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Emissions reporting requirements have gone from mostly mandatory to quasi-discretionary.
The Securities and Exchange Commission approved a highly anticipated rule on Wednesday that will require companies to disclose information about their climate-related risks to investors. But the final rule differs dramatically from the proposal the Commission released two years ago, with significantly weaker provisions that leave it up to companies to decide how much information to share.
Perhaps the most dramatic change: Most of the climate-related disclosures the rule covers are now mandatory only if they’re considered “material.” Under the original rule, all public companies would have been required to calculate and report the greenhouse gas emissions they are directly responsible for, known as scope 1 emissions, and the emissions from the electricity they use, known as scope 2 — no exceptions. But under the final rule, companies only have to report this information if they deem it material — i.e. if there is “a substantial likelihood that the disclosure of the omitted fact would have been viewed by the reasonable investor as having significantly altered the ‘total mix’ of information made available,” according to a 1976 Supreme Court decision.
Further, only about 40% of domestic public companies will even be required to consider whether their emissions are material. Smaller companies and emerging growth businesses — generally companies with less than $1.2 billion in annual revenues — are exempt.
Part of the impetus for the rule was to standardize climate disclosures. Though many companies already publicly report information about their emissions and climate-related risks, they do so sporadically, using different methodologies, adopting different formats, and publishing across different forums. Steven Rothstein, a managing director at the nonprofit Ceres, once told me it was like a “climate ‘Tower of Babel.’”
The final rule will still create a more formal, consistent, public reporting system for this information. But the picture it provides to investors will be incomplete. “By shifting to a materiality standard, they are leaving a huge gap in the information available to investors and the public,” Kathy Fallon, the director of land and climate at the Clean Air Task Force told me. “That's going to hurt companies and the climate in the long run.”
This wasn’t entirely unexpected. The original proposal ignited a firestorm from Republican attorneys general and business groups accusing the SEC of trying to pass back-door climate regulations, overstepping its role, and saddling companies with burdensome reporting costs. The Commission received more than 20,000 comments on the proposal, more than any rule in its history. As the pressure grew, reports emerged that the Commission planned to remove a requirement that companies tally up and report a third category of their emissions, known as scope 3, which includes those associated with their supply chains and the use of their products. Then last week, Reuters reported that the SEC would also soften the requirements for disclosing scope 1 and 2 emissions by subjecting them to this materiality test.
Before the vote on Wednesday, Erik Gerding, director of the SEC’s division of corporation finance, emphasized that the final rule struck an “appropriate balance” between investor demand for more consistent, comparable, information about climate-related risks, and “the concerns expressed by many companies and commenters about the potential costs of the proposed rules.”
The Commission voted along party lines, with Democratic chair Gary Gensler and commissioners Caroline Crenshaw and Jaime Lizárraga approving the rule, and Republican commissioners Hester Peirce and Mark Uyeda voting against. But no one appeared satisfied.
Peirce argued that companies were already required to inform investors about material risks and trends, including those related to climate change. She accused the staff of having merely “decorated the final rule with materiality ribbons” while still creating an overly prescriptive rule. “The resulting flood of climate related disclosures will overwhelm investors, not inform them,” she said.
Crenshaw said the rule was a “bare minimum” step forward that would “move a haphazard potpourri of public company disclosures into the Commission's well-developed and standardized filing ecosystem.” But she also worried that it would pass the buck to future commissions to ensure investors are getting the information they actually need. “To be crystal clear, this is not the rule I would have written,” she said. “Today's rule is better for investors than no rule at all, and that's why it has my vote. But while it has my vote, it does not have my unencumbered support.”
There is no specific test to determine whether emissions are considered material. But the climate disclosure rule does discuss some examples of when a company’s scope 1 or scope 2 emissions may be material. One is if there is a transition risk associated with those emissions — for example, if a company anticipates that future regulations would increase their costs. Another is if a company has articulated a climate goal, like an ambition to achieve net-zero emissions, to the public. As with other SEC disclosures subject to a material standard, it will be entirely up to these companies to determine whether their emissions are material, and they will not have to share their analysis with investors.
Experts don’t expect this to lead to a total lack of emissions reporting. If a company fails to disclose its emissions, it could open up the business to fines from the SEC or lawsuits from investors if the information is later determined to be, in fact, material. Many companies, prodded by their lawyers, are likely to play it safe and disclose. “It’s hard to make an argument that scope 1 emissions are not material,” Jameson McLennan, a sustainable finance analyst at BloombergNEF, told me.
But there still may be a spectrum. John Tobin, a professor of practice at Cornell University’s business school and a former managing director of sustainability at Credit Suisse, told me that big, white collar companies like banks and tech companies that don’t directly emit much may not see the need to disclose, whereas manufacturing and industrial companies that directly burn fossil fuels to produce their products, absolutely should. That being said, those white collar businesses should still consider their scope 2 emissions material, Tobin said, as they tend to use a substantial amount of electricity and could be at risk of cost increases if regulations change.
Where Tobin thinks the rule really falls short is in lacking requirements to disclose certain kinds of scope 3 emissions — particularly upstream supply chain emissions. Why would an investor care more about the emissions from the electricity Toyota uses than the emissions from the steel it buys? The latter is more likely to pose a significant risk to the company’s business due to carbon regulations. “A lot of the emissions associated with industrial activity have very little to do with electricity,” he told me.
By telling companies they only have to report emissions that are material, the Commission is essentially saying that a company’s emissions are not inherently material to an investor’s understanding of risk. Allowing companies to opt out of emissions reporting “misses the whole point of climate disclosures,” said Fallon. “The whole point is to make available the information that investors want, not just the information that companies want to give.” Investors want to know how exposed a company may be to changes in climate policies, energy prices, or shifts in consumer sentiments.
At the same time, tying the list of required disclosures to a materiality test could be what ultimately preserves the rule when it inevitably ends up in court. Many groups have already threatened to sue the commission if it exceeds its legal authority. These include the National Association of Manufacturers.
“The NAM has been clear that a failure to bring the rule back within the agency’s statutory authority could invite legal action. On the other hand, a balanced, workable rule could obviate the need for litigation,” said the group’s vice president of domestic policy, Charles Crain.
The rule will still likely surface valuable information for investors and others keen to get their hands on more consistent, comparable data about certain companies’ emissions and vulnerability to climate change. But it will also leave huge reporting gaps that dilute the overall utility of that information.
“The fact that the SEC is providing uniform requirements for reporting is still an improvement upon what we had before,” said Fallon. “But the final rule doesn’t go far enough to give investors the information they need to make informed decisions.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the result of the SEC’s vote.
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Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.