ESG Standards: The Securities and Exchange Commission is Copying Chinese Communist Methods
The administrative state is implementing the Democrats’ Green New Deal using Chinese methods
While Americans and others around the world are fixated on the Russo-Ukrainian war and Taiwan, the Biden administration has relentlessly been using the federal bureaucracy to fundamentally change the US in service of leftwing politics. Biden’s top domestic priority is to “tackle the climate crisis” through the implementation of the authoritarian socialist policies of the so-called “Green New Deal.” The purpose of the GND is to use the force of the federal government to remake the American economy completely through arbitrary bureaucratic measures instead of being implemented in US law through congressional action.
The GND is aligned with the UN goal of achieving “sustainable development”, a Marxist-inspired end result that is intended to “transform the world” economy “to address a range of social needs including education, health, social protection, and job opportunities, while tackling climate change and environmental protection.” For GND and sustainable development goals to be achieved, capitalism must be swept aside and replaced by authoritarian socialism.
The GND-related measures being implemented by the US administrative state are patterned after the authoritarian methods used by the Chinese Communist Party to control businesses and individuals in China. These methods involve forcing businesses and individuals to regularly report their actions in order to conform to arbitrary CCP requirements while enabling communist bureaucracies to directly monitor those actions to determine and enforce compliance. A social scoring system is used to control behavior and implement penalties for non-compliance, with the social scoring aligned with the political objectives of the ruling party. The authoritarian methods being rolled out by the CCP in China are exactly what GND proponents in the Democrat Party seek to implement in the US, with the Democrats calling the shots and implementing compliance measures via the federal bureaucracy.
Here is the Democrat gameplan.
Immediately after Inauguration Day 2021, Biden signed executive actions that established the “green objectives” of his administration, as excerpted from the official White House website: “… to hold polluters accountable, including those who disproportionately harm communities of color and low-income communities; to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; to bolster resilience to the impacts of climate change; … and to prioritize both environmental justice and the creation of the well-paying union jobs necessary to deliver on these goals.”
Many federal agencies have taking up the charge in pursuing those objectives, including Dept of Interior (through shutting down new oil and gas leases by the Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management), Environmental Protection Agency (through tightening emissions standards), Dept of Transportation (through tightening fuel economy standards), and Dept of Energy (revised energy conservation standards). All of these activities are intended to reduce domestic oil and gas production and to force Americans to use so-called “green energy” alternatives to power their businesses, vehicles, and homes. Since so-called “renewable energy sources” currently produce only 12% of US energy production, as reported here by US Energy Information Administration, the US economy from top to bottom would have to be disrupted and changed (and destroyed?) to achieve the objectives of the Left’s GND.
Biden’s executive orders (the equivalent of pronouncements on high by Chinese leader Xi Jinping) have shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, placed a moratorium on the leasing of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) land for oil and gas drilling, halted new oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters, and led to a frantic Biden push to increase oil and gas imports from adversarial countries such as Russia, Venezuela, and Iran (after the new deal is consummated in Vienna).
Early results of these bureaucratic actions are in: historically high gasoline prices (average price on 28 March was $5.928 per gallon in Los Angeles as reported here) and inflation throughout the US economy (7.9% for the 12 months ended February 2022 as reported here) that is directly tied to the high energy costs. Secondary effects include de facto US financing of Russia’s war in Ukraine through a spike in imports of Russian oil in 2021, as documented and graphed by the US Energy Information Administration here.
The above bureaucratic actions are fairly standard and obvious when contemplating what the feds might do to pursue Biden’s GND objectives. A much more insidious and far-reaching step toward implementing socio-economic controls through the financial regulation of American businesses has recently been taken by the Securities and Exchange Commission, as reported by The New York Times here: “The Securities and Exchange Commission has said for the first time that public companies must tell their shareholders and the federal government how they affect the climate, a sweeping proposal long demanded by environmental advocates.”
The bottom line is that the SEC is being weaponized to implement through administrative action GND-related social controls sought by climate change activists that will force businesses to report the “climate impacts” of their business operations. This is just the typical nose of the camel under the tent because fines and penalties for non-compliance with to-be-determined bureaucratic requirements are the almost certain next steps in forcing US companies to “go green.”
If/when implemented by the SEC after receiving feedback from the public, these new rules will have far reaching effects on publicly traded companies that will be forced to comply with the evolving “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) standards being developed cooperatively by climate activists, financial institutions, and government officials in the US and around the world. According to the Heartland Institute, approximately “82% of percent of large companies in the US” have ESG systems already in place. Making ESG standards compliance mandatory is the real endgame of the SEC’s initiative to force annual climate impact disclosures by US businesses.
The Heartland Institute points out that ESG standards include models and statistics for monitoring and enforcing many leftwing causes. Examples include:
Identity politics: Percentage of employees per employee category, by age group, gender and other indicators of diversity (e.g., ethnicity).
Labor union politics: Percentage of active workforce covered under collective bargaining agreements
Climate activism: The carbon footprint (and other gas emissions/by-products)
In short, ESG standards and associated statistical measurements can be arbitrarily divined outside normal legislative processes for almost any leftwing cause, with the federal government becoming the ultimate arbiter of authorized business activities. This is the Chinese Communist model!
[As an aside, despite claims that “the science has been settled” about anthropogenic carbon dioxide being a major contributor to “climate change,” new studies continue to be produced that debunk this unproven theory. For example, a recent report, entitled “World Atmospheric CO2, Its 14C Specific Activity, Non-fossil Component, Anthropogenic Fossil Component, and Emissions (1750–2018)” concludes (emphasis added): “Our results show that the percentage of the total CO2 due to the use of fossil fuels from 1750 to 2018 increased from 0% in 1750 to 12% in 2018, much too low to be the cause of global warming.” Despite this real science, the Biden administration seeks to take the US economy over the cliff in pursuit of its GND dreams.]
Biden’s SEC is marching to the drums of environmental extremists in pushing new financial regulations aimed at defining and enforcing what they deem to be “environmentally responsible actions” by businesses and individuals. By setting arbitrary ESG scores that are based on politics instead of science, the SEC would be able in the future to adversely affect a company’s reputation, determine a company’s ability to borrow money from major financial institutions, assign financial penalties for noncompliance, and even potentially force “goodwill gestures” through investment of company profits in socially-responsible leftwing activities and organizations in order to offset bad ESG scores. This would be capitalism with Chinese Communist characteristics!
Such actions would be a direct interference by the government in the capital appreciation of companies and in dividends to their shareholders – all in the name of leftwing GND (and other) political objectives. Add these CCP-inspired measures to the massive tax and spending increases proposed in Biden’s budget demands, and the result is a predictable recipe for economic disaster: a return to the stagflation of the 1970s caused by the policies of another Democrat president. It is axiomatic that governments can neither tax nor spend their way to prosperity.
All of this is a two-fer for the CCP in their quest for world domination and control: the conditioning of American businesses and individuals to accept CCP-style social controls while at the same time also destroying the US economy. These actions also help achieve the UN’s sustainable development goals, which require capitalism to be replaced by authoritarian socialism. And the Democrat Party and others are playing their parts to make it all happen.
The end.