“Under [Ken] Lay’s direction, Enron would restart the solar industry [in 1995], rescue the US wind industry [in 1997], and help legitimize the climate issue.”

“Enron saw green in green energy. Wind and solar as primary energies had new public policy rationales and powerful political constituencies. Specifically, global warming from fossil-fuel usage (via the enhanced greenhouse effect) was the new neo-Malthusian scare, and post–Gulf War concerns over energy security put petroleum on the defensive. Even more than this, renewables had public cachet for an energy company, particularly one that prized publicity and promoted a momentum stock.”

– Bradley, Enron Ascending: The Forgotten Years, pp. 530, 528, respectively.

Rent-seeking … strategic uses of government intervention…. corporativism. Many terms have described business lobbying within political capitalism where the political means replaces the economic means to financial success The result is bad profit, defined by classical-liberal entrepreneur Charles Koch as corporate income not created but politically obtained and thereby lost to the creators in the economic system.…

“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.…