Ed note: With the 20th anniversary of Enron’s collapse in the news, the underside of the company’s climate/energy strategy deserves another look. (Bradley’s personal experience is recounted here.)
This week, a Hall of Shame business memo turned 24 years old. Dated December 12, 1997, it was written from Kyoto, Japan, by Enron lobbyist John Palmisano in the afterglow of the Kyoto Protocol agreement.
Global green planners were euphoric that, somehow, someway, the world had embarked on an irreversible course of climate control (and thus industrial and land-use control). But Kyoto predictably failed, expired, and the Paris climate accord of 2015 teeters, with COP26 turning into a “let’s talk next year” at COP27.
Palmisano’s memo cites the benefits for first-mover ‘green’ Enron. Enron, in fact, had no less than six profit centers tied to pricing carbon dioxide (CO2)–and seven if CO2 were capped and traded.)…
“We cannot allow oil executives to blackmail us,” concludes Houston Chronicle business editorialist Chris Tomlinson. “They are not prophets; they are business people looking for profits.” And you, sir, are an elitist telling motorists and travelers of all ages and income levels to go eat cake.
He just keep doubling down against consumers who naturally choose the best energies–the plentiful, cheaper, more dependable ones. And so Chris Tomlinson closes out his repugnance week at Houston’s World Petroleum Congress with a peculiar rant:
…Yes, Big Oil’s leaders promised to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as long as they can make money. But failure to provide the industry with $11.8 trillion in capital between now and 2045 will trigger an energy crisis that they insist will make the public forget all about the climate crisis.
The false, wasteful crusade of anti-capitalist, anti-energy deep ecologists needs to be demoted. And Chris Tomlinson needs to get off the hate train as energy density continues to drive the world market.
Climate change is a political issue. A business issue. The climate does not need to be saved; in fact, humankind needs to be saved from a political and intellectual elite pushing authoritarian climate policy.
Perhaps Chris Tomlinson should get fired, not the oil executives and ministers that promote their products in the face of climate alarmism and forced energy transformation. And perhaps it is Tomlinson who needs to take his blinders off and start over with his understanding of energy and of government intervention, not to mention climate science (or the lack thereof).
The Houston Chronicle business editorial writer has long been prone to hyperbole and astringency.…