Biden Administration’s New ‘Woke’ Corporate Disclosure Rules Will Cost Companies Billions, Experts Warn

Under the Biden administration’s leadership, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has proposed new “woke” corporate disclosure rules. A new form of social-justice-based financial regulation, the federal agency’s rules would mandate that companies track, report, and disclose a wide array of data on issues such as climate change emissions and diversity. 

This might poll well or look nice at first glance. But like any complex federal regulation, the woke reporting rules will have many unintended consequences—namely, they’ll cost businesses billions.

“Business groups are trying to calculate just how much money public companies might have to shell out to comply with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s planned new ‘woke’ corporate disclosure rules, and initial estimates aren’t pretty,” Fox Business reports. “While no exact estimate can be determined, the SEC’s new disclosure mandates involving everything from the environment to board diversity is likely to cost U.S. public companies well into the billions of dollars.” 

The goal of the SEC regulation is to promote environmentalism and racial equality, with regulators likely having good intentions. But they are either unable or unwilling to foresee the adverse consequences that could accompany this virtue-signaling effort.

Heritage Foundation senior fellow David R. Burton, a specialist in tax and financial regulation, laid out the many ways these rules will likely backfire in a letter to the SEC. 

He agreed that “requiring all public companies to develop climate modeling expertise, the ability to make macroeconomic projections based on these models and then make firm-specific economic assessments based on these climate and economic models will be expensive,” likely costing billions.  

The result? 

“These expenses would harm investors by reducing shareholder returns,” Burton explained. This means it’s not just Big Business, but the millions of Americans who invest in the stock market or rely on it for their retirement, who could bear the costs. 

Burton further warns that these woke disclosure rules would result in “the creation of a new compliance eco-system and pro-complexity lobby composed of the economists, accountants, attorneys and compliance officers that live off of [regulatory compliance].” Simply put, they would even further entrap firms into wasting money on red tape compliance costs. 

The Heritage expert also added that the rules would fuel a huge rise in costly litigation.

Meanwhile, it’s unclear what, if anything, the SEC’s woke disclosure mandates would accomplish—beyond merely virtue-signaling, of course. 

"This whole ESG thing is just one giant waste of time and money," said Chris Whalen, chief of Whalen Global Advisors. "It’s just a big show that only benefits the consultants and the lawyers who are making money off of this.”

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Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Policy Correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education.

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Biden Administration’s New ‘Woke’ Corporate Disclosure Rules Will Cost Companies Billions, Experts Warn

Groupthink on Climate Change Ignores Inconvenient Facts

Since we’ve now been living with the global warming story for 30 years, it might seem hard to believe that science could now come up with anything that would enable us to see that story in a wholly new light.

But that is what I am suggesting in a new paper, just published in the UK by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, thanks to a book called Groupthink, written more than 40 years ago by a professor of psychology at Yale, Irving Janis.

What Janis did was to define scientifically just how what he called groupthink operates, according to three basic rules. And what my paper tries to show is the astonishing degree to which they explain so much that many have long found puzzling about the global warming story.

What Is Groupthink?

Janis’s first rule is that a group of people come to share a particular way of looking at the world which may seem hugely important to them but which turns out not to have been based on looking properly at all the evidence. It is therefore just a shared, untested belief.

Rule two is that, because they have shut their minds to any evidence which might contradict their belief, they like to insist that it is supported by a “consensus.” The one thing those caught up in groupthink cannot tolerate is that anyone should question it.

This leads on to the third rule, which is that they cannot properly debate the matter with those who disagree with their belief. Anyone holding a contrary view must simply be ignored, ridiculed, and dismissed as not worth listening to.

What my paper does is look again at the entire global warming story in the light of Janis’s rules, and to show how consistently they explain so much of the way it has unfolded all the way through.

A Brief History of Climate Change

The alarm over man-made climate change first exploded on the world in 1988 by a tiny group of scientists who had become convinced that, because both CO2 levels and global temperatures were rising, one must be the cause of the other. Unless something very drastic was done, they urged, the planet was heading for catastrophe.

