Google, Facebook, Amazon and Others Urge SEC To Mandate Regular Climate Reports (cnbc.com) 55
A group of seven tech companies urged the Securities and Exchange Commission to require businesses to regularly disclose climate-related matters to their shareholders. From a report: In a letter to SEC Chairman Gary Gensler on Friday, Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Autodesk, eBay, Facebook, Intel and Salesforce shared their view in response to a request for public input on such disclosures. The tech industry has been vocal on climate issues in the past, even as employees have pressed the companies themselves to do better. "We believe that climate disclosures are critical to ensure that companies follow through on stated climate commitments and to track collective progress towards addressing global warming and building a prosperous, resilient zero-carbon economy," the companies wrote.
Mission creep (Score:3, Insightful)
Monitoring the climate is not an appropriate role for the SEC.
An important lesson from the 2008 financial crisis is that the SEC needs to focus more on its primary mission.
If we, as a society, believe that writing more reports is the solution to climate change, we should set up a new bureaucracy with plenty of filing cabinets to manage those reports.
CDC (Score:3)
The CDC was originally supposed to track and help prevent communicable diseases, like COVID. Since then, it has spread out into monitoring crime, workplace safety, chronic ailments, terrorism and environmental issues, among many others. In the early 2000s they tried branching out even further, but Obama wisely put the kibosh on that effort.
The question is, do we need the agency in charge of managing communicable disease outbreaks, like COVID, also doing what OSHA, the EPA, the FD, the Justice Department, an
Re: CDC (Score:3)
Though given the existence of the two agencies, couldnâ(TM)t they simply collaborate? Basically the SEC would require corporations submit an environmental report, in a format specified by the EPA. The idea being that stock holders would be able to more easily compare the environmental performance of different companies based on the report, since it would be in the normalised format .
Re: CDC (Score:4, Insightful)
And just think, in four (or whatever) more years, we can have the SEC require companies to produce annual reports on their company's effects on religious freedom. Then we can require one about how well they're supporting gun rights, etc...
In addition to the anti-competitive effects of this type of requirement against small companies, do you really want to go farther down the path of politically motivated regulations via the SEC?
How about the companies who want to voluntarily report this sort of thing can continue doing so, and reap the associated competitive advantages/disadvantages, and everyone else can run their own businesses without kowtowing to the first set of company's left-wing employees?
I believe the technical term is "freedom", very heavily associated with the right to "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence. It functions better than allowing the biggest companies to impose their political beliefs on everyone else.
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The DOI is a legal document. What's it's not is legally binding on anyone. It includes an expression of principles, though.
It's a fallacy to describe an expression of principles as incorrect just because someone who purports to support those principles isn't 100% consistent in their living up to them. Principles can be aspirational. Obviously, still being de facto and de jure under the rule of King George, the DOI had to be aspirational at the time.
Third, "climate change" isn't just "weather", a phrase drum [scientificamerican.com]
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curious.
but i thought that n o a a had the job of climate monitoring.
and as i recall n a s a has done several tasks of atmosphere sampling.
it sounds to like the n o a a needs a team of people to present information on the climate.
and i am glad that multi billion dollar businesses have realized that they need to start contributing to this community i like to call planet earth
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According to their website, that's exactly what they do!
https://www.noaa.gov/climate [noaa.gov]
"From supercomputers and state-of-the-art models to observations and outlooks, we provide data, tools, and information to help people understand and prepare for climate variability and change."
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> Monitoring the climate is not an appropriate role for the SEC.
They'll take any distraction they can from taking responsibility of not intervening in naked shorting of $GME and $AMC (and now possibly $GEO).
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The climate is not the concern of corporate entities, their only concern should be to generate returns for their shareholders and increase share value.
No.
It may be true that their only concern is to generate profit, but it's not true that their only concern should be to generate profit.
If they were generating profit by damaging the environment, this is bad. If they generate profit by making the world a worse place to live, that is bad. And if we have a legal system that encourages companies to do that, this is bad also.
If there are people or even employees that want to swoon over climate concerns on the side, or even make the information publicly available, that's fine. But wasting time, resources, and money publishing regular reports?
Actually, I'd agree with that one-- this really shouldn't be the SEC's purview.
Bullshit. We need to clamp down hard on these climate change idiots, for every inch they get, they ask for another miles. It's out of control, they will never be happy until we're all living back in the stone age again.
I'm not sure what the point of insults is. Most of t
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What companies are concerned about is consistency, and not putting themselves in a disadvantage with their competitors.
These companies know that being some of the largest companies in the world, they are going to be a target for environmental activism. Also Climate change is a Change, Companies don't like change, because change will impact the current Best Practices, and they will need to be adapted and modified, being expensive to implement, as well more uncertain about the new practices effectiveness.
Non
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Could you please elucidate.
