Republicans plan legal assault on climate disclosure rules for public companies........The SEC’s proposed new rules, which would require public corporations to disclose climate-related information, have been criticized by industry groups. Republican officials and corporate lobby groups are teeing up a multi-pronged legal assault on the Biden administration’s effort to help investors hold public corporations accountable for their carbon emissions and other climate change risks. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed new climate disclosure rules in March that would require public companies to report the climate-related impact and risks to their businesses. The regulator has since received more than 14,500 comments. Submissions from 24 Republican state attorneys general and some of the country’s most powerful industry associations suggest that these groups are preparing a series of legal challenges after the regulation is finalized, which could happen as soon as next month. The SEC proposal does not establish environmental policy or require that companies take any climate-related actions other than making more information publicly available.  Both critiques feature prominently in comments from the Republican attorneys general and the US Chamber of Commerce, which spent more than $35m lobbying the federal government in the first half of 2022, according to OpenSecrets. The Republican letter warns that if the new disclosure requirements are finalized, “capitalism will fall by the wayside”. (editorial comment- isn't that the end-run objective!)  The free speech and legal authority objections have been met with profound skepticism from legal experts and former SEC officials. In a letter to the commission, John Coates, a Harvard Law School professor and former SEC general counsel, said that instead of challenging the climate disclosure rule on its merits, “critics have resorted to mischaracterizing the proposal, and inventing their own, fictional rule”.                   https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/15/republicans-climate-rules-legal-challenge-allow-emissions?utm_term=63230cbaf989b229526a78ce5ecafbaa&utm_campaign=GuardianTodayUS&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=GTUS_email

Executive Excess 2022, reveals how low-wage corporations have continued to pump up CEO pay during the pandemic while workers are struggling with rising costs.A tight labor market created a rare moment of leverage for low-wage workers last year. But Corporate America took no great leap forward on pay equity. The report zeroes in on compensation trends at the 300 publicly held U.S. corporations that reported the lowest median worker wages in 2020. At over a third of these firms—106 in all—median worker pay either fell or failed to rise above the 4.7 percent average U.S. inflation rate in 2021.A new Institute for Policy Studies report, Executive Excess 2022, reveals how low-wage corporations have continued to pump up CEO pay during the pandemic while workers are struggling with rising costs. By contrast, CEO pay at these same 300 low-wage firms soared 31 percent to an average of $10.6 million. This stunning increase drove the average gap between CEO and median worker pay at these companies to 670-to-1, up from 604-to-1 in 2020. At 49 of the 300 firms, pay ratios topped 1,000-to-1. Amazon's new CEO, Andy Jassy, raked in $212.7 million last year, making him the highest-paid CEO in our corporate low-wage sample. Jassy's pay amounts to 6,474 times the $32,855 take-home of Amazon's typical worker. Of the 106 companies in our sample where median worker pay did not keep pace with inflation, 67 blew a combined total of $43.7 billion on stock buybacks. This financial maneuver inflates executive stock-based pay and drains capital from worker raises, R&D, and other productivity-boosting investments. Corporate America's perverse pay practices become even more disturbing when we consider another often overlooked reality: Ordinary Americans are supporting our inequitable corporate economic order through the hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded contracts and subsidies that flow every year to for-profit businesses. Of the 300 companies in our sample, 40 percent received federal contracts totaling $37.2 billion over the past few years. CEO pay apologists regularly argue that corporate leaders deserve their massive compensation packages because they bear enormous responsibilities and must take extraordinary risks. This argument quickly falls apart when we compare CEOs at major contractors with the government officials ultimately responsible for their contracts. The U.S. secretary of defense, for instance, manages the country's largest workforce—more than 2 million employees—and makes life-and-death decisions on a daily basis. And yet the defense secretary and other Biden cabinet members make just $221,400 per year, less than three times as much as the $76,668 average federal employee annual pay. By contrast, at the low-wage contractors we studied, CEO pay averaged $11.8 million and the average CEO-worker pay ratio sat at 571-to-1 in 2021.                    https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/05/11/ceo-pay-skyrocketed-corporations-while-their-low-wage-workers-

