After the Republican win in Massachusetts, the odds of climate change legislation fall: That’s not good news for company profits

And what about climate change legislation in the U.S. Senate?

You’d think that after State Senator Scott Brown’s victory over State Attorney General Martha Coakley in the race to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts climate change legislation was dead as a door nail in the Senate.

But maybe not. The Obama administration has a big club on climate change legislation that it didn’t have on health care.

It’s called the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). The EPA has already announced plans to regulate carbon dioxide and other green house gases as pollutants. And the Supreme Court has already ruled that the agency has the power to do that.

Any regulatory approach will be far more painful and expensive to industry than a subsidy-laden bill passed by Congress. Now it remains to be seen if industry hates the idea of EPA regulation enough and still carries enough clout with Republicans to make some Senate Republicans willing to give up the strategic political gains that come with opposing any legislation on the topic.

Brown’s victory gives Republicans in the Senate 41 votes. If the Republican minority sticks to together in opposition, as it has in the votes on health care legislation, that’s enough, given the Senate’s arcane procedural rules, to prevent any piece of major non-budget legislation from passing in the Senate.

Any piece of major non-budget legislation. If the Republican minority sticks together.

That certainly includes health care reform.

Global climate change. Quite probably, but not certainly. Read more

A cynical guide to profits from fighting global climate change

The vague, blatantly inadequate “agreement” wrangled out of the Copenhagen conference—or to give the meeting its official name The United Nations Climate Change Conference—by President Barack Obama is nonetheless a game changer.

Oh, not because any of the countries that the signed on to effort at global saving face have committed to actually do much of anything. But because the very inadequacy of this agreement forces all meaningful action back onto national governments.

If you want to know where the profits—and costs—of global climate change will be for the next decade, then I think you need to study not the technologies of climate change but the nature of the governments and economies that will stumble toward addressing this problem.

The nature of the U.S. economic and political system, for example, tells an investor a great deal about how to make money on global climate change in the next few years.  

Sometimes looking at the challenges of global climate change I think this problem was designed by some mad economist temporary sitting in God’s chair: It plays to just about every weakness in capitalist market economies.

Shall I count the ways? Read more