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Rubio continues ESG pushback (2021)
| Environmental, social, and corporate governance |
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| • What is ESG? • Enacted ESG legislation • Arguments for and against ESG • Opposition to ESG • Federal ESG rules • ESG legislation tracker • Economy and Society: Ballotpedia's weekly ESG newsletter |
A week after introducing legislation pushing back against ESG, Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sent a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) asking it to clarify several ESG matters. Specifically, Senator Rubio wanted the SEC to explain how ESG rules will affect American business in its dealings with China. He wrote:
| “ | “[P]revious positions taken by the Commission indicate that the consistent application of its policies to the PRC is not guaranteed,” Rubio wrote. “In recent years, the Commission has created arbitrary exceptions to its general rules for activities in the PRC.
For example, a standard purporting to provide information about issuers’ relevant ‘social’ businesses practices that required the disclosure of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ practices with respect to their workforces in the United States, but not the complicity of those same issuers in supporting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s many human rights abuses within the PRC or globally would be, at the very least, highly inconsistent and arbitrary…. [Consider] [w]hether China-based issuers or issuers with significant business in the PRC should require the representation or information about the representation of underrepresented ethnic or religious groups historically oppressed by the CCP, including Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and members of other Muslim groups, Tibetans, Christians, and practitioners of Falun Gong, among others. If the level of ‘investor demand’ for an ESG disclosure for business activity in the U.S. is diminished for substantially similar, or even more substantial activities in the PRC, it may indicate that the disclosure is not primarily about providing beneficial and consistent information to investors about that activity, but instead is an arbitrary attempt to influence issuers on certain domestic political affairs….” According to a press release, Senator Rubio also “argued that the SEC should consider how to consistently apply its standards to supply chain resiliency and investor protection” to China, especially in light of what it described as “the hoarding of medical supplies by [China] during the COVID-19 pandemic….”[1] |
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See also
- Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG)
- Economy and Society: Ballotpedia's ESG newsletter
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
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