We've already seen that nothing satisfies the filers of such suits as they just change words or refile repeatedly. They will no doubt find a minuscule mote of an item left out and structure their suits around that. Filing unique reports will not end if for no other reason than locale specific
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That's plain silly. Companies, left to their own devices, have fouled the air and water before Nixon finally established the EPA to put a stop to it. Stopping it is an ongoing job precisely because companies don't want to consider whether they are polluting the Commons.
Put another way, it is plain silly to wait until a major environmental crisis hits before attempting to do something about it.
You must be one those who will wait until you are on your deathbed before calling a doctor. The ICUs have plenty of
That's what they are doing (Score:5, Insightful)
When very big companies support requiring that companies spend even more time and money producing even more reports that nobody will ever read, they ARE protecting their profits, from the smaller competitors.
When I had my businesses, I spent about about 20% of my time on "bullshit required by a government agency". A lot of that was various types of tax returns showing we didn't owe any such tax. Such as the telephone company tax in Harris county. We weren't a telephone company and we had to file a quarterly report informing them four times a year that we're still not a telephone company. Another tax averaged about 12 cents - and took $50 worth of time to jack with.
Google and Facebook can *easily* afford a few employees whose sole job is to fill out BS forms. It hits smaller companies harder, which helps the megacorps stay on top.
No it doesn't (Score:2)
No, having us file "we're still not a phone company" reports (in a county where we don't have an office) every quarter does not raise revenue that pays for roads for police. The bureaucracy and stupid reports WASTE money that could otherwise be used for useful things like roads.
No, paying someone to process a 12 cent payment each month does not raise revenue that pays for roads for police. The bureaucracy and stupid reports WASTE money that could otherwise be used for useful things like roads.
No, paying som
Great way to place legal burdens on competition (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever you see stories like this, it helps to remember that compliance with onerous legislation benefits larger companies. Larger companies like the FANG above can easily absorb the costs to produce such a report. But, competitors would have to go down the rabbit-hole of hiring consultants, lawyers and environmental engineers to create this while also trying to produce competitors.
Imagine if Vimeo or Craiglist or even smaller ecommerce sites had to produce a report like this? Where does the environmental impact of running a site begin and end? Craigslist allows person-to-person sales of used items. Would they be on the hook for calculating the environmental impact for each sale, or simply the cost of running CL servers?
This is well-intentioned but it also serves to consolidate power in the hands of large profitable companies by creating additional legislative burdens on smaller competitors to knock them aside.
Re:Great way to place legal burdens on competition (Score:5, Insightful)
This is well-intentioned
No, it isn't. The advantage to the FAANG incumbents is the primary motivation, not a mere unintended side-effect.
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I remember being furious at the FDA banning CFCs as delivery systems for emergency inhalers.
Turns out they were fine with it since it was as a small use for medical emergencies, and it was the drug companies pushing it so they could say, oh well, I guess you have to buy our much more expensive, newly-patented inhalers!
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Re: Great way to place legal burdens on competitio (Score:1)
That's exactly what this is. More barriers to entry to hinder competition from smaller companies.
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The amount of "barrier" this is versus the other competitive advantages they wield isn't worth the finger they had to lift to suggest it. It's just as stupid to think companies don't exercise advantages like position and size over competitors as it is to think everything they do is motivated by it.
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But worth "the finger" it took to virtue signal? Don't think so. Everything they do is money driven, including this.
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Everything they do is money driven
That's exactly what I said is stupid, because it's so demonstrably untrue. You can say lots of things - probably even most things. But companies are still run by people, and people still have emotions, and they do things to be vindictive, or because the people in positions of making decisions have things they are particularly passionate about or interested in.
Saying everything is driven by money is dumb.
Although in this case, I don't see why people can't accept that lots of
Virtue Signal Beta 2.x (Score:3)
These companies already generate massive amounts of reports that say they're doing wonderful things for the environment. All quite truthful, within the bounds of the law.
By calling for everyone else to do it, they can virtue signal even harder, with no additional work on their part.
And, if by some chance, the SEC is pushed into requiring this (expect a legislative push this summer, to deflect attention away from all the other congressional attention they are getting), they only need to revamp their current
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au contraire. I worked for a publicly traded company that had 8 people. When the office manager/receptionist went on leave the CEO and CFO alternated as to who would answer the door. Microcap companies grossly outnumber large caps and regulation like this costs them real money.
As another example, I just went through a public-private conversion for a company I owned, Westell, annual revenue $~30M. They went private because the cost of public reporting and was a million bucks a year. 1/30 is a huge perc
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Why, specifically?
I can see the argument for it for companies that produce energy, but I have a very hard time explaining for companies beyond that. Case in point, consider my local Waffle House restaurant. Aside from the feel-good exercise that greenwashing that number would be, how does it benefit the owners, customers, employees, or environment for them to collect and publish it?
