Companies will have to start telling the public about how climate change could hit their bottom lines — just not with as much detail as some had hoped. The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday voted to approve new climate risk disclosure rules, a significant shift that will require many companies to include information about their emissions along with the other material risks that U.S. businesses must detail to the public.
It no longer requires businesses to disclose Scope 3 emissions, which describe indirect emissions like the greenhouse gasses produced to acquire raw materials from a supplier or the emissions created during a product’s end use. That means an automaker would not have to disclose the carbon cost of the steel it purchased from a contractor, nor the emissions a car could be expected to create during its lifetime of driving.