Top White House Aides Push Climate Change Disclosure

Two of President Obama’s key economic strategists took to the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal on Friday to announce new agency actions to track climate change and solicit private-sector cooperation.

“Even before the devastating flooding began in Louisiana last week, and we learned that July 2016 shattered all global temperature records, mounting data had demonstrated the growing risk climate change poses to the global economy,” wrote Obama senior adviser Brian Deese and National Economic Council Director Jeffrey Zients.

Citing federal agency actions to highlight and address the related risks, they appealed to the business community by arguing that “standardized disclosure of climate risk will help secure long-term value for investors and taxpayers.”

Recent economic reports, they said, reveal that “financial markets suffer from an alarming lack of standardized and comparable climate-risk information, which keeps investors and policy makers from accurately incorporating these risks into their decisions.”

The solution “requires not only leveraging bold action by governments to cut carbon pollution, but also harnessing the power of market forces with clear, uniformly disclosed assessments of climate-related economic risks.”

And it starts, they said, “with changing the way the federal government does business.”

Deese and Zients noted that on Friday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will propose the first update to federal flood standards in 40 years. Similar updates are due from the Housing and Urban Development and the Transportation departments.

“The administration recently proposed requiring that all companies doing business with the federal government publicly disclose what they know about their climate-risk exposure,” they continued. “This information will be a factor in taxpayer-funded contracting decisions.” 

Also in the works is requiring disclosure about climate risks that 140 million pension beneficiaries face in their investments. Already agencies must disclose climate risk in leases of public resources, issuance of permits, and investment in infrastructure.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, the two noted, has already taken steps, but industry is ready for more, they argued. “This proxy season alone, shareholders filed a record-setting 94 climate-related proposals at shareholder meetings of U.S. companies.”

They proposed that the SEC “adopt detailed and standardized industry specific requirements for disclosure, and, once in place, aggressively hold public companies to account when it comes to those obligations to disclose.”

Though some bipartisanship on the issue is evident, Deese and Zients wrote, “Some Republicans in Congress continue to advocate for a strategy of keeping taxpayers and investors in the dark by preventing the government from updating flood standards or enforcing disclosure of common-sense information to the public.”