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America The Swamp Turns Green


Oficials who designed cumbersome carbon offset regulation join company that will profit from it.


W BY KEVIN MOONEY


ashington’s revolv- ing door is getting a green paint job. The architects of a


controversial new federal rule requir- ing businesses to measure their carbon footprints have joined a startup com- pany poised to reap millions by per- forming those exact same calculations. Three top Securities and Exchange Commission officials have joined Perse- foni, a company formed in 2020 to mea- sure the footprints of large businesses. Documents show that the SEC relied


on input from Persefoni to draft the rule. Persefoni, which bills itself as “the


platform for carbon accounting, built for climate disclosure,” and similar outfits are emerging as their own ser- vice industry to profit from the new rule, since most companies do not have the expertise to calculate their carbon footprints. While environmentalists have


hailed the rule as an important step in forcing companies to grapple with their impact on the climate by expos- ing it to the public, critics argue that it goes far beyond the SEC’s core mis- sion of protecting investors. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce,


a Trump appointee, said it “forces investors to view companies through the eyes of a vocal set of stakeholders” — as opposed to traditional share- holders — “for whom a company’s cli- mate reputation is of equal or greater importance than a company’s finan- cial performance.” Public records from the SEC show


the commission held six meetings with Persefoni and Ceres — a prom- inent investor advocacy group that supports such climate disclosure — from September 2021 to June 2022. These include meetings between:


36 NEWSMAX | DECEMBER 2023


Persefoni and the SEC chair, Gary Gensler; Ceres and the office of Commis-


sioner Allison Herren Lee; Persefoni and Ceres with the SEC’s Division of Economic and Risk Analy- sis, the Division of Corporation Finance, and the Office of the Chief Accountant. Lee, a Democrat who joined the


SEC as a staff attorney in 2005, was appointed by President Donald Trump as one of the SEC’s five commissioners in 2019. President Joe Biden named her acting chair in 2021.


“The collusion between the SEC and a select group of outside parties gives new meaning to the term climate


cartel.” — Bonner Cohen, National Center for Public Policy Research


Lee stepped down on March 15,


2022, just six days before the com- mission unveiled its proposed climate rule. In May 2023, she joined Persefoni as a member of its “sustainability advi- sory board.” At Persefoni, she reunited with Kris-


tina Wyatt, who joined the company’s board in March 2022. Previously, Wyatt had served the SEC as senior counsel for climate and environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG). In this capacity, she worked direct-


ly on developing the proposed rule. Wyatt was also listed as the direct contact when the commission circu- lated a request for information from the public regarding climate change disclosures.


In December 2022, Persefoni hired


another SEC alum, Emily Pierce, to serve as associate general counsel and vice president of global regulatory cli- mate disclosure. The controversial and cumbersome


SEC rule requires large companies to provide soup-to-nuts calculations of their carbon emissions, including those from thousands of their suppliers. To come up with numbers for


Cocoa Puffs cereal, for instance, Gen- eral Mills might have to calculate the emissions from cocoa farms in Africa, corn fields in the U.S., or sugar planta- tions in Latin America. Since most of the emissions that


must be measured are not directly gen- erated by the companies, the calcula- tions amount to a herculean task. This is where Persefoni comes in. “Persefoni has a glaring conflict of


interest in low-balling cost of compli- ance estimates to the SEC, which the SEC should have disclosed and been mindful of,” says Rupert Darwall, an author and energy policy analyst affili- ated with the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute and a senior fel- low at the RealClearFoundation. Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow with


the National Center for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C., said: “The collusion between the SEC and a select group of outside parties gives new meaning to the term climate cartel.” While the SEC and Persefoni


would not comment for this article, Steven Rothstein, managing director of the Ceres Accelerator for Sustain- able Capital Markets, told Real Clear- Investigations that there is no conflict of interest. “The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission received 15,000 public comments around this rule,” Roth- stein said in an email. “The invest- ment community is overwhelmingly supportive of more climate informa- tion as a way to reduce material finan- cial risk.” — RealClearInvestigations


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