What to look for in the SEC’s groundbreaking climate rules

By Trey Thoelcke Published Mar 21, 11:10AM EDT

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What to look for in the SEC’s groundbreaking climate rules — © Alex Wong / Getty Images News via Getty Images

By David Callaway, Callaway Climate Insights

(Bill Sternberg is a veteran Washington journalist and former editorial page editor of USA Today.)

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Callaway Climate Insights) — President Joe Biden’s climate agenda is stalling like an electric vehicle with a dead battery. His $555 billion package of clean energy tax incentives is on life support in Congress. The Supreme Court is weighing whether to block his administration’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The fossil fuel lobby and its congressional allies just torpedoed one of his Federal Reserve nominees. And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shifted the prevailing political winds from leave-the-oil-in-the-ground to pump-as-much-as-you-can.

Stymied on several fronts, climate activists and environmentally conscious investors are turning toward the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees U.S. financial markets and for the past year has been soliciting input on what corporations should have to report about climate change.

There’s no shortage of opinions: The agency received more than 500 comments, spanning the spectrum from the Sierra Club to the National Mining Association. Now the commission is poised to vote tomorrow — Monday, March 21 — on a groundbreaking proposal to mandate, for the first time, that publicly traded companies disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and the risks they face from a changing climate.

“It’s an enormous deal,” Steven Rothstein, founding managing director of the Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets, said in an interview with Callaway Climate Insights. “To begin to put a system in place that will have a standardized climate disclosure for publicly traded companies is critical. Investors have been asking for this. Customers have been asking for this. The market needs it.”. . .

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About the Author Trey Thoelcke →

Trey has been an editor and author at 24/7 Wall St. for more than a decade, where he has published thousands of articles analyzing corporate earnings, dividend stocks, short interest, insider buying, private equity, and market trends. His comprehensive coverage spans the full spectrum of financial markets, from blue-chip stalwarts to emerging growth companies.

Beyond 24/7 Wall St., Trey has created and edited financial content for Benzinga and AOL's BloggingStocks, contributing additional hundreds of articles to the investment community. He previously oversaw the 24/7 Climate Insights site, managing editorial operations and content strategy, and currently oversees and creates content for My Investing News.

Trey's editorial expertise extends across multiple publishing environments. He served as production editor at Dearborn Financial Publishing and development editor at Kaplan, where he helped shape financial education materials. Earlier in his career, he worked as a writer-producer at SVE. His freelance editing portfolio includes work for prestigious clients such as Sage Publications, Rand McNally, the Institute for Supply Management, the American Library Association, Eggplant Literary Productions, and Spiegel.

Outside of financial journalism, Trey writes fiction and has been an active member of the writing community for years, overseeing a long-running critique group and moderating workshop sessions at regional conventions. He lives with his family in an old house in the Midwest.