NY Comptrollers: Force Companies To Make “Climate Change” Disclosures

April 21, 2015 – 3:20 pm

Hey, you know how I constantly write that “climate change” is really about Progressive politics, which requires bigger and bigger centralized government with more and more control over our lives, over private entities, and over economies?

New York comptrollers call on SEC to enforce climate change disclosures at companies

New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli and New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer on Friday said the SEC should “consider enforcement and other actions” to make fossil-fuel companies improve disclosure of “material risks” that climate change “poses to their business.”

Mr. DiNapoli is the sole trustee of the $181.7 billion New York State Common Retirement Fund, Albany, and Mr. Stringer is the fiduciary for the $163.4 billion New York City Retirement Systems, which consists of five city pension funds.

“The silence of fossil-fuel companies on the risks they face from climate change is a red flag for investors,” Mr. Stringer said in a news release issued by both comptrollers.

“It’s time for the SEC to step in and, through regulatory or enforcement action, require these companies to provide complete and accurate information to protect investors and the broader marketplace,” Mr. DiNapoli said in the news release.

Huh. More Big Government. Weird, right?

Interesting that neither comptroller is willing to divest their funds from fossil fuels, as well.

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This entry was written by William Teach and posted on at 3:20 pm and filed under Global Warming, Progressive Goals. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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8 Responses to “NY Comptrollers: Force Companies To Make “Climate Change” Disclosures”

  1. drowningpuppies says:
    April 21, 2015 at 4:16 pm

    The letter didn’t identify the fossil-fuel holdings of the two pension systems or the names of companies that the comptrollers alleged haven’t provided sufficient information on the impact of climate change.

    Ahem.

  2. john says:
    April 21, 2015 at 5:25 pm

    Teach BIG GOVERNMENT actually has fewer workers now than at any time since the 1960s
    Employment by the Federal Government is at a 47 year low even though the US population has increased by 50% http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/bloated-government-federal-employment-at-47-year-low/
    Yeah it is pretty weird to ask the SEC to require fossil fuel companies to provide complete and accurate info to protect investors.
    Wait ??? No Teach it isn’t “weird” that is the job of the SEC to protect investors and make sure that ALL companies provide full and honest info.

  3. gitarcarver says:
    April 21, 2015 at 5:37 pm

    Teach BIG GOVERNMENT actually has fewer workers now than at any time since the 1960s

    The BIG GOVERNMENT disagrees with you johnny boy.

    Secondly, if the companies were required to give the information, they would. Instead, this is another end run to an agency to make a rule which was not intended by the letter and spirit of the law.

  4. john says:
    April 21, 2015 at 5:38 pm

    Back in the good old days 1967 The Federal Government employed 4% of the population it now employs 2% that is BIG GOVERNMENT ???

  5. jl says:
    April 21, 2015 at 7:18 pm

    Professor John- It’s not how employees they have but how much power they have.

  6. gitarcarver says:
    April 21, 2015 at 7:34 pm

    johnny boy,

    You are working on the presumption that just because a 500 lb person loses weight, they are still not overweight. Just because the government has fewer employees does not mean it is not too large.

    One should see an increase in productivity from the pre-desktop computing years until now. That is one of the reasons people use more computers.

    But you are still missing the point that it is not only the size of the government, it is the cost of it and the cost of the regulations it imposes.

    According to the study, last year Washington imposed an additional $112 billion in regulatory costs and 157.9 million paperwork burden hours on Americans. That works out to $446 million and 629,000 paperwork hours for each day the federal government was open.

    “From 2009 to 2013, regulators have published $494 billion in final rules,” penned AAF’s director of regulatory policy, Sam Batkins. “This figure dwarfs the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from countries like Sweden, Peru, and Ireland.”

    In 2013, 80,224 pages of regulations were added to the Federal Register, a 3.8-percent increase over 2012. The number of “economically significant” regulations increased by 25 percent, and the number of rules imposing “unfunded mandates on states or private entities” grew by 38 percent, Batkins found.

    “Overall regulatory activity was up over 2012,” Batkins told CNSNews.com, in part because “the White House delayed some controversial rules until after the 2012 election.”

    So what are we getting for that money? Well, the IRS is a mess. The VA can’t get its act together. The EPA continues to make regulations that hurt businesses and then loses in courts. The Department of Education can’t learn what it is doing wrong, much less teach anyone else. The ATF is trying to make rules that infringe on Constitutional rights. The FDA can’t inspect manufacturers but is using military weaponry to raid small farms that are selling raw milk products.

    The list goes on and on.

    The fact of the matter is that you cannot go a day without breaking a law.

    In 2007, professor Tim Wu of Columbia Law School recounted a game played by some prosecutors. One would name a famous person — “say, Mother Teresa or John Lennon” — and other prosecutors would try to imagine “a plausible crime for which to indict him or her,” usually a felony plucked from “the incredibly broad yet obscure crimes that populate the U.S. Code like a kind of jurisprudential minefield.” Did the person make “false pretenses on the high seas”? Is he guilty of “injuring a mailbag”?

    In 2009, Harvey Silverglate’s book “Three Felonies a Day” demonstrated how almost any American could be unwittingly guilty of various crimes between breakfast and bedtime. Silverglate, a defense lawyer and civil libertarian, demonstrated the dangers posed by the intersection of prosecutorial ingenuity with the expansion of the regulatory state.

    The Founders saw government as a necessary evil. You see it as “welcomed overlords.”

  7. Jeffery says:
    April 22, 2015 at 6:26 am

    Merely suggesting that the SEC consider having a company disclose the business risks they face to potential investors is government overreach??

  8. Jeffery says:
    April 22, 2015 at 6:46 am

    Gitar boy

    Nice distractions.

    The SEC is being asked by two officials with the responsibilities of investing hundreds of billions of public workers pension funds to have corporations disclose the risks of climate change on their business operations.

    And you let fly at the VA, IRS and EPA.

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