Washington, D.C., Aug. 03, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The Securities and Exchange Commission proposes to rescind the rules it passed in 2024 that would require public companies to make extensive climate-related disclosures, including forward-looking estimates of business risks, reports of greenhouse-gas emissions, and descriptions of any steps a company takes to mitigate climate-related risks. The rules would force companies to guess what regulations the government would impose, how consumers would respond to those hypothetical regulations, and how courts would rule on them.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance’s National Center for Public Policy Research v. SEC lawsuit prompted SEC to revisit the climate-disclosure rules in their entirety. NCLA and NCPPR filed official comments today encouraging SEC to rescind the rules and acknowledge that the agency did not have the statutory authority to impose them in the first place.
The securities laws that govern the SEC were written in response to the Crash of 1929, long before climate change was a widespread scientific topic. They authorize the SEC to require disclosure of specific business and financial information ‘necessary or appropriate in the public interest or for the protection of investors’—not a completely different body of climate-focused information.
The Supreme Court’s Major Questions Doctrine says agencies must have clear congressional authorization to take actions of great economic and political significance. Whether and how public companies should respond to climate change is economically and politically significant, and Congress has repeatedly considered but never passed climate-disclosure legislation. After NCLA’s defeat of Chevron deference in Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, SEC could not force courts to defer to a strained reading of the Securities Act that would embrace the agency’s climate-disclosure rules.
NCLA released the following statements:
“The securities laws were written in the 1930s, decades before climate change was on anyone’s radar. It defies common sense to claim Congress authorized an economy-wide climate-disclosure regime in those statutes and let it lie dormant for 90 years. An agency that discovers vast new powers in old laws passed for other purposes is exceeding its statutory authority, not exercising it.”
— Alana Black, Senior Litigation Counsel, NCLA
“The climate change disclosure rule was never about providing investors with material information. It was an attempt to reduce corporations’ greenhouse gas emissions. But legislating conduct in this backdoor manner far exceeds SEC’s authority, and we applaud its decision to rescind this burdensome rule.”
— Caitlin M. Moyna, Senior Litigation Counsel, NCLA
“NCLA led the successful fight against SEC’s Nasdaq board diversity rules. The climate-disclosure rules suffer from the same defect NCLA identified there. Neither set of rules involves SEC’s statutory remit to prevent fraudulent and manipulative acts and practices or otherwise protect investors. SEC thus had no statutory authority to issue these rules in the first place—which is reason enough to rescind them.”
— Mark Chenoweth, President and CLO, NCLA
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ABOUT NCLA
NCLA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group founded by prominent legal scholar Philip Hamburger to protect constitutional freedoms from violations by the Administrative State. NCLA’s public-interest litigation and other pro bono advocacy strive to tame the unlawful power of state and federal agencies and to foster a new civil liberties movement that will help restore Americans’ fundamental rights.
Joe Martyak New Civil Liberties Alliance 703-403-1111 joe.martyak@ncla.legal
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