Note: On this day in 2001, the politically correct, all-things-to-all-people Enron entered the workweek in bankruptcy. Monday December 2nd was my last day at the company after a 16-year career there, as it was for several thousand other employees.

Enron, a unique story of corporate strategy and governance gone wrong, has been misinterpreted by the Progressive mainstream. The company represented the failure of political capitalism, not market capitalism. Its lessons extend to image environmentalism and renewable energy hyperbole, as I document in my book series on the company, as well as in shorter articles.

Reprinted below for the historical record is an email from John Jennrich, founding editor of Natural Gas Week, to Enron author John Emshwiller and myself. Jennrich discusses Enron’s role in the development of the modern natural gas market.…

Editor Note: The important role of defunct Enron Corp on climate issues has been well documented at MasterResource. This post by Bruce Stram, who served as Enron’s chief economist for most of his 20 years at the corporation, adds to the historical record. [Part II tomorrow will describe Enron’s revisionist view of the natural gas resource base that was related to promoting gas as a “bridge fuel” to “sustainability.”]

Several papers I had written made me Enron’s environmental policy lead by 1992. I was blessed with a CEO/Chairman Ken Lay who understood that a carbon tax or cap and trade was good for natural gas relative to other fossil fuels, and we were of course a natural gas company.

We had developed a theme about the environmental goodness of natural gas.…

“California’s reliance on hydropower and proliferation of remote, centralized renewable energy plants; the mandated environmental mothballing of 19 coastal natural gas power plants located close to customers; redundant transmission lines for green power; and seasonal wind blasts, results in lethal blast-furnace-like wildfires that leave trees alone but incinerate houses.”

“California leaders and opinion-makers must first abandon their blame game and diagnose the problem more clearly than using clichés like ‘global warming,’ ‘Donald Trump,’ ‘greed’ or even ‘not enough clear cutting,’ if they are going to responsibly deal with the dangerous unintended consequences of de-modernizing its electric grid.”

A question arising out of California’s recent wave of wind-fanned wildfires, is why are public officials mainly attributing the cause to downed electric transmission lines that comprise less than ten percent of all the causes of such fires?…

“Add [to rent-seeking] the company’s rank imprudence and strategic deceit (what I labeled philosophic fraud), and a new term had to be invented to describe that which true capitalist luminaries from Adam Smith forward warned against: the contra-capitalist corporation.”

For many years now, as a poor man’s Robert Caro, I have labored to demonstrate that the worldview-testing event called Enron was Exhibit A of crony capitalism and Progressivism, not free-market capitalism and the classical liberalism.

The Progressive mainstream argued emphatically for their conclusion. Two examples are among my favorites. Paul Krugman in the New York Times: “I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.” Robert Kuttner in BusinessWeek: “Defenders of deregulation are mounting a heroic effort to insist that the [Enron] debacle was merely a business model gone bad, not an impeachment of freer markets”.…