May. 10, 2022
**** May 10, 2022 I am NOT a professional in any aspect of the financial business. I am NOT affiliated in any way with any lobby, organization, firm, cause-group or ANY pressure group. I AM just me, a regular retired guy in the Midwest with modest investments whose performance is often related to the regulatory burden imposed on businesses by overzealous regulators who are trying to justify their existence and exercise their power to make their institution seem indispensable and make themselves feel powerful. Your proposal to incorporate ESG metrics as a required disclosure in SEC filings will cause tremendous difficulties for public corporations trying to provide the best good or service to their customers with a minimal burden of disclosing information, esp. that which is not proven to affect business outcomes and which does not fall under the traditional purview of the SEC to regulate key commercial activities and their disclosure. There is too much uncertainty about what, why, how, when, and who involved in forcing firms to disclose what they IMAGINE or GUESS to be the ESG consequences of their business operations, upstream, in-stream, and downstream, and this says nothing about the tremendous costs involved in doing so for, at best, questionable benefits. The SEC should stick to its proven mandate and cease trying to be yet another arm of an unproven and radical point-of-view on business regulation. And who is writing this ? A famous person, an important person, a wealthy person, a 'connected' person ? NO, it's just me a regular American who tries to inform himself about important issues of the day and is now make his first ever public comment to any federal agency in his 76 years of life. Do you hear this message ? I certainly hope so. Thank you. ****