 A new report suggests that the money Big Tech companies keep in the banking system can do more climate damage than the products they sell.  On Tuesday, three nonprofit environmental groups jointly released a report containing a different set of numbers that appear to indicate that the world’s biggest companies—and, indeed, any company or individual with cash in the bank—have been inadvertently fuelling the climate crisis. Such cash, left in banks and other financial institutions that lend to the fossil-fuel industry, builds pipelines and funds oil exploration and, in the process, produces truly immense amounts of carbon. The report raises deep questions about the sanity of our financial system, but it also suggests a potential realignment of corporate players that could move decisively to change the balance of power which has so far thwarted rapid climate action.  Google’s parent company, Alphabet has worked hard to rein in the emissions from its products. Last year, for example, Google Sustainabilitypublished an account of the work it put into having casing suppliers convert from using virgin to recycled aluminum for Google’s new Pixel 5 phone “studied the chemical compositions of different recycled aluminum alloys and grades, looking for an optimal combination of alloying elements to meet our performance standards”—to executives who had “to go far upstream in the supply chain to the source that was supplying our aluminum, then negotiate a new type of deal that they’d never done before.” All this was done, Google said, in order to “lower the carbon footprint of manufacturing the enclosure by 35 percent.” 

But, according to the new report, these efforts have missed perhaps the most important source of corporate emissions: the money that these companies earn and then store in banks, equities, and bonds. The consortium of environmental groups—the Climate Safe Lending Network, the Outdoor Policy Outfit, and BankFWD—examined corporate financial statements to find out how much cash the world’s biggest companies had on hand, and then calculated how much carbon each dollar sitting in the financial system may have generated. According to these calculations, Google’s carbon emissions, in effect, would have risen a hundred and eleven per cent overnight. Meta’s emissions would have increased by a hundred and twelve per cent, and Apple’s by sixty-four per cent. For Microsoft in 2021, the report claims, “the emissions generated by the company’s $130 billion in cash and investments were comparable to the cumulative emissions generated by the manufacturing, transporting, and use of every Microsoft product in the world.”  The authors are quick to note caveats. The companies mentioned do not disclose banking arrangements; some of their cash is in the major banks, but some of it is reportedly held overseas, and a portion is in sovereign debt, such as Treasury bills, or in other assets that can be quickly sold, such as stocks. So the numbers, though precise, are extrapolations based on averages and emissions estimates. The report is based on research and analysis performed by South Pole, an international climate-finance consultancy that has worked with companies such as Nestle and Hilton on emissions reporting. South Pole maintains that “the carbon intensity figures for the asset classes analyzed in this report are conservative estimates that constitute an indicative underestimation of the actual emissions banks generate through their financial services”—and that, if you added in companies’ pension plans and insurance arrangements, it would “generate a larger financial footprint calculation than simply cash and investments.” Even if these figures are crude-cut, however, they are the first of their kind that we have seen and, as such, they offer a unique analysis.  The authors are quick to note caveats. The companies mentioned do not disclose banking arrangements; some of their cash is in the major banks, but some of it is reportedly held overseas, and a portion is in sovereign debt, such as Treasury bills, or in other assets that can be quickly sold, such as stocks. So the numbers, though precise, are extrapolations based on averages and emissions estimates. The report is based on research and analysis performed by South Pole, an international climate-finance consultancy that has worked with companies such as Nestle and Hilton on emissions reporting. South Pole maintains that “the carbon intensity figures for the asset classes analyzed in this report are conservative estimates that constitute an indicative underestimation of the actual emissions banks generate through their financial services”—and that, if you added in companies’ pension plans and insurance arrangements, it would “generate a larger financial footprint calculation than simply cash and investments.” Even if these figures are crude-cut, however, they are the first of their kind that we have seen and, as such, they offer a unique analysis.....and there is much, much more.... https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/could-googles-carbon-emissions-have-effectively-doubled-overnight