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.…
Continue Reading“One of the lessons of Climategate is that scientists are all too human…. The next few chapters … expose how some climate scientists bent the rules of scientific engagement in ways that blurred the distinction between doing good science and preserving their own reputations.” – Fred Pearce, The Climate Files, p. 79.
When reputable scientists have different views of the same subject–such as climate sensitivity to anthropogenic forcing–the players need to be assessed. Who is less emotional and less bombastic? What is the track record of the players? And in an unsettled, still young area such as climate science, who expresses humility in the face of unknowns.
This leads to the central character of the Climategate scandal, revisited at MasterResource last week, Michael Mann, who has remained as unapologetic and strident as ever in the last decade.…
Continue Reading“It is possible that some areas of climate science have become sclerotic … too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with … primitive cultures.”
– Mike Hulme, CRU climate scientist. Quoted in Fred Pearce, The Climate Files (below)
Fred Pearce’s The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming (2010) remains the definitive account of one of the greatest scientific scandals of our time. The book’s self-described summary states:
… Continue ReadingOne of the world’s leading writers on climate change tells the inside story of the events leading up to the much-publicized theft of climate-change related emails. He explores the personalities involved, the feuds and disagreements at the heart of climate science, and the implications the scandal has for the future. In November 2009 it emerged that thousands of documents and emails had been stolen from one of the top climate science centers in the world.