Are Corporations Disclosing Enough about the Financial Risks of Global Warming? SEC is Studying Issue.

Mindy Lubber of Ceres Compares Global Warming Risk to Subprime Crisis

Non-profit Ceres is the largest coalition of investors in North America and represents trillions of investment dollars. At our Enterprise Carbon Accounting seminar in February, Mindy Lubber, President of Ceres, highlighted the similarities between the financial risk of global warming and the subprime crisis. Global warming "is an economic crisis of unknown proportion. Not acting on this is doing exactly what we did with subprime crisis." View a 2 min video from Mindy's talk excerpt here.

Ceres reports that about 76 percent of Standard & Poor's 500 companies failed to mention climate change in their annual reports to the SEC last year.

The SEC is researching merits of additional disclosure (read NY Times article). Environmental groups, insurance companies and others argue for more disclosure of risks. Some companies voluntary disclose risks through public disclosures like Carbon Disclosure Project, but a SEC mandate raises disclosure importance considerably for US firms..