Just right around when everyone was turning on their out-of-office messages for the holidays, Excel Trust made a securities filing for an IPO to sell up to $300 million in common shares. As a REIT, the company would acquire retail assets such as shopping centers, power centers and neighborhood shopping centers.

Did the big investment banks package and sell shoddy real estate mortgage debt and then bet against it? Here are some excerpts from an NYT Christmas Eve story: “Banks Bundled Bad Debt, Bet Against It and Won”

While the investigations are in the early phases, authorities appear to be looking at whether securities laws or rules of fair dealing were violated by firms that created and sold these mortgage-linked debt instruments and then bet against the clients who purchased them, people briefed on the matter say.

One focus of the inquiry is whether the firms creating the securities purposely helped to select especially risky mortgage-linked assets that would be most likely to crater, setting their clients up to lose billions of dollars if the housing market imploded.

Some securities packaged by Goldman and Tricadia ended up being so vulnerable that they soured within months of being created.

“The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen,” said Sylvain R. Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York. “When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson.”

This newly released report “Energy efficiency and real estate: Opportunities for investment” from Ceres and Mercer is pretty good in that it combines case studies from REITs to institutional portfolios as well as surveys and data from sources such as RREEF, McKinsey and several universities. Ceres is a coalition of investors, environmental groups and other public interest organizations working with companies to address sustainability challenges such as global climate change. Mercer provides consulting, outsourcing and investment services.

Here are some excerpts:

-A 2009 Maastricht University study found rental premiums of 3.5 percent on US office properties, a six percent increase in occupancy for “ENERGY STAR” buildings and a 16-17 percent premium on sales prices per square foot.

–For instance, in 2008 financial services giant TIAA-CREF established a goal of reducing energy use in its real estate portfolio 10 percent by 2010, and the company is well on its way to meeting that goal. The effort is already yielding $4 million a year in reduced energy costs across the portfolio, and all new buildings TIAA-CREF develops will be LEED certified.

–The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), the world’s largest pension fund, is also on target to meet a 20 percent energy use reduction goal in its real estate by the end of this year, “As fiduciaries, focusing on energy efficiency in our real estate portfolios just makes sense,” said CalPERS CEO Anne Stausboll. “CalPERS invests in millions of square feet of real estate,” said Stausboll, “so cutting back on energy use and lowering operating costs can only boost the value of the properties in our portfolio, while also contributing to climate change mitigation.”

After developing nations walked out of the Copenhagen Climate Talks yesterday amid disagreements over which countries pollute and which countries should pay to cover the impacts of climate change (the developed nations), a new draft of a U.N.-sponsored international climate change agreement is circulating today. Most notably, it takes both questions off the table–long-term emission reduction goals and long-term cleanup financing.

According to Bloomberg:

With China and India seeking at least $200 billion a year for developing states, envoys at the climate talks in Copenhagen bargained over several options for funding starting after 2012. No amounts were pledged, according to a draft accord today. The talks among 193 nations end Dec. 18, and poorer countries say they’ll reject an accord that offers no money.

“This is eyewash — it’s a paper tiger,” Quamrul Chowdhury, a Bangladeshi envoy who coordinates the group of Least Developed Countries on finance issues, said in an interview. “There is nothing in terms of long-term finance.”

At the global climate summit in Copenhagen today, the Obama Administration declared carbon dioxide a threat to public health, leaving the door is open for the EPA to regulate emissions from vehicles, factories and power plants.

American business groups, including U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Edison Electric Institute oppose the declaration, saying it will place undue costs on an already struggling economy.

Despite such dire predictions, there is some good news today on the carbon capture front. It comes from the National Coal Council, a federal advisory committee to the U.S. Secretary of Energy. Today the NCC presented the U.S. Department of Energy with recommendations for broad deployment of carbon dioxide capture and storage technologies to achieve an 80% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 with sustained economic and employment growth.

The study found that extensive deployment of coal-based generation with carbon dioxide capture and storage over the next 40 years would increase U.S. GDP by $2.7 trillion, create 28 million job-years over four decades from new construction, and support 800,000 permanent jobs related to operation and maintenance of these facilities. The analysis also found that related enhanced oil recovery projects utilizing the captured CO2 could help extract more than 2 million barrels per day of domestic oil.

“The technologies to deploy coal-based power generation with carbon capture and storage are available now, subject to establishment of the proper financial, regulatory and liability framework,” said NCC Study Chair Fred Palmer, senior vice president of government relations at Peabody Energy.

Meanwhile, back in Copenhagen, talks of carbon trading are heating up. According to MarketWatch:

The value of the global carbon trading market could rise from roughly $118 billion in 2008 to nearly $2 trillion by 2020, although it currently remains frozen in the headlights pending safe passage of U.S. emissions trading legislation.

I’d really been focused on the potential impact of federal climate legislation. So I don’t know how I missed the fact that when governors of 50 states accepted $3 billion in stimulus money in February in the form of state energy grants from the Department of Energy that they were also agreeing to adopt and enforce building energy codes that meet or exceed ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2007. This model code covers new buildings and existing buildings with major remodeling, equipment replacement or renovations.

By taking the money, about $1.5 billion of which has been so far dispersed, the governors also agreed to be 90% compliant with the latest energy code by 2017.

Uncertain as to what it meant, I rang up Jeffrey P. Harris, vice president for programs with the Alliance to Save Energy based in D.C. more

As a liberal Democrat, I was a little disconcerted when I took a look at the web site for the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. The problem? All of the controversy about climategate and the recent damning emails were addressed by phrases such as “the majority” and thoughts such as “How dare we question our government—NASA after all put a man on the moon.”

In a balanced story posted on CNN I read two views:

Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin said the e-mails in question poke a hole in the conclusion that the question of human influence on climate change is settled. The Republican said the E-mails “read more like scientific fascism than scientific process.”

Rep. Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, called the focus on the e-mails a distraction from the “catastrophic threat to our planet.”

But on the Web site of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, the highlighted videos presented only one view: the issue has been decided. Despite my liberal leanings (I am from the South where my mother ran away from boarding school to go freedom riding with Dr. King), I don’t believe that we are the sole “intellectual elite” when it comes to science. Whatever the truth about the many causes of global warming, I think there are enough intellectually elite people like John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, who question the science. They say what everyone should be saying—let’s bring it all out in the open and have a debate. If the temperature has been rising at an alarming rate for 50 years and the consequences could be catastrophic, surely Congress could take a few months to hear both sides and come to a real consensus.

As internal investigations get underway, the head of the Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones, has stepped aside. Jones was among the scientists in the hacked emails who allegedly discussed the destruction of data subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

See update in WSJ: Climate-Change Scientist Steps Aside Amid Probe