“IER [and AEA] would like to work itself out of a job by depoliticizing energy so that lobbying monies can be retained by individuals, foundations, and corporations for nonpolitical purposes, thank you. With the help of the New York Times, we can do so and get the saved money to other uses.”

[Editor’s Note: Ad Hominem attacks on free-market organizations espousing industry positions are a regular occurrence, even though the same organizations oppose the same companies when they seek special government favors. This repost from five years ago remains as relevant today as then. Part II tomorrow, also a repost from April 2012, explains the philosophy behind the Institute for Energy Research/American Energy Alliance.]

The New York Times is upset with “Big Oil,” including the advocacy group American Energy Alliance (AEA).…

“[William] Baumol was worried, however, by a very different sort of entrepreneur: the ‘unproductive’ ones, who exploit special relationships with the government to construct regulatory moats, secure public spending for their own benefit, or bend specific rules to their will, in the process stifling competition to create advantage for their firms. Economists call this rent-seeking behavior.”

– Robert Litan and Ian Hathaway. “Is America Encouraging the Wrong Kind of Entrepreneurship?” Harvard Business Review, June 13, 2017.

MasterResource covers business entrepreneurship, not only the in’s and out’s of energy history and energy policy.

Good entrepreneurship is about serving consumers in a private property, voluntary exchange, rule-of-law setting. Bad entrepreneurship is about a business receiving special government favor to advantage itself at the expense of consumers and (free market) competitors.…

“I am writing to urge you to attend the upcoming United Nations Conference on Environment and Development [‘Earth Summit’] scheduled for early June in Brazil and to support the concept of establishing a reasonable, non-binding, stabilization level of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.”

– Ken Lay [CEO, Enron Corp.] to George H. W. Bush, Letter of April 3, 1992.

“The United States fully intends to be the world’s preeminent leader in protecting the global environment. Environmental protection makes growth sustainable…. [This] recognition … by leaders from around the world is the central accomplishment of this important [United Nations] Rio Conference.”

– George H. W. Bush, “News Conference in Rio de Janeiro, June 13, 1992.

“[Enron was] the company most responsible for sparking off the greenhouse civil war in the hydrocarbon business.”

The Institute for Energy Research (IER) and its advocacy arm, the American Energy Alliance (AEA), are in the news.

As reported last month in the Los Angeles Times, and more recently in Bloomberg Politics, IER/AEA are involved in the free-market directions that the president-elect and his team have followed to date.

One account described the founding of IER as follows:

The Institute for Energy Research was founded to be a clearinghouse for energy information in 1989 in Houston by Robert L. Bradley Jr., a speechwriter for Enron chief executive Kenneth Lay, who was later convicted of securities fraud.

Given that this association is part of the political conversation (Joe Romm started it in 2009: see below), and the continuing attention that is ahead for IER/AEA, I wish to revisit the historical record about my time at Enron that overlapped with IER.…