Senator Arlen Specter's announced a switch to the Democratic majority in the Senate today. This raises the prospects of a fillibuster proof Democratic majority. How will this affect climate change legislation?
Likely scenario- not much. 27 Democratic Senators voted with the Republican minority against allowing climate change legislation to pass with just a 51 vote majority. It is likely that Senators of both parties are getting the message from the latest Marist Poll that found that more Americans favor the economy over the environment and that 69% of Americans feel that global warming is either a 'minor' problem or no problem at all. And the trend in the data is encouraging for those who feel that drastic CO2 reduction measures are unnecessary- satellite data indicates a ten year cooling trend and solar sunspot activity has fallen drastically. There has never been a consensus over the models, and now, correcting for the effect of urban expansion on ground-based temperature measurement stations, the empirical data has diverged from IPCC predictions. A great deal of investigation is going into ocean currents and dark/translucent aerosols to explain this trend.
While both sides of this debate are stepping up their rhetoric, in the midst of a global recession it would be prudent to wait for answers that are coming sooner than later. The effects of what could be the largest tax hike in history not only include higher energy prices (possibly doubling gasoline prices by 2015), but also those invoked by the law of unintended consequences (such as money going to carbon credits instead of cleaner energy investment, and thus- increasing CO2 emissions). Meanwhile, there are already signficant incentives for CO2 minimization in the form of energy prices.
Consequently, the most bullish positions for alternative energy and energy trading entities should deteriorate as this plays out.
Disclosure: No positions