As I Said

From today's EEI newsletter:

"Wall Street Investors Climbing on the Climate Change Bandwagon
Investors, and not just socially-conscious ones, have begun targeting companies that control GHGs, believing climate change regulation in the United States is not far off, the New York Times reported today.

Wrote the Times: "New carbon-tilted rating scales could come in handy, and investment research houses like Sanford C. Bernstein and Innovest Strategic Value Advisers are busily setting them up. Innovest, in partnership with UBS, has created a carbon beta basket, a fund that will hold 50 stocks in five industries. The fund managers would monitor global warming regulations and would buy and sell the stocks on the basis of how the companies would be affected by those rules."

Investors develop lists of "carbon leaders" and "carbon dogs" to rank companies in the area of climate change control, according to Innovest. The investors also are betting on an emissions trading system being instituted. Wrote the Times: "Such a system plays to the basic math of the carbon beta basket. The companies selling the credits would receive an added source of income and therefore would be deemed ‘carbon leaders;’ the companies buying them will incur a new cost and will be deemed ‘carbon dogs.’ Even companies that decide to reduce their emissions could wind up as dogs, from the view of the carbon basket's fund manager, because they must incur costs to switch fuels or buy pollution control equipment."
New York Times , May 24."