Jun. 1, 2026
To the Securities and Exchange Commission: Please accept this comment on behalf of Persistence Analytics Group LLC regarding File No. S7-2026-19, Rescission of Climate-Related Disclosure Rules. Persistence Analytics Group LLC supports a registrant-specific, materiality-based approach to disclosure. The issue is not whether climate-related matters can ever be material. They can be. The issue is whether any disclosure requirement should be category-based, highly prescriptive, and broadly applicable regardless of a registrant’s specific business, financial condition, operating exposure, capital structure, infrastructure dependency, or investor-relevant risk profile. Disclosure should be material, decision-useful, financially relevant, and supported by evidence investors can reasonably rely on. In that respect, the Commission’s proposal correctly returns attention to the core securities-law question: whether a reasonable investor would consider the information important in deciding whether to buy or sell a security. Materiality should not mean less truth. It should mean better truth. A registrant-specific materiality standard is especially important because the next generation of investor-relevant infrastructure risk is broader than climate alone. Public companies may face material exposure from energy availability, grid constraints, data-center load growth, AI infrastructure demands, supply-chain dependency, water stress, insurance costs, public-cost shifting, transmission bottlenecks, critical equipment shortages, and stranded-capital risk. Some of those risks may overlap with climate. Some may not. But the proper disclosure test should be the same: Does the risk materially affect the registrant’s business, cash flow, operations, asset value, financing cost, capital structure, supply chain, or valuation? If yes, it should be disclosed clearly. If no, the Commission should not require disclosure merely because the topic is politically, socially, or academically important. Investors do not benefit from disclosure volume that obscures the material facts. They benefit from decision-grade evidence about the assumptions that drive value, risk, cost, resilience, and future performance. For example, in the current market, AI and data-center growth are creating major infrastructure questions for utilities, real estate, technology companies, manufacturers, public finance issuers, and energy-intensive businesses. Investors may need to understand whether projected demand is durable, whether power is deliverable, whether infrastructure costs may be shifted, whether supply chains are constrained, and whether long-duration capital is being allocated around assumptions that may not hold. Those are materiality questions. They should not be reduced to climate categories, nor excluded because they fall outside climate categories. The Commission should preserve and strengthen a disclosure framework that is neutral as to political category and disciplined as to financial materiality. Persistence Analytics Group LLC therefore supports rescission of the 2024 climate-related disclosure rules to the extent those rules impose broad, prescriptive, category-based obligations inconsistent with registrant-specific materiality and disproportionate to their investor-useful benefits. At the same time, the Commission should continue to emphasize that existing disclosure obligations already require public companies to disclose material risks, trends, uncertainties, dependencies, and assumptions when those matters are reasonably likely to affect business performance, financial condition, or investor decision-making. The right standard is not climate disclosure versus no climate disclosure. The right standard is material disclosure versus immaterial disclosure. The Commission should require better truth, not more noise. Respectfully submitted, Neil P. Osnato Founder Persistence Analytics Group LLC National Security & Infrastructure Risk Analytics Demand Durability, Grid Stress & Load Integrity 📍 New Jersey, USA 📞 609-464-9055 ✉️ neil@persistenceanalyticsgroup.com Persistence Analytics Group https://persistenceanalyticsgroup.com/ SAM.gov Registered Vendor UEI: D3VYU39H6DX9 | CAGE: 19T34 D-U-N-S number: 142849930