In November that year, two of these fervent believers in what they called “human-induced climate change” were authorized to set up the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. This would report to the world’s politicians on the basis of computer models programmed, according to their theory, to predict just how fast the world was likely to heat up over the next 100 years.

With startling speed, their theory was soon proclaimed as being supported by a scientific “consensus,” backed by governments, all the main scientific journals and institutions, environmental pressure groups, and the media.

Questioning the "Consensus"

In fact, right from the start, many scientists, like the eminent physicist Richard Lindzen of MIT, were highly skeptical, both of the theory itself and of those computer models. These, as Lindzen wrote, were so narrowly focused on CO2 that they were far too simplistic to allow for all the other natural factors which shape the earth’s climate.

But such dissenters were ignored. And for nearly 20 years the “consensus” rolled on, ever more extreme in its apocalyptic claims, with each new IPCC report scarier than the last. By 2006, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was outdoing them all.

Anyone daring to question the “consensus” was now being vilified as just an “anti-science denier,” no better than those crazies who deny the reality of the Nazi Holocaust.

Just then, however, the story was beginning to change. It was noted that, since the abnormally hot year of 1998, caused by a record El Nino, global temperatures had not risen at all. Those computer models had not predicted this.

Even more significant, thanks to the internet, expert science blogs were now appearing, able to show that not a single one of the claims from the “consensus” — vanishing Arctic ice, disappearing polar bears, unprecedented hurricanes, floods, droughts, etc. — was supported by the factual evidence.

Calling the Bluff

By 2009, the “consensus” was facing considerable embarrassment with the highly damaging Climategate emails between the little group of scientists at the heart of the IPCC followed by the collapse in disarray of the great Copenhagen climate conference.

Then there was the spate of scandals surrounding the IPCC itself when it was revealed some of the scariest predictions of its latest report had not been based on proper science at all, but only on more hysterical claims by climate activists.

Finally, in Paris in 2015, came what I describe as the crux of the whole story. This was yet another great global conference to decide what the world must do to avert catastrophe.

Every nation had been asked in advance to submit its energy plans for the years up to 2030. The West, led by President Obama and the EU, dutifully pledged that it would be cutting its “carbon emissions” by up to 40 percent.

But from the rest of the world, a totally different story emerged. China, by now the world’s largest CO2 emitter, was planning to build so many new coal-fired power stations that by 2030 its emissions would have doubled. India, the third largest emitter, was planning to triple them. Altogether global emissions by 2030 were set to rise by a staggering 46 percent.

The rest of the world was just giving two fingers to the “consensus” and planning to carry on regardless. But not one Western leader mentioned this until 2017 when President Trump gave it as his reason for pulling the US out of that meaningless “Paris Accord.”

In effect, Trump was thus finally calling the bluff of the groupthink which for 30 years had driven the whole global warming scare. If other Western countries wanted to commit economic suicide, that was their affair. But the rest of the world was no longer taken in by it, and the US was now with them.

Reprinted from CapX.

Christopher Booker


Christopher Booker is a columnist for The Sunday Telegraph.

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After Paris: There Is No Existential Crisis

After Paris: There Is No Existential Crisis

President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord has thrown the world into a blazing furnace full of weeping and gnashing of teeth—or the political world, at least, has been thrown into a fiery tizzy.

The front page of the New York Daily News reads  “TRUMP TO WORLD: DROP DEAD, Decides to hell with science, Earth’s future.

"Former President Barack Obama broke his silence, saying, in part, that with this decision the Trump administration "joins a small handful of nations that reject the future."

 

Former Secretary of State John Kerry lambasted Trump’s decision as “an ignorant, cynical appeal to an anti-science, special-interest faction,” as well as saying, “This choice will rightly be remembered as one of the most shameful any president has made.”

And the list goes on and on and on.

To hear these people talk, apparently, the human race can only progress into the future and create new industries and technologies if we are flogged into it begrudgingly by our ‘wise’ government and corporate leaders.

