Meet David Crane, president and CEO of NRG Energy, the nation’s biggest independent power producer (IPP). This company’s diversified generation interests are fueled by every energy source from coal to wind.

Crane’s pedigree is a lot better than mine–degrees from Princeton and Harvard Law and lots of business experience. With all that going for him, it may not surprise you that Crane has a philosophical bent to go with his industry smarts. The current issue of Energy Biz summarizes some of his recent thoughts in an article with the deep title, Carbon Morality: The Nearsidedness of Incumbency.

The message of Carbon Morality? The power industry has lost its moral stature, and American society is on the verge of doing something awful to it.

The crisis? There’s a “fast shifting moral landscape” that “threatens to leave our industry adrift, shunned by the customers we serve.”…

“It is time to welcome the good news about climate science–the exaggeration of warming and harm by too-hot climate models. It is past time to hurl ad hominem at those intellectuals who reject neo-Malthusians on theoretical and empirical grounds.”

“Ad hominem—is that all you got? I happen to hold my views because I believe in them. Is there something wrong with that?” Such was my response to a professor who complained about an opinion-page editorial I published in the Daily Oklahoman: “Rob Bradley: Is Sourcewatch wrong? We simple folks in Oklahoma just like to know who butters your bread.”

And another comment:

So no bias at there being your boss is Koch, huh? Sure. we TOTALLY believe you are not carrying water for the Koch brothers and that if you had a totally different opinion, you wouldn’t loose that kushy job… I have a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in.

Two weeks ago, the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) hosted a state-of-the-art climate and energy conference in the nation’s energy capital of Houston. The global warming establishment may have stayed away, but a large crowd was treated to a sound, multi-disciplinary review of the physical science, political economy, and resource economics.

The evening keynote for At The Crossroads: Energy & Climate Policy Summit was an address by Texas Governor Rick Perry. While Perry’s general public policy positions are free-market–and thus pro-consumer and pro-taxpayer–his energy security, don’t-import-but-export argument smacks of Mercantilism and U.S.-side protectionism. Furthermore, Perry pulled his punches regarding the conference’s major themes on climate and energy policy. It was a timid, uninspired keynote just when the momentum dictated going the other way.

Soft on Climate Propoganda

Perry could have, should have, reiterated the conference’s major themes: the 15–20 year ‘pause’ in global warming; lowered climate sensitivity estimates (and explanation for the same in the peer-reviewed literature); the desperate, speculative tie-in’s between anthropogenic climate change and extreme weather events (if there has been no warming, how can ‘climate change’ be involved?);…

“The business voices change, the decades change, but the arguments are familiar. Problem is, the global average temperature today is not appreciably higher than when Ken Lay penned his op-ed. The year 1998 would be the temperature peak, in fact, that marked the beginning of ‘the pause‘.”

Henry Paulson began his recent New York Times opinion-page editorial, “The Coming Climate Crash,” as follows:

“There is a time for weighing evidence and a time for acting. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout my work in finance, government and conservation, it is to act before problems become too big to manage.”

Ken Lay ended his Houston Chronicle opinion-page editorial of December 5, 1997, “Let’s Have an Ounce of Global-Warming Prevention,” [1] similarly:

“It’s time to stop debating the issues surrounding climate change initiatives and focus instead on simple, realistic, cost-effective solutions.