Can you profit from being an eco- investor?

There are really only two ways of doing it now. You can buy a risky sector fund or stock and hold on to it for dear life over the next few years. Or you can invest in your home.

Of the two, I prefer a home investment because the incentives have never been better and there’s no market risk. All the green funds got creamed last year.

Yet it’s unlikely your broker will tell you about the multiple tax breaks available through state and federal governments. Nor will he mention that eco-improvements will lower your cost of living.....

There’s no limit on the 30 percent write-off for these items through 2016.

you have until the end of next year to put in service a number of improvements to qualify for the federal tax credits.

A DELUGE of information, computer modelling, policy suggestions and rhetoric is swamping the mind—and desk—of your correspondent in the run-up to the climate-change talks taking place in Copenhagen in December. But the simple message contained in one report is so stark that it caught his attention. On October 7th the International Energy Agency released an excerpt of its “World Energy Outlook 2009” that highlights the difference individuals can make.

The excerpt addresses the agency’s “450 scenario”—its view on the stable atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (450 parts per million) that will halt climate change—and looks at a range of potential contributions to cuts in emissions that could be made by producing power differently and using energy more efficiently. The effects of these different technologies and strategies are popularly called “wedges”, because a graph showing how they effect carbon emissions over time is invariably wedge-shaped.

Stack up a lot of these wedges and out comes a chart showing the best- and worst-case scenarios: a stack of different coloured wedges showing where emissions would end up if people did nothing, sitting on a mountain shape at the bottom that shows what would happen if the potential cuts in emissions— currently figments of the hopeful imaginations of renewable-energy engineers and climate-change-policy campaigners—actually materialised. The new report provides just such a chart, and it presents a striking finding.....