The Obama administration's plan to reduce power plant emissions may be a bold effort to put climate change back on the political agenda, but it doesn't exactly have the big generators in the US quivering with fear.
Not yet anyway.
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On BoA-Merrill Lynch figures, the rule changes to the Clean Air Act effectively amount to a 1 per cent per year reduction in carbon from 2013 levels...
However, another report put out by a different investment bank two weeks before the EPA came out with its new carbon rules may give the coal burners a far greater concern for their future.
British banking giant Barclays downgraded the entire electricity-generating sector of the US high-grade corporate bond market because of the challenges posed by renewables and the fact that the market isn't pricing in those challenges.
The thesis from the Barclays credit team is that it's not so much regulations that will choke off coal burning, but technological advances.
And it's serious money Barclays is talking about.
According to the Barclays data, electricity utilities represent about 7.5 per cent of the investment-grade corporate bond market in the US, or about $280 billion in outstanding debt.
What makes the report particularly interesting is that it's driven by hard-nosed financial considerations rather than the ideology surrounding renewable energy.
Barclays' credit team is advising its investors to stop viewing the utilities as a "sturdy and defensive subset of the investment grade universe".
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Australia's generators are looking on anxiously.
About 10 per cent of their capacity has been mothballed due falling demand and increased uptake of renewable alternatives.
Once big institutional investors and credit rating agencies start writing down the value of assets, funding costs can start rising, which in turn puts pressure on pricing making alternatives look cheaper still.
Or, as Elias Hinckley puts it, "eroding demand and eroding profitability, and the best available option is to increase the price per unit of electricity, which only accelerates the economic competitiveness of the competing technology."
Thus starts the death spiral.