Coming Soon: Old Joe Sends Gas Prices Through The Roof

A digital platform launched by the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research on Thursday will help financial regulators reduce climate change risks; nevertheless, experts believe this action helps the Biden administration to continue its climate policy.

According to a Thursday press release, the initiative will provide data and computing and software tools to assist federal regulators and lawmakers in seeing these connections. The platform’s data will be utilized by regulators and legislators to link finance to climate change and ease the legal process, which may lead to fossil fuel investments being targeted by the government. “These trends have no relevance to corporate finance,” said David Kreutzer, a senior economist at the Institute for Energy Research, a non-profit think tank that studies government regulation of energy. “This is just another component of President Biden’s all-out war on traditional energy production, which will only raise prices further.”

Tools on the platform will assist officials in analyzing economic risks associated with wildfire, poor agricultural conditions, precipitation, and other climate-change-related concerns. Experts, on the other hand, claim that the Treasury Department lacks sufficient scientific understanding to properly assess these dangers and whether climate changes should be considered in financial regulations.

“They have no understanding of climate science, and that’s really scary,” David Burton, a Heritage Foundation senior research fellow, told the DCNF.

In 2021, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) recognized climate change as a potential risk to the nation’s economic stability. FSCO published a chapter of its report that focused on data gathering techniques, noting that stakeholders needed more information to accurately assess how climate change was affecting the financial system.

The city council’s decision comes amid the Biden administration’s efforts to achieve its aggressive climate and “environmental justice” objectives, which it has done via a variety of government agencies.

The Department of Labor, for example, proposed a rule in 2021 to encourage retirement-fund managers to consider climate change while investing employees’ money. In March, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) unveiled climate disclosure rules that would force private companies to submit carbon emissions information to the SEC.

“It’s part of a government-wide effort to put climate change-related regulations on finance in almost every federal agency,” said Burton.