While speaking with Bloomberg’s David Westin on Wednesday, Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler discussed the agency’s potential climate disclosure rule and stated that “we have a role to bring some consistency” because most of the biggest companies do climate disclosure anyway.
Westin asked, [relevant exchange begins around 27:30] “Let’s talk about disclosure of climate issues, which has been pending before the commission, and it has not come out yet. And it’s not clear why. Can you give us a sense of the timetable on when you may have [that] regulations?”
Gensler responded, “So, the Securities and Exchange Commission is not a climate regulator. We are not a regulator of climate risk. But we oversee companies raising money in the public and they disclose their material risk to you — or they’re supposed to disclose their material risk out of rules that have been around for decades. And many of those companies are already making significant disclosures. I think something like 90% of the top 1,000 companies in the U.S. by market cap disclose something about climate. Over half do it — disclose their greenhouse gas emissions. So, there we have a role to bring some consistency, some comparability, you can compare and contrast. That’s our role. It’s a securities market role, not a climate role.”
Gensler didn’t give a specific timetable on the regulation and stated that there has been an extraordinary amount of public comment on the proposal.
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