Climate Finance Rule Stiffs Investors

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently released a new rule resulting from a process intended to make companies disclose their climate-related financial risks to investors. But in trying to shape a regulation that would mollify opponents—largely industries responsible for the heat-trapping gases that cause climate change—the SEC failed to relieve investors of responsibility for determining how companies will fare in the clean energy transition.

The final rule that arrived in early March, almost two years after its introduction, reflects the tortured process that produced it. The document clocks in at 888 pages, twice the length of the already lengthy draft rule. A close reading reveals that nearly all the draft rule’s tenets were bracketed by legal caveats that greatly weakened it from what supporters had hoped. So, after years of asking for…