Attorney General Paxton has joined a West Virginia-led letter to Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chairman Rostin Behnam over the CFTC’s unprecedented focus on enforcing the Biden Administration’s radical climate goals.
The CFTC has recently taken several dramatic steps to impose this new agenda. That includes looking at ways to facilitate “the transition to a low-carbon economy” and requesting information on “climate-related financial risk” in order to issue new guidance, interpretations, policy statements, and regulations in furtherance of a radical progressive worldview.
The CFTC was created to oversee exchange-traded derivatives in the financial markets, not to regulate the environment or otherwise address climate policy. The CFTC’s departure from its statutory authority is unauthorized by Congress, unlawful, and destructive to the American economy. In fact, Congress has repeatedly rejected any attempt to bestow upon the Commission any authority to regulate climate policy.
This attempted shift in the CFTC’s focus, which will undoubtedly punish American energy companies, represents a dangerous new path for the CFTC to tread. As the letter reads: “CFTC is abandoning its mandates in favor of the present administration’s political goals by assuming the mantle of an environmental regulator. That new focus has little to do with preventing fraud. It is a role that the CFTC has never sought to assume before. And it is an area far afield from the Commission’s traditional realms of expertise.”
To read the full letter, click here.