Ahead-of-the-curve retail investors looking to play carbon as a commodity may want to bone up on the facts while they are waiting to for the nascent market to scale up.

Carbon may be the next great investment opportunity but private capital is still trying to get its arms around around it. The ideal carbon investment structure may be a hybrid of private equity and hedge funds models.

In addition to the usual specialized brokerage and accounting services any commodity needs, carbon markets also require established standards to ensure credits are reliably similar and registries to track those credits from birth to retirement

With emissions rules looking inevitable, companies are taking steps to prepare for a number of different  government  scenarios.

With carbon cap-and-trade legislation before Congress and increasing pressure from shareholders, US companies know they’ll have to deal with their greenhouse gas emissions, or carbon footprint, and many are jumping the gun to change their carbon liability into an asset.

The decision of several major companies to quit the Chamber of Commerce over carbon emission regulation underscores the concern—and confusion—within Corporate America about how it will impact the bottom line.

Clean technology edged out biotechnology to become the largest recipient of venture investment in the United States in the third quarter of 2009, according to new research by the Cleantech Group and Deloitte.

“I’m estimating carbon markets could be worth $2 trillion in transaction value – money changing hands – within five years of trading (starting),” says one federal regulator.

The Mountaineer Power Plant in West Virginia has become the world’s first coal-fired power plant to capture some of the carbon dioxide it churns out and store it in the ground.

The potential economic impact of a carbon market seems to divide American industry as much as talk about healthcare reform may divide a family at Sunday dinner.

Large-scale rollouts of solar farms in Europe in the past few years have virtually commoditized photovoltaic solar technology as an energy source, and huge installations on the way in the United States and China will cement that process.

As the Markey-Waxman bill on carbon emissions cap-and-trade makes it way through the Senate, a new carbon-counting reality may soon be here for American businesses.