THE MORNING RANT: With “Natural Asset Companies,” Eco-Communists & Wall Street Have Created a New “Investment” to Seize Productive Lands

In the words of Michael Walsh, “They never stop, they never sleep, they never quit.”

The enviro-communists are teaming up with Wall Street to develop a new financial instrument called a Natural Asset Company. NACs are designed to protect “climate” and “biodiversity” by acquiring the rights to natural assets - both publicly and privately owned - and then taking them out of formerly productive uses such as agriculture or energy production. It’s almost as if the “sagebrush rebellion” of the Reagan era, which sought to privatize federal lands, has been hijacked by communists.

Even more disturbing, the NACs are a new form of corporate entity that doesn’t even strive for profit, because they have also created a new type of accounting that doesn’t involve traditional revenue. Rather than a Profit & Loss Statement, there is a “Statement of Ecological Performance” which will “account for the flow of ecosystem services in financial terms,” whatever that means.

Carol Roth tweeted out an exceptional thread explaining the whole situation. I am printing it below in its entirety.

Below that I will link to some hopeful news on this battle front – red states are already fighting back to protect their citizens and the resources of their states from the communists in Wall Street clothing.

Long/Important thread on Natural Asset Companies:

Natural Asset Companies are worse than ESG on steroids-- imagine Wall Street or even foreign countries having control over our food, energy and water.

A new type of company called a Natural Asset Company (NAC) is pushing for control of America’s natural resources. The NYSE is currently trying to get the SEC to approve it and unleash it on public investors. Your urgent help is needed to comment and spread the word.

For background: it is very hard and out of the ordinary to create a new type of company, particularly one that qualifies for listing on the largest stock exchange in the world.

The NAC designation was created by Intrinsic Exchange Group (IEG), which includes folks from various environmental/ecology backgrounds. Their website is sketchy about who is supporting them, but several sites have reported support from the Rockefeller Foundation + others.

Their new company idea is to allow NACs to buy the ability to control or “manage” productive public & private land/other natural resources. Their stated purpose is not to make a profit or be productive, but to protect, conserve, restore and preserve these natural “assets”.

NACs could offer $ to the federal govt (owns about 30% of US land) to manage lands that produce/cultivate food, water, timber, energy, etc, then decide the current activity is bad for the environment + take them out of productive use in the name of “restoration/conservation”.

NACs = ESG on steroids..

Where do NACs get their $? IEG pitched the NYSE, who became their partner. The NYSE took a, “small minority interest in IEG and one seat on IEG's board of directors,” and the NYSE is now petitioning the SEC to allow for NACs to be publicly listed and traded.

As a former i-banker, I can tell you there is a very clear reason that a company goes public. It is to broadly access capital to provide both funding for growth and liquidity for existing investors. Companies are supposed to have strong merits and provide a path to growth for public investors in exchange. It is a rigorous and costly process both to become public and to stay public, and it is not for every business.

These NACs are a bastardization of that purpose. They aren’t seeking to manage resources to improve their earnings potential, rather they would often be seeking to remove the productivity of assets in the name of some type of "climate justice".

Not only could NACs impact our ability to generate + access energy, critical minerals, water + food, but it could also put those decisions in the hands of institutions, such as foreign govts, which could invest in these NACs and have de facto control over America’s resources.

This entire scheme stinks to high heaven and is fraught with myriad potential conflicts and bad outcomes. It also came about in a way that raises red flags.

In addition to coming up w/a new company type out of thin air, IEG’s CEO said they invented a new type of accounting! “We created a new accounting system, which we called Statements of Ecological Performance, which account for the flow of ecosystem services in financial terms.”

If making up a new accounting standard with ecology as a base doesn’t raise a red flag, I am not sure what will. It is also noted that IEG’s Ecological Performance Reporting Framework is based upon a UN framework, something that doesn’t raise a lot of confidence.

This is an effort by climate cultists and social engineers to get around the legal system to push their agenda. The IEG CEO has said as much, stating, “We were looking for a private-sector approach that wasn’t dependent on policy, it wasn’t dependent on traditional taxes, regulation or philanthropy to price in these assets and give investors the opportunity to invest directly in nature, whether that’s for climate or biodiversity.”

What to do? Call all your representatives + state officials quickly, as the SEC is set to decide on this in a couple of weeks. Tell them to put pressure on the SEC to not allow File No. SR-NYSE-2023-09; don't allow the NYSE to list Natural Asset Companies.

You can also contact the SEC directly to weigh in here. Again, you must include File No. SR-NYSE-2023-09 in the email subject or on any paper drafts. More information on the rule is here.

You don’t want Wall Street, university endowments or even a foreign government to control our natural resources. Help make sure that NACs are kept as merely a crazy idea and not a reality.

The good news is that the Attorney Generals in most red states are already pushing back.

“Republican states unleash effort opposing SEC climate rule creating new type of company” [Fox Business – 01/09/2024]

In a public comment letter Tuesday, the officials — led by Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes and Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach — called for the SEC to rescind its proposal enabling the formation of so-called natural asset companies (NAC). They argued NACs may pose a threat to national security and subordinate the interests of millions of Americans "to the aims of environmental activists as well as to United Nations policies and mandates."

"NACs rely on unproven models focused not on returns and value for investors but rather restrictions of legal and productive use of natural resources, with dollars deployed in amorphous and undefined categories such as ‘natural assets’ and ‘ecosystem services,’" Reyes continued. "While masquerading as a novel tool for the public good, NACs are a brutish vehicle to accomplish an activist political agenda."

It can’t be stressed enough that while national politics matter, it is at the state level we can win and push back against the left. A conservative Republican state Attorney General is so much more important to our cause than any GOP Senator. This is an impressive list of states whose AGs are engaged in this battle:

In addition to Utah and Kansas, attorneys general from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming also signed onto the effort Tuesday.

South Dakota, Georgia, and North Carolina are conspicuously absent from that list.

Securities that don’t produce a return for their investors don’t sound like a good investment, but this involves communist accounting, which is somehow endorsed by the New York Stock Exchange. Once the “natural asset rights” are sold to communists and foreign investors, cash profit doesn’t even matter, as their “investment goal” will have already been realized.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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