Are we really ready to presume what human society will look like several decades from now? Are we seriously expected to believe that government action is the only way to tackle the problem of climate change? If we fail to use the heavy hand of government to brave the future, why should we assume the human race will fail to innovate and adapt to complex challenges on its own?

Imagine, if you will, a world where you cannot turn to governments to solve problems such as climate change.

How would you achieve your righteous ends? Would you simply do nothing if you could not turn to government?

I ask because too often, noble goals serve as a Trojan Horse for political control.

Governments often present us with grand solutions as gifts for our real and perceived problems, but once inside the gates, they proceed to saddle our communities with a slew of regulations, mandates, taxes, diktats, quotas, subsidies, penalties and the like. The cursed gift of government, it seems, is always a central plan that conflates voluntary cooperation, collective action, and even community itself with centralized political control.

But we do not need the trappings of central planning to solve our collective problems. Society can run itself, thank you very much; it needs no single creator or director.

Unnecessary Committees and Commisions

Society already has great gifts for solving complex human issues—individual liberty, initiative, and ingenuity, along with the free and open exchange of goods and ideas—and we need not sacrifice these liberal benefactors of the modern world to dream impossible dreams and fight unbeatable foes. 

The greatest achievements of the human race have not come from government committees and accords, but from intrepid yet everyday individuals working in concert to tackle the unknown and implacable through innovation and persuasion.

Yet, rather than allowing people to freely choose and coordinate their own plans in our common struggle against nature, too many people first brand other people as the problem. Too many would rather rely on commanding and controlling others to fix humanity’s wicked problems than freely solve the problem themselves. Too many conflate the government’s failure to act as society signaling we are resigned to do nothing—thus, the weeping and gnashing of teeth over Donald Trump’s recent decision.

I find all the hysterics and tears of hubris laughable. This mindset deserves to be mocked for its lack of imagination and obsequious acceptance of corporate cronyism and global governance as the only path to the future; it deserves to be mocked for claiming the singular appearance of “doing something” (without much effect) is better than actually tackling the problem from many different directions; it deserves to be mocked even on environmental activist grounds as a list of empty promises and half-measures, as a perversion of the cause, just as a free trader may mock NAFTA or an anti-war activist may mock Barack Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize; and it deserves to be mocked for how little it respects the ability of average people to change their station and adapt to the changing world on their own without the pretentious prodding of government leaders.

I’m willing to bet the existence of the entire human race that without the Paris Climate Accord, we will rise to meet the challenge of climate change successfully.

Further, if we would shrink government generally—i.e. give average people the freedom to think and trade as they wish in the energy sector or any other industry—then by the accord’s own target year of 2100, the market (which is simply free people trading and producing as they wish based on their own enlightenment) will have reduced carbon emissions and given us new technologies beyond the wildest dreams of those now bemoaning the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord.

In fact, the U.S. clean energy sector has grown leaps and bounds in only the last few years despite the lack of a robust central plan. Coal is already giving way to cleaner forms of energy and will continue to do so no matter what Donald Trump promises the miners of West Virginia. And the fact that there is this burgeoning clean energy industry does not mean we should engage in crony capitalism and wealth redistribution between nations to “prime the pump.”

 

Picking winners and losers in the clean energy sector is just as bad as doing so in any other sector (including the fossil fuels industry.). Must we really kowtow to corporations and their client states by granting them government privileges and sweetheart deals to create new technologies they already have enough incentive to create anyway?

No, if we wish to solve the climate change problem, I suggest we try, first and foremost, to create products and services that will actually make people’s lives better immediately rather than imposing immense costs upfront with no clear time horizon wherein we reap the benefits. Just as one need not convince people of evolution before they take vaccines or life-saving drugs, there’s no need to convince people of the science of climate change if you can sell them a better, cheaper, cleaner, and more practical way to power their lives.

Shaming, lecturing, and trying to control people’s behavior through the political process for unclear results and opaque benefits is not serving this cause well, as sound as the science and as noble as the cause may be.

