Watch out: The political shocker in Massachusetts won’t relieve business from worrying about climate change regulations.

Once newly elected Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) takes his Senate seat in Washington, D.C., EPA will be calling the shots on turning back the global warming phenomenon, not Congress.

Yes, Brown opposes healthcare legislation, and he’s also opposed to the cap-and-trade bills. The future for both controversial policies that are at the core of President Obama’s legislative agenda is shaky at best. Certainly they won’t survive in their current forms.

Even if the Democrats were able to somehow agree on a cap-and-trade bill and get it to the Senate floor for a vote, Brown represents the key vote needed to kill the bill. The Democrats now have only 59 of the 60 votes they’d need to break a GOP filibuster.

But this doesn’t mean there won’t be GHG regulations. Now, Obama will rely on EPA to do the dirty work of regulating, industry-by-industry, using the Clean Air Act.

What can be particularly troubling about the lack of Senate action on the cap-and-trade bill is that, at least in the Senate, industry lobbyists can greatly influence the final details of the bill. Senators and Representatives are pretty easy to sway when it comes to special interests.

EPA on the other hand has a much stiffer backbone than Congress when it comes to regulating industries.

Other countries certainly lamented Scott’s victory as a signal the U.S. won’t be adopting the tough climate change legislation the international community prefers. But they’re overlooking what EPA can and will do.

However, even when the Democrats held total sway in the Senate before Brown’s election, it seemed doubtful the Senate would act.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is the lone Republican trying to broker a cap-and-trade deal, and so far, he hasn’t won any GOP converts to the cause. He’s even been censured by the South Carolina legislature for his attempt to find a middle ground that would open the way for a resurgence of nuclear power plants in the U.S.

Nuclear power plants are clean in that they don’t release GHGs.

Tags: cap-and-trade, climate change, Sen. Scott Brown