“Business that is everything to everyone is not anything at all in itself.”

 – Elaine Sternberg,  Just Business: Business Ethics in Action. Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 33.

No doubt his handlers have given Al Gore the word: go easy on climate warming (aka climate change). The issue has little traction. You are the wrong voice for the cause. Solyndra. Climategate 2.0. Winter snows…. Not now, Al.

Take it up a notch! they must be telling him. Think bigger. Subsume the issue…. And so Gore’s new piece in the Wall Street Journal barely mentions his pet issue of (man-made) climate change but something much larger and amorphous.

“A Manifesto for Sustainable Capitalism,” coauthored with David Blood, calls for “abandoning short-term economic thinking for ‘sustainable capitalism’.” Such is code for that subjective, holistic, anything goes doctrine of corporate social responsibility, which I elsewhere questioned as follows:

The discipline of business ethics should be reoriented around a more sophisticated understanding of capitalism proper.

“This house believes that subsidizing renewable energy is a good way to wean the world off fossil fuels.”

– ECONOMIST magazine, Online debate, November 8–18, 2011

Yesterday we reviewed the surprising rebuke of renewable energy–and the underlying premise that fossil fuels were inherently unsustainable–by an international voting audience.

Today we revisit the essential question: Can renewable energy really help ‘wean the world off fossil fuels’?

Although the affirmative’s Matthias Fripp, moderator James Astill, and their colleagues evaded this fundamental question, here is a sampling of oft-heard rationales, most if not all of which were implicit in Astill’s comments and final announcement. Windpower (providing more than 75% of any politically correct renewable portfolio), we are told, helps to:

(a) Reduce reliance on foreign oil;

(b) Substitute for coal;

(c) Complement the fuels used in our electricity generation portfolios;

(d) Provide a fair return to wind investors while making them feel good about helping save the world;

(e) Spawn discretionary revenues to help bootstrap our economic doldrums;

f) Create new jobs;

(g) Establish leadership credentials to encourage the rest of the world to follow our example; and

(h) Serve as a bridge to newer, better technologies in some more enlightened future.

“Arguments have no chance against petrified training; they wear it as little as the waves wear a cliff.”

— A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Last month, The Economist magazine conducted a two-week Oxford style online debate over the proposition “that subsidizing renewable energy is a good way to wean the world off fossil fuels.”

“Renewable” in the case is really politically correct renewables: basically wind power, with some solar and a bit of of biofuel/geothermal thrown in.

Matthias Fripp, a research fellow for the Environmental Change Institute and Oxford’s Exeter College, defended the motion, while Robert L. Bradley Jr., founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research, argued against. Three comments by Jeremy Carl , Travis Bradford , and Ben Goldsmith each played to the premise that government energy policy had to displace fossil fuels.…

It is perhaps the most revealing ‘crony capitalism’ memo in American history–at least that is in the public domain. (I ask others to submit nominations for this (dis)honor to see if this memo does not take the prize.)

It was written from Kyoto, Japan in the afterglow of the Kyoto Protocol agreement by Enron lobbyist John Palmisano. The global green planners were euphoric that, somehow, the world had embarked on an irreversible course of climate control (and thus industrial and land-use control). Palmisano’s memo reflects that as well as the specific benefits for first-mover ‘green’ Enron.

Parenthetically, I was lucky to have received this memo back at Enron to share it with posterity. Palmisano had me in the “To” list but but purposefully did not email it to me (we were foes on ‘green’ energy issues).…