May. 06, 2021
As a taxpayer and individual investor and as a person who invests through institutional investors, please note that: 1. I am in complete agreement with the response you received from a fellow investor, Mark Steven Browning, dated April 21, 2021. His was short and sweet. I am medium-sized and more sour. 2. As you are my employees (as a taxpayer who is responsible for your salary and ancillary benefits), I object to the SEC getting into areas that are beyond its core mission as detailed by Mr. Browning and which emanate from legislatively enacted statutes. 3. You indicate that your efforts are “(i)n light of demand for climate change information,” however, you do not specifically cite any such demand emanating from individual investors. It seems that the “demand” is coming from either regulators responding to political constituents with particular agendas including those working within the climate risk analytical and mitigation industry (who of course, love what you are doing and want more of it) and academia. I note that the request for information does not consider the costs of this current and possible future efforts in this area, both as to the SEC’s and other regulators’ work and the cost to industries, both of which are passed along to taxpayers and consumers. Note you folks at the SEC are taxpayers and consumers too. 4. First off, note that investors “invest” for one reason and one reason only and that is, quite simply, to make money. It’s no more complicated than that. They do that through four distinct means. First they can directly invest in the means of production (e.g., constructing and outfitting a factory) to produce a product or service that in turn can be sold at a profit. Secondly, they can invest by providing capital either directly to some entity engaging in producing a product or service to be sold at profit or indirectly by purchasing the equity in such provided capital to another prior investor in the hopes that initially provided capital will allow continued sales of products and/or services at a profit (e.g., a stock investment). Third, an investor may loan, in one of a myriad of forms, capital to an entity seeking to produce a product or service to be sold at a profit in return for a rate of return on the loan, that rate being fixed or variable according to the loan terms (e.g., a bond). The fourth means of investing is a combination of two or three of the foregoing (e.g., a preferred stock with a coupon dividend or perhaps a convertible bond). The choice as to which investment modes to use are dependent on the investor’s own goals. Thus, one investor might be seeking short term capital gains, another more longer term gain possibilities and a third investor may be seeking defined cash flow possibilities. If one wants to “invest” for political and/or social reasons and not to make money, they are free to do so but if they are so willing to take a loss (not necessarily a total loss) on their “investment,” the more germane terms for such usages of assets are “charity” or endowment.” In a free society, citizens should be allowed to utilize their assets in any way they choose within the limits of the law (that limit being something on the order of using an asset such as a knife to stab someone in the back). 5. Your questions seem geared towards “climate change” having a solely and wholly negative connotation. However, “climate change” is not defined. In fact, the climate of the planet Earth has changed continuously since its formation billions of years ago. At one point dinosaurs roamed in Antarctica and dinosaurs were generally cold blooded and therefore could not survive in the current climate of that continent. I note that the term “global warming” used to be the term de jour but that seems to have morphed into “climate change” maybe because the so-called “scientific pontifications” have not exactly panned out as predicted (snow has not melted off the Himalayas). But beyond that and accepting that climate changes are occurring, are such changes uniform as regards the whole planet? Might there be positive changes in some areas offsetting negative changes in other areas? If one is in an area receiving positive change are they required to forego such positive effects for the benefit of others receiving negative impacts? Do negatively impacted people owe anything to the positively impacted people impliedly demanded to forego their positive impacts? In short, wouldn’t people residing in Fairbanks be happy with a 2 degree change in average temperature (perhaps as much as 2% positive impact) while the people of Phoenix (suffering a less than 1 % change with a 2 degree increase in average temperature) continue to be hot as hell in July? Moreover, might society a whole be better off with warmer climates since most of the Earth’s land mass lies in the northern hemisphere and in fact in the northern half of that hemisphere (think Siberia, Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia) so that more land would be arable to provide food for the ever-expanding population of the planet? Further, is it even conceivable that climate change produces greater positive opportunities for people and industries as opposed to negative consequences. For instance, if the planet can support more people and industries because of the ability to produce more food and climate change made more areas hospitable for residing and industry location, wouldn’t that be an opportunity for say the insurance industry inasmuch as there would be more consumers to which products and services could be sold and therefore more employment opportunities? 6. Not really dealt with in your survey request is a longer term view of society. We seem to be engaging in more space exploration. Extrapolating over a period (say 100 years) might the negatives of global climate changes, even if net negative, be naturally mitigated by inter-space exploration and migration. Just something to consider. Can we possibly meet the Ivory Soap standard and be stupid only 99.44% of the time as opposed to 100% of the time!!!!