May 28, 2021
As a retail investor who trades securities to help generate income for my higher education student loans and expenses, I am worried that these ESG disclosures will have a negative impact on the average American like myself. Many of my family, friends, and community members use some of our savings to invest in publicly traded markets in order to supplement our income for the high cost of living, pay down debts, or save for retirement or other high expenses. I know that many of the environmental concerns are factored into the market, and companies that invest in climate hurting business strategies have already been devalued accordingly, as the market considers futures. I am worried that in order to meet these standards, public companies will have to spend more costs and generate less revenue, which in turn would lower stock prices for people like me. The SEC already requires certain disclosures, and I believe that the strong, centralized proposal that the SEC is currently proposing is one-size-fits all policy that will have a negative impact on many publicly traded companies. I believe it is important that we protect the environment, and as someone who studied biology and took many classes on ecology and environmental science in college, even if all United States companies reduced their negative climate impact to zero, global temperatures would continue to rise, mainly because of emissions produced by less developed countries like China and India (my parents even immigrated from there).
I am worried that this increased regulatory burden would only impact companies that the working and lower middle class can easily invest in, through public markets accessible through Schwab or Robinhood. Private companies, on the other hand, dont have to follow this guidance, and that is where the top 1% of Americans, such as Bill Gates and David Koch, have more connections to invest in. These regulations would not apply to those elites and would hurt the common Americans investments. I urge you to consider comments from people like me instead of just the lobbyists who try to socially engineer life for the common American. Thank you for your consideration.