The Biden administration’s top domestic priority is to “tackle the climate crisis” by implementing the authoritarian socialist policies of the so-called “Green New Deal.”
The purpose of the GND is to use the force of the federal government to remake the U.S. economy completely through arbitrary bureaucratic measures instead of being implemented in U.S. law through congressional action.
These actions are patterned after the authoritarian methods used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to control businesses and individuals in China.
Those methods involve forcing businesses and individuals to regularly report their actions in order to conform to arbitrary CCP requirements while enabling communist bureaucracies to monitor those actions to determine and enforce compliance directly.
A social scoring system is used to control behavior and implement penalties for noncompliance, with the social scoring aligned with the political objectives of the ruling party.
The authoritarian methods being rolled out by the CCP in China are precisely what GND proponents in the Democratic Party seek to implement in the United States. The Democrats call the shots and implement compliance measures via the federal bureaucracy.
Here is their game plan.
“To hold polluters accountable, including those who disproportionately harm communities of color and low-income communities; to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; to bolster resilience to the impacts of climate change; ... and to prioritize both environmental justice and the creation of the well-paying union jobs necessary to deliver on these goals.”
These activities are intended to reduce domestic oil and gas production and force Americans to use so-called “green energy” alternatives to power their businesses, vehicles, and homes.
Biden’s executive orders have shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, placed a moratorium on the leasing of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) land for oil and gas drilling, halted new oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters, and led to a frantic push to increase oil and gas imports from adversarial countries such as Russia, Venezuela, and Iran (after the new deal is consummated in Vienna).
The above bureaucratic actions are relatively standard and obvious when contemplating what the federal government might do to pursue the administration’s GND objectives.
“The Securities and Exchange Commission has said for the first time that public companies must tell their shareholders and the federal government how they affect the climate, a sweeping proposal long demanded by environmental advocates.”
The bottom line is that the SEC is being weaponized to implement through administrative action GND-related social controls sought by climate change activists that will force businesses to report the “climate impacts” of their business operations.
This is just the typical nose of the camel under the tent because fines and penalties for noncompliance with to-be-determined bureaucratic requirements are the almost certain next steps in forcing U.S. companies to “go green.”
If/when implemented by the SEC after receiving feedback from the public, these new rules will have far-reaching effects on publicly traded companies that will be forced to comply with the evolving “environmental and social governance” (ESG) standards being developed cooperatively by climate activists, financial institutions, and government officials in the United States and around the world.
Making ESG standards compliance mandatory is the real endgame of the SEC’s initiative to force annual climate impact disclosures by U.S. businesses.
- Identity politics: Percentage of employees per employee category, by age group, gender, and other indicators of diversity (for example, ethnicity).
- Labor union politics: Percentage of the active workforce covered under collective bargaining agreements.
- Climate activism: The carbon footprint (and other gas emissions/byproducts).
In short, ESG standards and associated statistical measurements can be arbitrarily defined outside normal legislative processes for almost any left-wing cause, with the federal government becoming the ultimate arbiter of authorized business activities. This is the Chinese communist model!
As an aside, despite claims that “the science has been settled” about anthropogenic carbon dioxide being a major contributor to “climate change,” new studies continue to be produced that debunk this unproven theory.
Despite this real science, the Biden administration seeks to take the U.S. economy over the cliff to pursue its GND dreams.
President Joe Biden’s SEC is marching to the drums of environmental extremists in pushing new financial regulations to define and enforce what they deem to be “environmentally responsible actions” by businesses and individuals.
By setting arbitrary ESG scores that are based on politics instead of science, the SEC would be able to affect a company’s reputation adversely, determine a company’s ability to borrow money from major financial institutions, assign financial penalties for noncompliance, and even potentially force “goodwill gestures” through the investment of company profits in socially responsible left-wing activities and organizations in order to offset bad ESG scores.
This would be capitalism with Chinese communist characteristics!
Such actions would be a direct interference by the government in the capital appreciation of companies and in dividends to their shareholders—all in the name of left-wing GND (and other) political objectives.
All of this is a twofer for the CCP in its quest for world domination and control: the conditioning of American businesses and individuals to accept CCP-style social controls while at the same time also destroying the U.S. economy.
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