If the Biden administration has its way, U.S. citizens will soon be tracked by every company they buy anything from.
A new rule proposed by, of all agencies, the Securities and Exchange Commission, will require all publicly traded companies and investment advisers to track climate-related information.
The most insidious bit of fine print in the stock watchdog’s 490-page rule proposal is called Scope 3 tracking.
“Scope 3 requires these companies to estimate the carbon output of the use of their product by the consumer, which means they’re going to have to go out into the field and talk to consumers,” said Consumers’ Research Executive Director Will Hild in a July 12 interview.
“Let’s say you bought an internal combustion engine lawnmower,” added Hild. “The lawn mower company will need to know how many times you mow your lawn. They’re going to have to go out and ask people that and research that.”
“And so you could see how this starts to lay the groundwork for scoring actual individual people’s activities.”
The consumer protection organization’s head explained car companies may start adding trackers to their new vehicles to learn how many miles the auto is driven.
The rule would also force suppliers of public companies to provide all CO2 emissions-related information.
Will cabbage growers or Bush’s Beans have to track the flatulence each consumer emits after consuming their product? It sounds like a creepily invasive overreach by government that always wants to know more about us, negating the principle of privacy rights.
Civil liberties advocates worry that social scores may develop in the U.S. similar to what China has implemented to evaluate the worth of its citizens. The carbon footprint used by individuals, as determined by tracking required by the new SEC rule, would conceivably factor in any such “social score,” which could affect the ability to get a job, apartment or credit.
FICO analyst Doug Craddock predicted in December, “there will be an increased focus on developing new data assets such as individual carbon profiles” in 2022. FICO is a consumer credit rating agency.
“Over the longer term, we expect that ESG and climate risk evaluations will become an integral element of credit risk and affordability assessments,” Craddock commented.