Extending that, the franchisee company for that restaurant owns 22 stores,
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Why, specifically?
Because these costs (which are significant and growing rapidly) are externalized on to tax payers, people around the globe, and future generations, but are treated as a free resource when businesses account for their own costs. But it is not free. It's very expensive, and companies should not be able to silently offload this expense on to other people.
In addition, by making companies account for the costs they are currently foisting on others they can be taxed accordingly to pay for those operational costs,
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But regardless, we need reports on emissions for every public and private company above some revenue threshold.
Whenever I see someone say "we need", I just mentally replace it with "I want".
Ok. . . (Score:2)
. . . .then how about shutting down all those power-intensive data centers, full of chips made from rare earths with massive toxic wastestreams ??
Somehow, I doubt they're going to do that. . .
Oh, MY! They're all such amazingly GOOD PEOPLE!!! (Score:2)
Should ALL fraud and externalities be SEC biz? (Score:2)
That's swell, but it's not immediately obvious what it has to do with the SEC.
The best argument I can make off the top of my head is that if a publicly-traded company is externalizing costs in a fraudulent manner (and this would involve all forms of pollution, not just
Re:Should ALL fraud and externalities be SEC biz? (Score:4, Interesting)
p>That's swell, but it's not immediately obvious what it has to do with the SEC. The best argument I can make off the top of my head is that if a publicly-traded company is externalizing costs in a fraudulent manner (and this would involve all forms of pollution, not just CO2, and plenty of other types of shenanigans too), they might eventually get caught and their stock would take a sudden hit, instead of increment hits as various hidden liabilities come to light over time.
I agree that this doesn't seem to be central to the SEC's purview.
An alternate thought as to why it might be within the SEC's purview is that companies put out vast amounts of publicity (and shareholder reports) saying how ecological and green they are. People may hold their stock because they believe that the companies are socially conscious. If internal documents, however, show that they are deliberately withholding information on their damage to the environment, in order to boost their share price, that could be securities fraud.
Shocking news ... (Score:2)
... big companies in favor of adding burdensome requirements.
In totally coincidental news, small competitors hardest hit.
Climate change is not going to be addressed (Score:2)
It's also not going to be addressed by individual actions. You tossing a soda bottle in a recycling bin isn't going to stop what's coming.
What's needed is mass action by an organization without a profit motive. One that can take the losses the businesses refuse to while taking the action individuals can't. We typically call these
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Bwahahaha! Government indeed does have a profit motive. It's just that the profit isn't cash, it's jobs for party affiliates.
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So say the partisans who completely ignore whether something might actually be good for the country, as opposed to being a good look for their party.
That's what Shareholders are for (Score:2)
This doesn't belong within the auspices of the SEC, it's up to shareholders to hold their collective boards of directors accountable for whatever issues that they feel are important in terms of company plans and strategy. More bureaucracy brings nothing more than fat profit-driven lawyers to the table looking for any missing "disclosures" that they can seek class status in litigation of course in friendly judicial districts. every 10K, 5K or whatever filing brings a wrath of potential litigants who just nee
Why? (Score:1)
Wait, let me see if I get this right... (Score:1)
Did I summarize SJW position on speech correctly?
Just another tool for competitive advantage (Score:1)
I see that the stoic corporations that wish to make the same profits tomorrow that they did today by doing exactly the same thing are rolling out the "over regulation" whining brigade.
Listen folks, regulation is just another piece of the business landscape. It invites companies to excel at a new piece of the business landscape and perform better than their competition.
It would just mean that companies could choose to suck at their climate impacts and let the companies that do it better attain higher market
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What corporations are whining exactly?
Exactly the words were "whining brigade", anonymous coward.
Just press the Page Up button to view their salvo.
So, richest companies want to burden smaller ones (Score:2)
The biggest, richest companies which incidentally use a tremendous amount of energy want to burden smaller ones with costly reporting requirements.
Sure, they claim they are "green" but it's really "greenwash"
https://bsic.it/big-tech-playi... [bsic.it]
"Critics claim that many of the companies’ pledges are greenwash, a simple PR stunt aimed at appeasing climate-conscious employees or ESG investors. Often, they are right. Carbon neutrality is extremely hard to quantify. Companies often engage in window dressing wh
Problem with Google/Facebook mandating morality (Score:1)
Problem with Google/Facebook mandating morality and acting as the arbiter of truth, is that they have a poor record in these things. We know from their past actions that Schmidt, Zuckerberg et al. are greedy and unethical pieces of garbage.
Whatever it is that they're peddling right now, climate change or mental purity or w/e, might very well be good and worthwhile things. But you really have to think hard about who's behind it and ask yourself, do we really want to give these power-hungry scum even more pow
Fat (Score:2)
More money wasted on regulatory red tape that helps nothing.