Rep. Vargas Remarks in Support of SEC Climate Disclosure Rule at House Financial Services Committee Hearing
WASHINGTON - At a House Financial Services Committee hearing today, U.S. Representative Juan Vargas (CA-52), co-chair of the Congressional Sustainable Investment Caucus, voiced support for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) recently finalized climate disclosure rule.
“The SEC’s climate rule is about standardizing the climate related disclosures publicly traded companies must make so that regular people invested in the market can have access to the same information that businesses already are spending roughly $500,000 a year to access,” said Rep. Vargas. “Giving people more information is a good thing, not a bad thing.”
“If you're a teacher, or a firefighter, or anyone that's working to earn a retirement for yourself and your family, because of this rule, you will have more information to help you decide which companies to trust with your hard-earned savings,” Rep. Vargas continued.
Last week, Rep. Vargas held a press conference with Rep. Sean Casten (IL-06) to underscore the need for the SEC’s climate disclosure rule.
Last year, Reps. Vargas and Casten founded the Congressional Sustainable Investment Caucus to create a forum to protect Americans’ freedom to invest while increasing the information available to market participants about the risks posed by climate change.
Rep. Vargas’s Corporate Governance Improvement and Investor Protection Act, which passed the House in the 117th Congress, encouraged corporations to address important issues such as climate change and worker rights by requiring the SEC to create standard definitions for environmental and social responsibility metrics. The bill also included language from Rep. Casten’s Climate Risk Disclosure Act that required public companies to disclose additional information about their exposure to climate-related risks.
A rough transcript of Rep. Vargas’s remarks is below.
Rep. Vargas: The SEC’s climate rule is about standardizing the climate related disclosures publicly traded companies must make so that regular people invested in the market can have access to the same information that businesses already are spending roughly $500,000 a year to access. Giving people more information is a good thing, not a bad thing.
The reality is that climate change isn't just a threat to our planet, it's also a threat to our financial systems. Wildfires, floods, and hurricanes, and the risk of future climate disasters have a significant impact on families’ financial well-being. These are not far-left radicals. These are firefighters, these are police officers, these are teachers, these are regular investors, these are… everybody in our country, we want to know this information.
In fact, interestingly, this week, I was able to talk to some insurers, because they are having a difficult time insuring homes in California because of climate change, because of the wildfires. They’re not far-left radicals. These are people that want this information because they invest.
If you're a teacher, or a firefighter, or anyone that's working to earn a retirement for yourself and your family, because of this rule, you will have more information to help you decide which companies to trust with your hard-earned savings.
In issuing this rule, the SEC has remained true to the agency's mission to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets and facilitate capital formation. Climate change also impacts anyone who has money invested in the market, including many, as I said, teachers, firefighters, with a pension, anyone who puts money away for a retirement account.
So I appreciate very much what the SEC has done here. And talking about transparency and talking about giving people the opportunity to take a look at this rule and to comment, it was an enormous amount of time, back and forth. And I think that they did a very good job.
Obviously, there's some of us that wished the rule would have gotten further… Scope Three information. But you know what, I think this is a very good start. So I applaud the SEC. I applaud them for what they've done there. It's clearly within their mandate, clearly opportunity is here to give information to investors that want this information. And I applaud them for what they do.
Lastly, I would say this, there has been this notion of denying climate change for many, many decades. And finally, people are understanding that this is real. It has real impacts on our country and throughout the world.
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