Gary Gensler is Chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This post is based on his recent remarks before the Principles for Responsible Investment “Climate and Global Financial Markets” Webinar. The views expressed in the post are those of Chair Gensler, and do not necessarily reflect those of the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Staff.
Thank you, Fiona, for the kind introduction. It’s good to be here with the Principles for Responsible Investment. As is customary, I’d like to note my views are my own, and I’m not speaking on behalf of the Commission or the SEC’s staff.
So what does the SEC have to do with climate?
Before we get to the main event—on climate and finance—I’d like to discuss something a lot of us are watching these days: the Olympics.
In the Olympics, there are rules by which we measure an athlete’s performance.
In gymnastics, for example, the scoring system is both quantitative and qualitative. Athletes are evaluated based on the numeric difficulty of the skills and the judges’ qualitative impression of how well they perform those skills.
This system brings comparability to evaluating the athletes across performances or across generations.
Another thing about the Olympics is that the sports change over the years. If the organizers never made any changes, we’d only get to watch the events from the first modern Olympics back in 1896. No soccer, no basketball, no women’s sports. That wouldn’t exactly reflect where sports are today.
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