“We still have much to learn about and learn from Enron’s remarkable history to understand its meaning for twenty-first-century American capitalism.”

 —Malcolm S. Salter, emeritus professor, Harvard Business School; author of Innovation Corrupted: The Origins and Legacy of Enron’s Collapse (2008)

This week, Scrivener Publishing and John Wiley & Sons begin shipments of a book that I have been working on for many years, along with my research assistant/editor Roger Donway. We searched and searched for this or that. We debated paragraphs, sentences, even words. And we never cut a corner for what is easily, between the two of us and copy-editor Evelyn Pyle, a 10,000-hour book. [1]

Enron Ascending: The Forgotten Years, 1984–1996 is Book 3 in my tetralogy on Political Capitalism inspired by the rise and fall of Enron.…

TRYING to pin down the arguments of wind promoters is a bit like trying to grab a greased balloon. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, it morphs into a different story and escapes your grasp. Let’s take a quick highlight review of how things have evolved with merchandising industrial wind energy.

1 – Wind energy was abandoned for most commercial and industrial applications, well over a hundred years ago. Even in the late 1800s it was totally inconsistent with our burgeoning, more modern needs for power. When we throw the switch, we expect that the lights will go on – 100% of the time. It’s not possible for wind energy, by itself, to EVER do this, which is one of the main reasons it was relegated to the archival collection of antiquated technologies (along with such other inadequate energy sources as horse and oxen power).…

“Climate denial is a deeply cynical enterprise; the people misrepresenting evidence and sifting through emails for ‘gotcha’ quotes have to know that they’re not being honest. Yet their rage against ‘elitists’ who continue to point out inconvenient truths is very real — because it’s a fact of life that many people feel special hatred for those they’ve mistreated.”

 – Paul Krugman, “The G.O.P.’s Climate of Paranoia.” New York Times, August 20, 2018.

In his recent “The G.O.P.’s Climate of Paranoia,” Paul Krugman invokes sound bites and invective on the subject of climate science and climate policy. The New York Times columnist is all-in regarding climate alarmism and forced (government) energy transformation. He knows he is right and just fusses at the rest of us.

Krugman’s statements are in red; my response is indented in black.…

“Very few scientists dispute a link between man-made CO2 and global warming. Where it gets fuzzy is the extent and time frame of the effect. One crucial point of contention is climate ‘sensitivity’—the mathematical formula that translates changes in CO2 production to changes in temperature. In addition, scientists are not sure how to explain a slowdown in the rise of global temperatures that began about a decade ago.”

– Stefan Theil, “The Backlash Against Climate Scientists,” Newsweek, May 27, 2010.

An article in Newsweek eight years ago, “The Backlash Against Climate Scientists,” rings true today–if not more so.

When seen from today’s perspective, Theil’s 450-word piece underscores how slowly climate science is really moving, where the more you know, the more you find out you don’t know.…