Beware the SEC’s Creation of ‘Natural Asset’ Companies
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Margaret Byfield
Real Clear Wire
To anyone who tracks the efforts of environmentalists, their policies often have an ulterior motive. They neither result in a better society nor do they produce better habitats. Their policy preferences also do not consider how using the land improves the land for man and wildlife. Instead, many environmentalists advocate for policies at the expense of farmers, miners, and others who create usable, tangible, societal benefits from the land. This often leaves observers to wonder: what are environmentalists really after?
The answer is power and money. It turns out, that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) are quietly working on a rule that may prove this ulterior motive.
On September 29, the SEC, at the request of the NYSE, proposed a rule that would create an entirely new type of company called a Natural Asset Company (NAC). NACs, according to the Proposed Rule, “hold the rights to ecological performance.” These companies would be given license to control lands, both public and private, and would be required not to conduct any “unsustainable activities, such as mining, that lead to the degradation of the ecosystems.” In effect, this means that these companies would somehow seek to profit off the lands without using the lands. Whatever they do, it must be “sustainable.”
How might a company make control of land profitable while also not using the land? The method is admittedly confusing, perhaps intentionally. They profit from “ecological performance” such as “conservation, restoration, or sustainable management.” These NACs would quantify and monetize these natural outputs (such as air or water). The best comparison would be using the air we breathe as a cryptocurrency of sorts. And, these natural assets that collectively belong to all of us would now belong to corporations run by what many would call environmental special interests.