State Treasurers Push Back on SEC’s Rushed Pro-ESG Policy
- Media Manager
- Dec 21, 2023
- 2 min read
The Daily Signal
Written By: Fred Lucas
Published: December 21st, 2023
A letter from 21 state financial officials is urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to postpone a rule creating a new type of company designed for climate activists.
The state financial officers asked SEC Chairman Gary Gensler to extend the comment period from what they considered an unusually short 21 days to 60 days.
If enacted, the new SEC rule would establish a new type of corporation called a Natural Asset Company, a company that by design can’t make money.
But, the financial officials contend, it enables locking up of America’s natural resources, which could harm rural communities that rely on mining, farms and ranches by allowing the activists to buy land, both public and private, on the condition that it not be put to productive use.
“We are asking the SEC to pump the brakes on this rule. Interested parties like state treasurers need time to consider the effects of essentially redefining business and value as we know it, and what such a mechanism could do to communities within our states,” Idaho State Treasurer Julie Ellsworth told The Daily Signal in a statement.
“That this proposed rule was rushed through quietly does not inspire confidence that it was proposed in good faith,” Ellsworth added. “The impacts on states could be enormous—even catastrophic.”
Utah State Treasurer Marlo Oaks first raised concerns about the matter in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in November.
This rule would promote the ESG movement—short for environmental, social, governance–that activists are pushing into companies, said Derek Kreifels, CEO of State Financial Officers Foundation.
“The SEC’s proposed rule creating natural asset companies will not only upend the accepted standards of value by which businesses are judged, it would pave the way for ESG fanatics to remake the American landscape,” Kreifels said in a public statement.
Natural Asset Companies “would lock away vital resources that have underwritten America’s prosperity, sacrificing them on the altar of climate alarmism,” Kreifels added. “That the SEC would weigh such a decision after such a ridiculously short comment period could only suggest they are trying to sneak this measure through without necessary scrutiny. The SEC must reopen the comment period to allow concerned parties to weigh in.”