Don't Depend on the Government

Ironically enough, Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord may very well usher in a new era of initiative absent the federal government. After Trump’s decision, many industry leaders, mayors, and governors pledged to pursue solutions to climate change absent the federal government. As the CEO of General Electric Jeff Immelt tweeted, “Climate change is real. Industry must now lead and not depend on government.”

That’s the spirit, Jeff, but my only question is: what the hell have you been waiting for?

Industry and the people of the United States should have been saying this long ago. It’s time to stop looking to central governments and global committees—whether the issue is climate change or poverty or education or whatever—to make our world a better place.

The time for us to pursue the future ourselves is long overdue, and it would be a shame to sell ourselves and the future short because we’re too busy bickering over political power.

Reprinted from Anti-Media

Joey Clark


Joey Clark is a budding wordsmith and liberty lover. He blogs under the heading “The Libertarian Fool” at joeyclark.liberty.me. Follow him on Facebook.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The Amazing Arrogance of the Paris Climate Agreement

The Amazing Arrogance of the Paris Climate Agreement

It was December 12, 2015, when headlines in the world’s leading newspapers, in implausibly bold type, celebrated the “historic” agreement in Paris between all nations of the world to curb carbon emissions and thereby stop climate change: or so they said, as if elites get to say what is and is not historic.

The spin, like the agreement itself, was crammed down our throats.

I read the stories that day, and the next and the next, and the continuing coverage for weeks that nearly every reader – apart from a few dedicated activists and permanent regime bureaucrats – ignored. The stories appeared on the international pages and didn’t touch the business pages. Energy stocks weren’t affected in the slightest.

The stories had all the signs of dutiful public service announcements – “fake news,” as they say today – and they contained not a single quote from a single dissenting voice, because, of course, no respectable news outlet would give voice to “climate deniers.”

Deniers?

Let me pause to protest this “denial” language. It attempts to appropriate the widely shared disgust toward “Holocaust denial,” a bizarre and bedraggled movement that belittles or even dismisses the actual history of one of the 20th century’s most egregious mass crimes against human rights and dignity. Using that language to silence questions about an attempt to centrally plan the energy sector is a moral low that debases the language of denial.

This rhetorical trick reveals all you need to know about the desperate manipulation the climate planners are willing to engage in to realize their plot regardless of popular and justified skepticism concerning their regulatory and redistributionist policies.

And what are the specifics of that agenda? The Paris Agreement is a “voluntary” agreement because its architects knew it would never pass the US Senate as a treaty. Why? Because the idea of the agreement is that the US government’s regulatory agencies would impose extreme mandates on its energy sector: how it should work, what kinds of emissions it should produce, the best ways to power our lives (read: not fossil fuels), and hand over to developing world regimes billions and even trillions of dollars in aid, a direct and ongoing forcible transfer of wealth from American taxpayers to regimes all over the world, at the expense of American freedom and prosperity.

And you wonder why many people have doubts about it.

The Trumpist Reaction

Consider what else was going on December 12, 2015. Donald Trump was in the midst of a big battle for the Republican nomination. He started with 16 challengers to beat. He was widely considered to be a clownish candidate, a guy in it just to get press attention to build his business brand. Surely the American system of electoral politics, largely but imperfectly managed by responsible elites, would resist such demagogues. Besides, the media that trumpeted the Paris Agreement would be on hand to shame anyone who supported him. He couldn’t win.

The press mostly pretended that he wasn’t happening. The Huffington Post put coverage of his campaign in the humor section.

And so President Obama came home from the Paris meetings to the acclaim of all the right people. He alone had made the responsible choice on behalf of the entire country: every business, every worker, every consumer, every single person living within these borders who uses some measure of this thing we call energy. He would be our master and commander, ruling on our behalf, fresh off cocktail parties in Paris where the best and brightest – armed with briefcases full of government-funded science – decided to give the Industrial Revolution its final comeuppance.

The exuberant spokespeople talked about how “the United States” had “agreed” to “curb its emissions” and “fund” the building of fossil-free sectors all over the world. It was strange because the “United States” had not in fact agreed to anything: not a single voter, worker, owner, or citizen. Not even the House or Senate were involved. This was entirely an elite undertaking to manage property they did not own and lives that were not theirs to control.

