The New Republic reports:

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday voted 3–2 to finalize a rule on what companies disclose about their greenhouse gas emissions and how climate change stands to impact their business. On its face, that wouldn’t seem to be much cause for alarm. Companies are already required to disclose information on their management structures, overall financial health, and the kinds of risks facing their business. Large segments of the oil and gas industry, though, as well as their beneficiaries in the Republican Party, are treating the possibility of having to disclose climate-related information as if it were an existential threat. And as a result, the SEC’s rule is much weaker than it could have been.

At an industry conference last month, Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, a trade association for oil and gas producers, laid out her group’s strategy for stopping new regulations and administrative actions in their tracks; the main goal, she emphasized, was to kill any version of the SEC’s climate disclosure requirements. At the North American Prospect Expo, or NAPE, Summit for the energy industry in Houston early last month, she described the potential SEC rule as one of several attempts to “decapitalize, defund, or de-bank our industry.” An audio recording of the speech, which was open to all attendees, was provided to The New Republic by an audience member who asked to remain anonymous so as not to jeopardize future attendance.

On some level, industry pressure has already worked: The SEC rule that came to a vote on Wednesday was considerably weaker than the version that was first proposed in March 2022. It lacked the strongest part of the original proposal: that companies be required to disclose what are known as Scope 3 emissions. Those are the emissions linked to products it purchases from third parties, activities like business travel, and the use of its products by consumers. Scope 3 emissions account for as much as 90 percent of a given company’s emissions. Fossil fuel executives and lobbyists’ heated opposition to being required to disclose these emissions is a big part of why that component was dropped. SEC Chair Gary Gensler has said that the rule received 24,000 comments during the required public comment period that ended this morning—the largest ever number of comments filed on a single proposal. By the time the rule was released, even disclosing Scope 1 and 2 emissions—roughly speaking, those generated by corporate operations—was in question. It will now only be required of larger, SEC-registered companies—about 40 percent of America’s 7,000 public companies registered with the SEC—that determine these disclosures are “material” to investors. [Continue reading…]