exert control.

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