SEC proposes to rescind 2024 climate-disclosure rule

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday formally proposed rescinding its 2024 climate-disclosure rule, turning a regulation that had already been stayed in court into an official rollback effort.

The move matters because the SEC is no longer merely pausing the rule or declining to defend it in litigation. It is now using the federal rulemaking process to try to erase a climate-reporting framework it adopted in 2024 before it ever took effect. If the rescission is finalized, it would remove what was supposed to become a federal baseline for standardized climate disclosures in SEC filings.

In a press release announcing the proposal, the SEC said it is “proposing to rescind the climate disclosure rules in their entirety because they exceed the scope of the agency’s statutory authority.” The agency also said the rules were unnecessary, strayed beyond traditional securities-law disclosure concerns and imposed costs that were not justified by their informational benefits.

SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins framed the proposal as part of a narrower view of what the agency should require public companies to disclose. “SEC disclosure obligations should comply with the Commission’s statutory authority, be guided by materiality as the North Star, avoid the practical effect of dictating corporate behavior, and be imposed only when the expected benefits justify the likely costs and burdens,” Atkins said in a statement.

The rules now targeted for rescission were originally adopted on March 6, 2024, as one of the SEC’s most prominent recent disclosure mandates. They would have required companies to include climate-related information in registration statements and annual reports, including disclosures about climate governance, risk management, certain greenhouse-gas emissions for many filers, and some financial-statement effects from severe weather.

But the framework never became operational. The SEC stayed the 2024 rules on April 4, 2024, pending judicial review, after legal challenges were filed. Those challenges were consolidated in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

The agency then took a further step away from the rule last year. On March 27, 2025, the Commission voted to end its defense of the 2024 rule in court. Later, on Sept. 12, 2025, the Eighth Circuit held the cases in abeyance while the SEC reconsidered the rule through notice-and-comment rulemaking or renewed its defense.

Friday’s action begins that reconsideration process in earnest. The SEC published a proposing release on May 29, opening a formal notice-and-comment proceeding to rescind the rule. The proposal will be subject to a 60-day public comment period after it is published in the Federal Register.

That means the climate-disclosure rule is not repealed yet. The proposal is an invitation for public input, and the Commission would need to take another vote to finalize any rescission.

The agency’s reasoning is notable because it rests not simply on a change in policy preference, but on the argument that the 2024 rule went beyond the SEC’s legal authority and departed from a materiality-centered approach to corporate disclosure. In securities law, material information generally means information a reasonable investor would consider important.

For companies and investors, the practical significance is that the SEC is seeking to eliminate a disclosure regime that was designed to standardize how public companies report certain climate-related risks and impacts in filings to investors.

Critics of the rollback say that would leave investors with less consistent information. Kathy Fallon of Clean Air Task Force said the 2024 rule had been “an important step toward giving investors consistent information about financially material climate risks.”