According to Pensions & Investments, over 75 House Democrats sent a letter to the Securities And Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler urging him to quickly finalize the agency’s climate disclosure rule. I suggest he does not and throws the ball back where it belongs.
You see, a rulebook is a consequence of a marketplace system, which, in turn, is a consequence of a proven theory, which, in turn, must be correlated to nature’s first-principles. The theory must be defined and proven before the marketplace systems can be described and sensible rulings to protect the trust in the marketplace can be achieved.
It is the responsibility of Congress, not the SEC, to define the policy that establishes the proven theory, in this case, of climate change, in the words of Albert Einstein, that determines what can be discovered.
Congress should request the assistance of renowned advisors to establish an agreed-upon theory before it tosses the responsibility of climate change actions over the fence to the SEC. Or better yet, the President should establish an executive council to -for the first time- establish the theory for humanity from which climate actions be derived.
I want to be on it.
To make climate change actions accountable, the SEC is in the unenviable position of having to decline to establish a rulebook detached from a proven theory and stringent marketplace mechanisms. The SEC is an umpire, like a referee in soccer. It is not the role of the SEC to establish or validate the theory of gameplay.
Climate change is no hoax. Where it comes from, we do not precisely know. We can clean up our act, and nothing may improve. Because in the words of Richard Feynman, understanding the individual elements does not mean you know anything about the interaction of the elements. The key to climate change is to adapt, regardless of its causation. In the same way, we have developed cameras to capture light, despite a hundred-year-old unresolved debate of whether light is a wave or a particle.
Saying no to his boss, Congress, may be hard for Gary. But for the sake of his integrity and the future of the SEC, I suggest he holds off until Congress has done its job. The precedent to this trainwreck of misplaced responsibility is a financial system eleven times the size of production that produces no renewable value to improve human adaptability to nature’s entropy and lets finance determine the vector of human expansion—a big governmental mistake.
Show some teeth, Gary.