The Backlash

And then Trump spoke. He said that this Paris bit was a bad deal for Americans. We are already in a slow-growth economy. Now these global elites, without a vote from Congress, are presuming to mandate massive controls over the economy, hampering its productive sector which benefits everyone and transferring countless billions of dollars out of the country, with the acquiescence of the party in power.

He spoke about this in a way that bested all his opponents. The entire scenario fed his America First worldview, that the global elites were operating as parasites on American prosperity and sovereignty. His answer was to put up the wall: to immigrants, to trade, to global managerial elites, and reclaim American sovereignty from people who were selling it out. It was another flavor of statism (globalism and nativism are two sides of the same coin), but it tapped into that populist vein of the voting public that looks for a patriotic strongman to save them from a distant ruling class.

Everything about the Paris Agreement seemed structured to play into Trump’s narrative of how the world had gone mad. And then he won the nomination. Then he won the presidency. None of this was supposed to happen. It wasn’t part of the plan. History took a different course from what the power elite demanded and expected to happen. Not for the first time.

How Dare Anyone Dispute Our Plans?

But the “globalists” of the type that tried to make Paris work have a stunning lack of self-awareness. They pretend to be oblivious to the populist resentment they breed. They act as if there is not a single legitimate doubt about the problem, their analysis of cause and effect, the discernment of their selected experts, or their proposed coercive solution. And there certainly isn’t a doubt that their mighty combination of power, resources, and intelligence can cause all the forces in the universe to adapt to their will, including even the climate that King Canute himself said could not be controlled by kings and princes.

As with countless other statist plans over the last hundred years, they figured that it was enough to gather all the right people in one room, agree to a wish list, sign a few documents, and then watch the course of history conform to their wishes.

The Paris Agreement is no different in its epistemological conceit than Obamacare, the war on drugs, nation-building, universal schooling, or socialism itself. They are all attempts to subvert the capacity of society to manage itself on behalf of the deluded dreams of a few people with power and their lust for controlling social and economic outcomes.

Rejecting Elite Politics

How far are the Democrats from recognizing what they have done? Very, very far. John C. Williams, writing in the New York Times, has decried the “The Dumb Politics of Elite Condescension”:

“As a progressive, I am committed to social equality – not just for some groups, but for all groups… Everyone should have access to good housing and good jobs. That’s the point… Too often in otherwise polite society, elites (progressives emphatically included) unselfconsciously belittle working-class whites. Democrats should stop insulting people.”

That would be a good start. But it is not only about rhetoric. Policy preferences have to change. A global agreement that somehow binds entire countries to centrally plan and regulate the whole of a crucial sector of economic life that supports all economic advances of our time – at the very time when the energy sector is innovating its own solutions to carbon emissions in the cheapest possible way –  is certainly going to breed resentment, and for good reason. It is a bad and unworkable idea.

Continued reliance on undemocratic, uneconomic, imposed strategies such as the Paris Agreement will only further feed the populist revolt that could end in the worst possible policy combinations of strong-man nationalism, nativism, protectionism, closed borders, and backwards thinking in general. No good can come from this. The backlash against globalism can be as dangerous as globalism itself.

You might think that the election of Trump would offer some lessons. But that is not the way the arrogant minds behind the climate agreement work. They respond by merely doubling down on disdain, intensifying their commitments to each other, heaping more loathing on the workers and peasants who have their doubts about these deals.

Trump and his ilk abroad, backed by voting masses with pitchforks and torches – and not a managed transition from fossil fuels to clean energy – are their creation.


Jeffrey A. Tucker


Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also Chief Liberty Officer and founder of Liberty.me, Distinguished Honorary Member of Mises Brazil, research fellow at the Acton Institute, policy adviser of the Heartland Institute, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, member of the editorial board of the Molinari Review, an advisor to the blockchain application builder Factom, and author of five books. He has written 150 introductions to books and many thousands of articles appearing in the scholarly and popular press.

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